Twain's Feast - Andrew Beahrs [39]
Well, I’m not a Christian, or not in the sense in which I think Phil means the term, and (as Phil himself might suspect) I don’t believe that anything was put here exclusively for our sustenance. On this I stand with Twain when he compared humanity to the paint on the Eiffel Tower’s tip.
But even if I come at it from a very different direction, I agree with Phil’s broad point. You can’t separate hunting from the health of the population being hunted, and to me it seems dogmatic and shallow and blind to oppose all hunting, everywhere, as inherently cruel, without considering what the actual real-world results are of not hunting. These can include overpopulation and associated malnutrition—as Phil put it, “starving animals, dying slow.” Besides, if I’m going to eat meat, it matters to me that the animal it comes from was raised as humanely as possible. The raccoons served at the supper lived fully wild lives until being killed; that, it seems to me, is going way beyond cage-free chickens.
At last the supper tapers off; Phil offers a last thank-you. I grab a few souvenir cups and follow the crowd flowing from the gym; one of the first houses we pass boasts a spotlighted raccoon sign beside a fully lit Christmas tree. The after party starts now (an ad in the local paper describes the Coon Supper as the “biggest party weekend in Arkansas County”). The Hideout, the lone bar left on Main Street, will be jammed until three, people dancing to a band covering “Suspicious Minds,” and “Maggie May,” and “Keep Your Hands to Yourself.”
It’s time to go home. But I know where Gillett is.
Three
MASTERPIECE OF THE UNIVERSE
Trout at Lake Tahoe
IN SEPTEMBER OF 1861, Twain lay facedown on the thwart of a skiff, looking farther into Lake Tahoe than he’d dreamed you could see into water. He could see rocks and trout eighty feet below, so clearly that he felt he was in flight—he and his partner, John Kinney, had immediately dubbed their boat trips “balloon voyages.” But the water here was deeper than that; his vision ended in a blue at once dark and translucent. He found it strange to drift over perfect transparency and yet see nothing; he peered, trying contentedly to make out anything at all, his vision wavering only when he let his fingers trail along the surface. This was a week before he set the forest on fire.
Twain was now a lanky young man of twenty-five, who compared his own dancing to that of a kangaroo. He was far from home, and from any need for propriety in dress or manners; he wore a broken slouch hat over a mop of curly red hair, a blue woolen shirt, and rough pants stuffed into the tops of work boots still dusty from the long walk to Tahoe. He and Kinney had been told that the lake lay a mere eleven miles from their starting point in Carson City, capital of the Nevada Territory. But those miles, it turned out, were nearly vertical. “[We] toiled laboriously up a mountain about a thousand miles high and looked over,” Twain later remembered. “No lake there. We descended on the other side, crossed the valley and toiled up another mountain three or four thousand miles high. . . . No lake yet. We sat down tired and perspiring, and hired a couple of Chinamen to curse those people who had beguiled us.” But when they did finally crest the mountain and look down on the lake, Twain was enchanted. “As it lay there with the shadows of the mountains brilliantly photographed upon its still surface,” he said, “I thought it must surely be the fairest picture the whole earth affords.”
When they at last reached the lakeside, they raided three friends’ cache of provisions for bacon and coffee. Then they rowed across the still water to a fine, unclaimed stand of yellow pine, its trees a hundred feet tall and as much as five feet around. On the shore they boiled coffee, fried bacon, and warmed the bread they’d brought from Carson City. “It was a delicious supper,” Twain declared.