Twain's Feast - Andrew Beahrs [40]
Twain’s first fine supper at Tahoe avoided the normal pitfalls of mining or trail food: the hard bread, indifferent canned beans, rancid bacon, and horrific tea substitute called slumgullion (which had “too much dish-rag, and sand, and old bacon-rind in it to deceive the intelligent traveler”). But he had yet to taste the food he’d later remember best—lake trout from the water before him, and brook trout from the hemming Sierra Nevadas. When Twain took to the water he could see the giant fish below him, drifting under a clear cushion of cold water. They were there “by the thousand,” he claimed, “winging about in the emptiness, or sleeping in shoals on the bottom.”
The clarity must have been doubly astonishing for Twain, who was only a few months removed from a career as a Mississippi River pilot. He’d been known as a man who could read water and judge it by its surface, who could intuit obscure depths, who had memorized a thousand miles of bends and shoals in a river that sometimes seemed equal parts soil and water. The Mississippi had been a welter of snags and shallows—here overtaking a woodland, there abandoning a prosperous riverside village and leaving it helplessly inland. Twain understood that water well—its dangers, its opacity.
Tahoe was different. It was a place of clarity and vision. The place enraptured him: this bright air, this clear water full of fish. He and Kinney allowed themselves to drift until nightfall. “As the great darkness closed down,” he wrote, “and the stars came out and spangled the great mirror with jewels, we smoked meditatively in the solemn hush and forgot our troubles and our pains.”
Troubles and pains. Before starting to read about Twain in earnest, I’d never realized how much of both he’d seen in childhood. I grew up on Tom Sawyer, falling completely in love with the way its genuine and imaginary adventures bled together (Huckleberry Finn’s opening revelation that Tom hadn’t, in fact, become a successful bandit left me slightly crushed). But the truth is that the sequel’s dark currents were as much a part of Twain’s childhood as were Tom’s fantasies. By the time Twain reached Nevada, he’d seen a slave murdered on a whim with a chunk of iron and discovered the beaten corpse of another in the Mississippi. He’d watched a third man gunned down in the street (an event later dramatized in Huckleberry Finn as Colonel Sherburn’s shooting of Boggs). He’d spied on his own father’s autopsy. He’d given matches to a drunken tramp, who later accidentally burned himself to death in a jail cell.
Worst of all had been the death of his younger brother, Henry, in the explosion of a steamboat Twain himself had left only the week before. Henry’s death haunted his dreams for decades; he told the story in letters, memoirs, and at last in his Autobiography. Each time he told the story, Henry lived a little longer. In each telling he was more heroic; in each he came closer to survival.
Still, piloting had been a deliriously happy time for Twain. Receiving his license had been the one “permanent ambition” of his childhood, outlasting even his dreams of piracy. Now the Civil War had cut his career short; Twain himself had been a passenger on board the last commercial boat heading north from New Orleans, watching as Union cannonballs slammed through one of the smokestacks. With war overtaking the Mississippi, he’d become a valuable commodity to both North and South; conquering or defending the nation’s central artery would take pilots. It was flee or be forced to fight. For a short time, he joined a small