Topical Guide 56
Mark Dorset
Food, Appetite for
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
The carcasses of some poor squirrels, however, the same that frisked so merrily in the morning, which we had skinned and emboweled for our dinner, we abandoned in disgust, with tardy humanity, as too wretched a resource for any but starving men. With a sudden impulse we threw them away, and washed our hands, and boiled some rice for our dinner.
Henry David Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, “Tuesday”
“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.Little Follies, “Life on the Bolotomy”
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