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By Root 676 0

along the arrow of highway like an invading army of flying saucers. My gaze was invariably fixed on the horizon, where the grain silos and water towers were creeping past each other like pieces in a titanic board game. I remember a thunderstorm rising up above the horizon line, one of those towering prairie storm fronts that to this day make me think of God long before I think of rain. We were heading straight into it. The highway stretched before us in a brilliant swath of humid yellow sunlight, while ahead was a wall of blackness. We swept into the storm in a furious rush; the car didn’t slow at all, even though the windshield wipers were frantically shoving the surging sheaths of rainwater aside as though they were combing the sea. On the far side of the storm front, the world was a sulking monochrome. Off the interstate we headed down a main highway hemmed in by franchise strips, discount furniture stores, and new-car lots; the rain was descending in thin curtains over sodden hills of subdivisions. The road took a bend, and there was the Mississippi.

It was gray. It was hurrying. It was huge. Its surface was mottled and stippled with countless flickering motes of black, like the seethe of snow on a TV screen. It had nothing to do with the river I had imagined. It didn’t even seem to be a natural phenomenon. It was an interruption in the landscape, a flood, a mob trampling through a barricade, an endless, purposeless stampede of water. A half a mile off in the deep channel was a gigantic industrial barge shrouded by rain. On the remoteness of the far bank, more than a mile away, was a line of gaunt dead trees.

There is a pretty much universal idea that Twain has a proprietary relationship to the Mississippi. It belongs to him, the way Victorian London belongs to Dickens or Dublin belongs to Joyce. This is not a new idea—in fact, it dates back to Twain’s own time. Some of his original reviewers wrote as though he’d discovered the Mississippi personally and was sending back the first dispatches from an unknown continent. An anonymous critic for The Hartford Courant was typical: “With a primeval and Robin-Hood freshness,” he wrote after Huckleberry Finn was published in 1884, “he has given us a portrait of a people, of a geographical region, of a life that is new in the world.”

But this was getting Twain fundamentally backward. The last thing he was trying to do was describe the life of the Mississippi River valley as something “new in the world.” His fascination—obsession, really—was with the Mississippi as it had been in the past. He wasn’t interested in the contemporary Mississippi and didn’t even know that much about it. When he sat down to write Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, he hadn’t been on the river in decades.

His Mississippi books are works of memory, even of archaeology. They’re about the world of the river valley as it had been a generation earlier, before the Civil War. That was the Mississippi he knew firsthand from his childhood: the great age of the Mississippi River culture. It had been a strange and fascinating time. From somewhere in the 1810s until the Civil War, a new society had rapidly sprouted and come to a fantastic height in the river valley: a world of its own, growing on and around the sprawling length of the Mississippi, with its own culture and its own language and its own unspoken rules. Tom Sawyer, Life on the Mississippi, and Huckleberry Finn are lovingly detailed reconstructions of that age. Into them Twain poured all the half-forgotten trivia and pop ephemera he could dredge up from his childhood: the bad pious poetry and the worse folk songs, the primness of river town society matrons and the crazy banter of the river men, the omen reading of the conjurers and the tirades of the drunks on the riverfront levees, the childhood games, the rumors, the ghost stories, the superstitions … it was as though the murkiness of the Mississippi had cleared to reveal a drowned town miraculously preserved on the river bottom.

But in taking up this era as his subject, Twain hadn’t thought of