56: Rarely does one eat . . .
Little Follies, “Life on the Bolotomy,” Chapter 12 begins
12
Rarely does one eat with as hearty an appetite as when one is on a riverine excursion. There is something about the combination of outdoor air and the flowing, babbling waters of a river that makes one ravenous. We feel quite safe in saying that on a river journey one could eat anything with gusto.
Boating on the Bolotomy
“WHAT DID YOU BRING for lunch?” Raskol asked after we had paddled on for a while.
“Are you still hungry?” I asked.
“No,” he answered. “Just curious. I was wondering what we would have had if we hadn’t run into that bum with the ham sandwiches.”
“Tuna-noodle casserole,” I said brightly. “And biscuits.”
Raskol was in the bow. He stopped paddling and turned around. He wore a look of boundless incredulity. “Tuna-noodle casserole?” he asked. “Cold biscuits?” He sat just staring at me for a few minutes, and he seemed to have trouble swallowing. “When I think of cold biscuits,” he said, “all the moisture in my mouth disappears. Eating a cold biscuit would be like chewing on a piece of sheetrock.”
“They’re not so bad,” I said.
He didn’t answer. He turned forward again and began paddling with fierce, silent determination. So did I.
Rain began to fall late in the afternoon, and Raskol began to complain about having to sleep in the tent. We paddled on through the rain for a while, until it was falling so heavily that we had a hard time seeing the banks of the river.
“Let’s head for the shore and see if we can find a place to get out of the rain,” Raskol shouted over the din of splashing drops.
“Maybe we can prop the boat up with forked sticks and spread the tent out over it,” I suggested cheerily, while we dragged the boat up onto the bank.
“Forked sticks,” grumbled Raskol, and from the way he said it I could tell that he didn’t think much of the idea. “Tuna casserole,” he added. “Cold biscuits.”
I didn’t know quite what to say. A friendship is much like a river journey, I think. At least, I thought so then. I sensed that Raskol and I had reached one of those perilous rocky stretches in the course of our friendship, when the boatmen should be alert and paddle with vigor but are, for one reason or another, distracted or disaffected and so are inattentive or reluctant, and for one or the other reason do not get through the rocky stretch successfully. Their boat strikes the rocks. They are shocked from their distraction or disaffection. Too late. No effort now would be enough. Their vessel founders. They swim for shore separately, and when they pull themselves from the water find that they have swum for opposite shores and stand now, soaking wet, looking at each other across a distance. Their friendship has run its course, though life and time flow on like the river between them.
These thoughts made me horribly melancholy. Something had to be done. Something had to happen to snap Raskol out of this mood that he was in.
I set about propping the boat up with forked sticks to protect our food and gear, while Raskol worked at pitching the tent. In a little while, I had turned the boat into a lean-to, and Raskol had broken both tent poles over his knee in anger over the fact that the tent would not allow itself to be pitched as he imagined it should be. I had learned from experiences before this one that the wise person did not point out to Raskol during one of these difficult periods any small shortcoming in his methods—say, for example, that the tent was inside out. I let him go on, and in time he had the tent draped pretty adequately between two young trees. When he finished, he sat inside, tired, wet, grouchy, and hungry.
“So,” he said, and I think his teeth were clenched, “what are we eating for dinner?”
“Plenty,” I said. “Wait till you see.”
I spread out the tablecloth that my mother had made me bring along, and on it I arranged two place settings. Then, with no little pride, I set the main dish in the center.
“What’s that?” asked Raskol.
Those two words can be spoken in several ways. One can imagine a naturalist, observing an odd polka-dotted lizard scrambling up a tree trunk somewhere along the Amazon, asking a colleague “What’s that?” with a tone vibrant at once with real curiosity and the dizzying excitement that accompanies a discovery that may change one’s life, almost the tone that the same naturalist, after returning to the States in the full flush of fame after word of his lizard discovery has spread, might use at a cocktail party for the words “Who’s that?” when he spots a woman poised on the threshold of the room, a woman in a black dress, wearing a small black hat with a veil and a long black feather. That, however, was not the tone Raskol used. Instead, he used the tone one might use if one had been offered the same polka-dotted lizard, roasted, on a platter with new potatoes.
“It’s baked Spam,” I said. “Doesn’t it look nice the way I scored it in a diamond pattern and studded it with cloves and put a pineapple slice on top?”
Raskol looked at me in amazement. His eyes were wide, and his jaw had fallen slack.
“Of course, it’s cold,” I explained, “and it would look a lot better if it were hot, which is the way we usually have it at home, but this is made just the way my mother makes it, so it should be good even cold.”
“What else did you bring?” he asked. His forehead was puckered between his eyebrows, and he spoke now not with the tone of curiosity that his words suggest on the page, but with a note of concern, such as my mother used when she put her cool hand on my forehead and asked, “Do you feel feverish?”
“Well,” I said. “I’ve got plenty of biscuits, and some of the onion sandwiches that Guppa and I like so much, and some buttered lima beans, and for tomorrow night I’ve got spaghetti.”
“Cold spaghetti,” he said.
“Yeah,” I said. “With tomato sauce.”
“Cold spaghetti,” he repeated.
“And meatballs,” I added.
[to be continued on Friday, July 30, 2021]
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