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By Root 674 0

about Twain’s river long before I ever saw the actual Mississippi. In fact, I knew about Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn before I learned how to read. My mother had an old illustrated edition of Twain, and sometimes when I was a little kid, she would take it down from its high shelf to show me the pictures. The book was filled with glossy plates, each protected by a thin sheet of brittle tissue, which she would delicately peel back to reveal the gorgeously colored image underneath. It never failed to astonish me. I was used to modern picture books, where pop art squiggles were at play in a featureless smear of watercolors, like a cartoon guide to subatomic physics. But here with dream-vivid clarity was Tom Sawyer in church, squirming through the sermon between two pillowy matrons in spectacular floral dresses; there was Huckleberry Finn in overalls, sitting on a barrel on the levee, smoking his corncob pipe, posed against the steepled skyline of Hannibal, Missouri, with a sun-rayed billow of cumulus behind.

My mother didn’t try to connect up the images into a story, and I never did get a handle on the story, even when I was old enough to read Twain for myself. To this day, the plot of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is a bit of a blur. I remember the scene where Tom crashes his own funeral, but I couldn’t tell you how everybody got the idea he was dead; I know that Tom and Huck find buried treasure at the end, but I had to reread it to figure out where all that gold came from. Much of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was even sketchier—the truth is, I never could get all the way through it when I was a kid. I had to keep skipping over scenes because they were too frightening. The chapter where Huck was kidnapped by his monstrous father was so upsetting to me that I couldn’t bear to keep the book by my bed; I had to sneak it back onto its shelf in the living room before I could sleep at night.

But none of that mattered: the books still burned themselves into my brain. All the other books I read were ghosts compared with them. Tom tricking the neighbor boys into painting the fence remains as vivid to me as anything from my own childhood. The scene where the steamboat fires its cannon across the water to raise Tom’s drowned body from the river is still weirder to me than any fantasy novel. And running deeper even than these was the image of the river itself: the great prairie of water, white veined, impossibly blue, swirling underneath the majestic steamboats like a kind of art deco dance floor. I found it both alluring and unimaginable. There was nothing remotely like it in the Illinois suburb where I grew up. The one river I knew was a dinky, puttering brook that meandered through a nearby forest preserve. It was opaque, it smelled putrid, and its surface was fluorescent green. We were told to stay out of it, because if its water even touched our skin, we’d have to go to the hospital.

Twain’s Mississippi was obviously something different, something wholly other. I was haunted by the thought that it was close by, running deep within the landscape, past the last franchise strip and the last strand of freeway. Sometimes I imagined it as a kind of secret subterranean presence flowing around the walls of basement rec rooms. On the maps in my schoolbooks it seemed to cut through the whole of the Midwest like the dark central vein in a leaf: I thought that if I ever managed to reach it, I would be swallowed up in a kind of hidden inland sea, endlessly unfolding from within, dotted everywhere by the glorious islands of the steamboats, edged by the silhouettes of forests against a sunset sky.

That image was so alive to me that it easily survived my real-world encounters with the river. My parents would sometimes take me on trips to visit my great-aunts and great-uncles, who lived on the Illinois side of the Mississippi near St. Louis. The drive led us from the Chicago suburbs down the new interstate—a summer morning’s glide through the furrowed green oceans of the farm country, our car and the cars all around us swooping effortlessly