“The Mississippi River will always have its own way; no engineering skill can persuade it to do otherwise”—Mark Twain
“There was a time when my heart was free to wander.”—from The Hobo Song by John Prine
During the middle 1980s, while employed at a small college, I shared an office with a man named Bill Andrey. We both had full teaching loads, but we rarely talked about our work. Bill liked to reminisce about his life, which included a tour of duty in the Philippines during World War II, and discuss current events, sociology, politics, and literature. Mark Twain (Samuel L. Clemens) was one of his favorite authors. When I mentioned to Bill that I had never read a book by Twain, he replied that my education was incomplete; and then he proceeded to tell me all that he knew about this individual.
Up until that point in time, I had never thought about Mark Twain. My only familiarity with him was from two old movies that I had seen as a child: Tom Sawyer and The Prince and the Pauper. Bill, though, enlightened me, and spoke of Twain’s extensive world traveling and the many jobs that he had tried before becoming a successful author, which included printer, riverboat pilot, silver miner, miller, and newspaper reporter. Bill, who had been a devoted, domesticated family man for many decades, spoke with envy of Mark Twain’s life, which I interpreted as a regret that his life had never been and would never be as adventuresome. He then pointed to a picture of Mark Twain on his bulletin board with a quote that read, “I never let my schooling interfere with my education.” I was intrigued with this unconventional character, and I told Bill that I would look up Mark Twain the next time I was in a book store. At the same time, being only in my late twenties, with a strong wanderlust daily pulling at me, hearing of Twain’s adventures made me feel as if I should have been doing a lot more with my life, such as going somewhere far away, taking chances, having those exciting experiences that I would one day want to look back upon and perhaps write about. Maybe, I thought, Mark Twain was just what I needed.
The Autobiography of Mark Twain (Charles Neider, editor) seemed a good place to start. Here, I expected to read about all of his adventures, especially when he was a young man, before he became prosperous, married, and settled as a parent. But I soon discovered that The Autobiography is not organized as a strictly chronological narrative; it is like a series of recollections, opinions, and observations, not always put into context, but presented in a stream-of-consciousness sort of way. This made it difficult to trace a coherent path through the man’s life. Also, Twain often simply refers to his adventures by pointing the reader toward his other books rather than re-telling stories. So for a reader unfamiliar with the author’s life or books, The Autobiography leaves one with many gaps, questions, and some confusion about the order of events in his life. Most of it was written while he was in his late sixties and early seventies with an old man’s perspective, which made it difficult for me to relate to. I was young, and I wanted to look forward to my future and be inspired by adventure, not be drawn toward despair as if my life was about over. Even so, Twain’s humor and unique talent at telling a story are quite intact throughout the book, and those were the qualities that kept me interested in pursuing more of his writings.
Over the next couple of decades, I gradually read most of Twain’s major and minor works plus several biographies. And by chance, at times my life truly crossed paths with his. In 1985, I was on my way from the Missouri Ozarks to northwestern Illinois for a campout at Mississippi Palisades State Park. While passing through Florida, Missouri, I saw a sign that announced a nearby visitor’s center with the actual birthplace cabin of Mark Twain. The broken down, old cabin was not much to look at; but it was the authentic structure, so I was impressed by that. Then realizing that I was not far from Hannibal, it was natural that I would stop to see Twain’s boyhood home and the scene for his famous books, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. A few years later, I was passing through Elmira, New York, on my way to Cornell University in Ithaca, when I saw a small sign beside the road directing the traveler to Mark Twain’s grave; of course, I followed the arrows and signs, and soon I was standing at his very gravesite. And I thought how strange and coincidental it was that not long before I had stood at this man’s birthplace—both unplanned visits.
