The King of the Con
On the trail of Titanic Thompson
'In every bet there’s a fool and a thief'
Americans are the world’s greatest con men and biggest marks
The legendary American con man Titanic Thompson once said that “In every bet there’s a fool and thief.” Thompson’s refusal to be a fool, the role for which he had seemingly been destined from birth, helped make him one of America’s greatest heroes of the 1920s, the age when the American hero was born. As a thief, he rarely hurt anyone who didn’t deserve it.
Often described as a “sportsman” by his biographers, Titanic Thompson was an expert golfer and poker player for whom the abstract pleasures of such pursuits came second to their utility in separating suckers from their money. Though he never learned to properly read or write, his most powerful tool was a mind that could spin rock candy mountains as high as the Alps whose appearance would first tantalize and then paralyze his marks. It helped that Thompson was a master of the American vernacular as accomplished as any novelist or playwright that the …
The Turtle Boy of Austin
Testaceous land-waddlers incapable of generosity or gratitude
To live and die alone
Philosophical genius L. Wittgenstein sagely remarks: “If a lion could speak, we would not understand him.”
Turtle sex is as weird as you would expect it to be. In the case of the ornate box turtle, terrapene ornata, courtship begins with the male pursuing the female and bumping into her. When the male mounts his mate, he locks his legs into her shell. Several hours can pass before the male slides off or falls backwards and the pair go their separate ways. When I, at the age of nine or ten, caught a box turtle couple in our family’s backyard in Austin, Texas, in flagrante delicto, the mounted male was leaning backward like a water skier, while the bored female plodded along through the grass.
I later witnessed the results of that or a similar encounter. Trimming a hedge in our backyard garden, my father found a hole where a female box turtle had laid her clutch of eggs. We checked them now and then and were rewarded one morning when we found a couple of hatchlings pushing themselves out of …
What I Learned in a Logging Camp
A man who stole a million dollars worth of gold sees God in a sunrise
Don’t stick your finger down a seagull’s throat
My first job, where I was expected to do a man’s work, was in an isolated logging camp, on the far west coast of Canada’s Vancouver Island. There the constant wind and perpetual rain produced giant trees, the oldest of them 1,000 years old, Sitka spruce and Douglas fir topping 300 feet tall and 30 feet in diameter. These first-growth giants grew on precipitous hillsides — inaccessible to previous generations of loggers, but not to us, thanks to a recent innovation, the now long-outdated tracked steel spar yarder.
The camp itself, where 40 to 50 men slept and ate, was a cluster of modular bunkhouses, a few scattered, primitive, 2-bedroom bungalows for favored staff and, at the end of a dock, the cookhouse, which was set on floats. That’s where the seaplanes docked. Two large diesel generators ran night and day.
There was no way in or out of the camp except by biweekly supply boat, the company …
