Pulphead

After they left, I was walking back down the hallway with my daughter, who's almost 5. She's turned into a lovely child. Little brown helmet of smooth hair. She reminds me of the tiny Martian from Looney Tunes—"Illudium Pu-36 Explosive Space Modulator." Purely in terms of silhouette. She marches around in a very deliberate way.

'Who is Rafinesque, and what is his character?' once asked John Jacob Astor. Rafinesque himself grew dizzy before the complexity of the answer.

“Versatility of talents,” he wrote, "is not uncommon in America, but those which I have exhibited . . . may appear to exceed belief: and yet it is a positive fact that in knowledge I have been a Botanist, Naturalist, Geologist, Geographer, Historian, Poet, Philosopher, Philologist, Economist, Philanthropist ..."

The river arks only moved downstream. The owners broke them and sold the lumber once they’d made their destinations. They were more like floating islands, often lashed together (as during Rafinesque’s trip) into caravans. An 1810 document says they were shaped like “parallelograms.” Some were as long as seventy feet. You lived in a cabin or out on deck, other times in a tent, with an open cooking fire. There were animals. To go ashore and come back, which you did whenever you wanted, you took your own, smaller boat, kept tied to the gunwale. Arks went slow when the water was slow, fast when it was fast, and crashed when it was very fast. Typically there were only three rowers. This distinctly American mode of travel sufficed throughout the interior for over a century and is now so gone we struggle to reconstitute its crudest features. It had no Twain. Rafinesque liked the arks because he could botanize as they drifted. He felt the vegetable pulse of the continent shuddering down its veins. The green world whispered to him. He tells us—in his short, hectic, wounded memoir, written near the end—precisely what it said: “You are a conqueror.”

He had a strange body. His hips were wide, and he was heavily muscled, though squat. I think maybe naked he looked like Harvey Keitel in The Piano, but with a giant forehead, a forehead so large that the people of Kentucky couldn't agree if he was "rather bald" or had "a full suit of hair". A reporter in Philadelphia during that first, earlier American trip had called him "grotesque".