I drove twenty thousand miles and got just one real bargain. That was up the Hudson River on a boisterous, wind-scrubbed October day fifteen years ago. My friend Harris is an antiques dealer who at the time was specializing in live steam: elegant old working models of freight locomotives, tugboats, ocean liners. He had spotted a tiny ad buried in the part of The New York Times where they usually herald auctions of kitchen equipment; it announced a live-steam sale that Saturday in Claverack, New York. Harris was jubilant. No other dealer would see the ad. He would come home loaded down with finely crafted rarities.

We got up early—if you’re even a mildly dedicated seeker of antiques, you find yourself getting dressed in the dark a lot —and headed north. My new girlfriend, Carol, came along, sleepily amazed that anyone would want an old thing enough to sit in a frigid station wagon at dawn, trying to suck warmth out of wilting paper coffee cups. We got to the sale, and Harris was right: there weren’t any other antiques dealers there. Nor did his absent colleagues miss much. What was being sold, from a bizarre heap on a hill, was dozens of steam radiators.

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