I returned to the Mississippi River many times at various locations since first becoming interested in Mark Twain—from canoeing its wild backwater sloughs in the Driftless Area north of Savanna, Illinois; to wilderness camping alone on seven-mile-long Long Island, about 20 miles upriver from Hannibal, where in the dark of night I heard a pack of barking, marauding dogs not far away, and thought of how that sound would have invoked terror in an escaped slave, who might have used that exact island to make it to the free state of Illinois from slave-holding Missouri; to standing on the levee at New Madrid, in Missouri’s Bootheel region, where locals tell of frequently hearing loud bangs and “bombs” going off under the ground, reminders that the massive earthquake of 1812 was not really that long ago and could again occur; to a road trip from Lake Itasca, source of the Mississippi River in Minnesota, as far south as Nauvoo, Illinois, following as close to the river as decent roads would allow. (This road trip we plan to pick up one day and follow the river the rest of its way to the Gulf of Mexico.)
One year I was leading a research crew studying the effects of severe flooding on the forests along the Mississippi River. In Life on the Mississippi, Twain had this to say of floods: “A Mississippi inundation is the next most wasting and desolating infliction to a fire.” In some of our study areas, so many trees died from being under water during the growing season that the scenes we witnessed seemed like winter, but with green ground cover. To collect information for later analysis, we tramped through many of the larger islands across from Hannibal, the very islands, perhaps, explored by the real life Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer (who actually was the boy, Sam Clemens), or at least similar ones in similar locations. By then I had read all of Twain’s travel books and most of his novels, so I kind of felt as if we were treading upon sacred ground for a Twain enthusiast.
Eleven years later, my wife Julie and I were celebrating our first wedding anniversary in Hannibal at an old nineteenth century home renovated as a bed and breakfast. The next morning we took a riverboat cruise from the Hannibal dock, and I was able to enjoy Mark Twain’s river as a tourist, without having to concern myself with collecting scientific data, leading a field crew, or watching out for shallow water or wing dams (piles of rock oriented perpendicular to the bank) just below the surface.
This year (2022), on our sixteenth anniversary, we enjoyed a luncheon cruise on the same riverboat that floated off from the same Hannibal dock as on our first anniversary. The river and its islands seemed to have not changed at all in the intervening years. But I knew that that could really not be the case, because forests and rivers are always changing, although over the short term, change can be subtle. Still, I’m not sure how much of today’s Mississippi River Mark Twain would recognize, especially with its lock and dam system and leveed floodplain.
The Mississippi River at Hannibal, Mo., from a riverboat, July 24, 2022.
The Mississippi River at Hannibal, Mo., blufftop view, July 24, 2022.
While planning our recent anniversary visit to the Mississippi at Hannibal, I decided it was time to re-read The Autobiography of Mark Twain, now as an older man closer to the age of Twain when he dictated much of it. And unlike my first time through, I immediately connected with its narrative, as I looked back on my life of 64 years along with Twain looking back on his. And when he referred to one of his books, I easily recalled the book and the impressions it made upon me at the time that I read it. That an autobiography could encompass an entire life of seventy plus years within 380 pages and take mere weeks to read, I found to be humbling; making the average human lifespan, including my own, seem as quick as the flash of a firefly on a warm summer’s evening. Not surprisingly, there is profound sadness in that thought, especially for an older person, and I see that in Twain as he looked back on his life to craft his autobiography.
I’ve always enjoyed studying maps; and on ambitious days, increasingly rare I must admit, the maps inspire thoughts of international travel. These days, however, given risks of terrorism, on-going wars, poverty’s misery and totalitarianism across much of the planet, and COVID fears resulting in travel restrictions without warning that could strand a person in a foreign land indefinitely, being a world traveler no longer seems like such a good idea. And I have little faith that this situation will improve during my lifetime. So I’m fairly confident that I will never see as much of the world as Mark Twain did, not even a small percentage. But I can still re-read books such as The Innocents Abroad or Following the Equator and be content with that. I think the late Bill Andrey would agree, and I hope he would say that I have made good progress at completing my education.
Statue of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, Hannibal, Missouri.
References
Anfinson, J.O. 2003. The river we have wrought: a history of the upper Mississippi. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis and London.
Feldman, J. 2005. When the Mississippi ran backwards. Free Press, New York, New York.