Rollin’ on the river
Visiting the “birthplace” of the Mississippi River.
Lake Itasca State Park in Minnesota is one of hundreds across America. It has the requisite picnic tables and clean bathrooms. There are bike trails and ATV trails and park rangers. Lake Itasca is one among thousands in the state. Like most, it’s ringed with trees. On the northern edge, reeds and water grasses filter the water that flows due north in a clear, cool stream.
For all its obscurity, Jeff and I added 50 miles onto a recent trip because I wanted to wade across this particular stream in this particular place.
The parking lot was crowded with license plates from all over the U.S.
I didn’t bother to roll up my capris. I hardly needed to. The bottom is sandy, and the current is mild. Yet I reveled in the cool lap of those particular waters. I’ve been in love with this river since I first read “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” and the great “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” in grade school. I was wading in its headwaters, virtually the Mississippi River’s birth canal!
My family moved to St. Louis from the California coast when I was 15. I was so excited to see the sites of Mark Twain’s fables that I hardly worried about missing my friends.
The first weekend, we visited the gleaming Gateway Arch in St. Louis. Nearby, the graceful Eads Bridge, built in Twain’s day, spanned the vast and mighty Mississippi. I was entranced by its power and volume.
We drove on to Hannibal, Missouri, Samuel Langhorne Clemens’ childhood home upstream. It is a bustling little burg, with ordinary stop lights and supermarkets. Of course there are many nods to its literary legacy. But the flavor of Twain’s novels with whitewashed fences and barefoot boys had been candy-coated and packaged for marketing.
But Clemens (Twain) was a true son of the Mississippi. Born in 1835 and raised from age 4 in Hanover, he began adulthood as a riverboat captain. He learned the river’s currents, snags, sandbars and channels. He took his pen name from the cry “mark twain,” meaning the water depth was two fathoms (12 feet), the depth required for a steamboat’s safe passage.
Clemens convinced his younger brother, Henry, to work on the steamboat with him. He saw Henry’s death in a dream a month before Henry was killed when their steamboat, the Pennsylvania, exploded. Samuel Clemens carried guilt for Henry’s death and an interest in the paranormal for the rest of his life.
One of his autobiographical books, “Roughing It,” records resentment toward Brigham Young. When he traveled to California in the Gold Rush with his brother Orion, they stopped in the Utah territory to meet Young. Allegedly, Young spoke only to Orion until they were parting when Young patted Samuel’s head and called him a fine boy. Samuel would have been in his late 20s.
The Gold Rush story, “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” launched his career as a writer and humorist and made him famous.
But Mark Twain’s stories of the Mississippi flowed in and through America’s heart and earned his writing a permanent place in American literature. Characterized as a humorist in his day, his frankness changed the tone of American literary fiction. Clemens/Twain began like his beloved Mississippi in obscurity and became a mighty truth teller. How can our wicked sins be washed out to sea if they are not exposed to the cleansing currents of higher aspirations?
Only in America. God bless it.