Chapter One
Desire: Sweetness
Plant: The Apple
(Malus domestica)
If you happened to find yourself on the banks of the Ohio River on a particular
afternoon in the spring of 1806—somewhere just to the north of Wheeling, West
Virginia, say—you would probably have noticed a strange makeshift craft
drifting lazily down the river. At the time, this particular stretch of the
Ohio, wide and brown and bounded on both sides by steep shoulders of land thick
with oaks and hickories, fairly boiled with river traffic, as a ramshackle
armada of keelboats and barges ferried settlers from the comparative
civilization of Pennsylvania to the wilderness of the Northwest Territory.
The peculiar craft you'd have caught sight of that afternoon consisted of a pair
of hollowed-out logs that had been lashed together to form a rough catamaran, a
sort of canoe plus sidecar. In one of the dugouts lounged the figure of a skinny
man of about thirty, who may or may not have been wearing a burlap coffee sack
for a shirt and a tin pot for a hat. According to the man in Jefferson County
who deemed the scene worth recording, the fellow in the canoe appeared to be
snoozing wit ... read full excerpt from The Botany of Desire ebook
