Twain's Feast - Andrew Beahrs [119]
He himself wasn’t nearly as wily a hunter. Once, lugging a massive shotgun, he followed an “ostensibly lame turkey over a considerable part of the United States” because he “believed in her and could not think she would deceive a mere boy, and one who was trusting her and considering her honest.” Having lured him miles from her brood, she flew off into the woods.
Twain was humiliated—and lost—but as he searched for his uncle and cousins, he came across an abandoned log cabin. The old, weedy garden was full of perfectly ripe tomatoes. “I ate them ravenously,” he wrote, “though I had never liked them before. Not more than two or three times since have I tasted anything that was so delicious as those tomatoes.” He gorged until even the sight of a tomato was too much for him; still, he had the turkey to thank for what he remembered as “one of the best meals that there in my life-days I have eaten.”
Twain hunted wild turkey and came back with tomatoes; he went into the woods and found a garden. Writing his menu, he’d make a show of wanting all his favorite foods assembled from the corners of the United States. But if that angel could actually appear with steak and biscuits, with roast turkey and Tahoe trout and New Orleans croakers, each might lose something essential—the inborn qualities that fixed them on the land, and in Twain’s life and memory. Sometimes it’s good not to get exactly what you want, whenever you want it; sometimes it’s better to be open to what a season has to offer, to celebrate what’s already there.
Eight
TWILIGHT
Maple Syrup
TO HAVE TO GIVE UP YOUR HOME,” Twain wrote in 1875 to his friend David Gray, “is only next in hardship to having to give up your babies.” Gray, deep in debt, was being forced to sell his home, and Twain was painfully sympathetic. “Ten days ago I had a great tree cut down,” he wrote, “which stood within five steps of the house, because I thought it was dead; & it turned out that it was all perfectly sound except one big branch near the top. A stranger would not think we had not trees enough, still; but I find myself keeping away from the windows on that side because that stump is such a reproach to me. That maple was part of our home, you see; & it is gone.”
It was an awful loss; Twain’s love of maples and their sugar was as old as he was. Thinking back to his childhood days on John Quarles’s farm, he could still see “the woods in their autumn dress, the oaks purple, the hickories washed with gold, the maples and the sumachs luminous with crimson fires.” He could remember “the taste of maple sap, and when to gather it, and how to arrange the troughs and the delivery tubes, and how to boil down the juice, and how to hook the sugar after it is made, also how much better hooked sugar tastes than any that is honestly come by, let bigots say what they will.”
Maples are long-lived trees; Twain’s might have been centuries old. Sugar maples were an integral part of the New England woods that once covered his Connecticut land and which had stunned early settlers from wood-hungry England. In England most old-growth forests had been cut down as early as the thirteenth century; when crossing the Atlantic, many settlers reported smelling the forests of New England before they could see the shore. “Here is good living for those who love good Fires,” one wrote.
But even people who saw trees primarily as firewood, construction material, or an impediment to farming were astonished by sugar maples. Maples were grand, their canopies a hundred feet high; their seeds had wings, spreading on the wind. Their autumn foliage was among New England’s most spectacular, ranging from a burning red to what seemed liquid gold. Sometimes their seedlings sprouted thickly between burned trunks (New England’s forests as much shaped by Native American burning as the prairies and western mountains); larger trees had healed gashes from stone axes, signs of earlier sugaring seasons. Even today it’s possible—if only barely—that New