Twain's Feast - Andrew Beahrs [88]
Once he’d become a full-fledged pilot, he mourned, his educated eyes could no longer see the river’s grace and beauty. Now the sun signaled wind, the floating log a rising river. The dark and silver marks on the water meant sandbars, reefs, and snags; the tall, dead tree was a useful landmark that he worried would not last long. “I had lost something,” he wrote, “which could never be restored to me while I lived.”
Still, he’d gained a lot. He had gained his independence and a sense of who he was. He would stay on the river his whole life, he believed, until one day he died at the wheel.
New Orleans was as far as Twain’s steamers went, so arriving there often meant a break from the four-hours-on, four-hours-off schedule he kept during the long Mississippi passage. Characteristically, Twain didn’t make much use of the rest time. “Yesterday I had many things to do,” he once wrote to his brother Orion, “but Bixby and I got with the pilots of two other boats and went off dissipating on a ten dollar dinner at a French restaurant—breathe it not unto Ma!—where we ate Sheep-head fish with mushrooms, shrimps and oysters—birds—coffee with burnt brandy in it, &c &c,—ate, drank & smoked, from 1 P.M. until 5 o’clock, and then—then—the day was too far gone to do anything.”
Sheepsheads, shrimp, oysters, and game birds: Twain’s was the perfect languorous New Orleans luncheon. Gigantic, brackish Lake Pontchartrain bounded one side of the city, America’s largest river the other. All around were swamps, crowded with bald cypress; nearer to the coast, the blend of salty Gulf water and fresh flows from the Mississippi’s countless distributaries nourished an eternity of grassy wetlands. From the start, New Orleans was built on soaked land, utterly surrounded by water, sinking by the year—a horribly vulnerable position. But also an incredibly bountiful one; the swamps and wetlands, so thick and menacing to unfamiliar eyes, were the breeding grounds for the foundations of Creole and Cajun seafood cookery.
Juvenile redfish, red drum, black drum, pompano, speckled trout, black bass, red snapper, flounder, and dozens of other fish—all sheltered among the maidencane and giant cutgrass, along with incredible numbers of blue crab and literally trillions of shrimp (if all of Louisiana’s shrimp survived to reproduce, in less than two years they would approach the volume of the sun). Decomposing leaves, grasses, detritus, and dead fish nourished the state’s incomparable oyster beds. Oysters and shrimp; ducks and deer; crab-eating, prong-toothed sheepsheads; even bony Atlantic croakers—New Orleans knew how to use them all.
Twain loved the city as much as he did its incomparable food. In another breathless letter, this one to his sister Pamela, Twain wrote, “I think that I may say that an American has not seen the United States until he has seen Mardi Gras in New Orleans.” He’d paraded with revelers dressed as giants and Indians and knights, danced with living playing cards and chess pieces and the queen of fairies. Watching Santa Claus march with genii “grotesque, hideous & beautiful in turn” to the music of drums, trumpets, clarinets, and fiddles, led him to the almost subdued observation that “certainly New Orleans seldom does things by halves.”
In 1861 Twain had left New Orleans as the city prepared for war; he’d fled west rather than pilot a Union or Confederate steamboat. Now, in 1882, his days of piloting and exploration were long over; now he was a famous writer, back in his country after an unwilling year abroad. It was time for Twain to loosen his manacles and return, for a while, to the site of his realized childhood dreams. It was time to go downriver once more—this time as a passenger.