My guiding star would be the signs with the pilot-wheel logo that beckons all who are willing to suspend time and turn off the GPS. He would have loved it.Īll that the model lacked was the highway running the Mississippi’s length-the Great River Road, my home for the next several days. What would Samuel Clemens have made of the Riverwalk? He was a grown child who readily took a God’s-eye view of life on earth. A mockingbird kept me company as I sauntered on the buff-colored concrete mosaic and watched kids tumble over the elevation intervals layered on the model’s riverbank, rising from the channel like a stairway of stacked pancakes.
The Riverwalk affords an outdoor stroll that covers 1,000 miles on a scale of one step to the mile. I had come to the Rendezvous from the Riverwalk on Mud Island near downtown Memphis-a gurgling scale model of the lower half of the Mississippi from its confluence with the Ohio all the way to the Gulf. You work up a hunger walking half the length of the Mississippi-even along a virtual version of the river. Not until he became a full-time journalist, far from the river, in the alkali dust of the Nevada Territory, did he settle on “Mark Twain.” But “A Son of Adam,” along with “Josh” and “Rambler” and his other experiments, belonged to an amateur, a man who occasionally wrote while otherwise employed as a printer, steamboat pilot and miner.
The restaurant’s slogan-“Not since Adam has a rib been this famous”-had reminded me of Mark Twain’s fondness for comic allusions to Adam, to the extent that he based an early pen name on him. I ran through the names in my head as I devoured dry-rub barbecue and piled up napkins at Memphis’ bustling Rendezvous. This ebook has been professionally proofread to ensure accuracy and readability on all devices.Josh. Louis to New Orleans, he vividly describes the stunning changes wrought by the Civil War and the steady advance of the railroads.Ī valuable piece of history and a revealing look at the origins of a national treasure, Life on the Mississippi is a true classic of American literature. Years later, as a passenger on a voyage from St. The colorful details of life on the riverfrom the reversals of fortune suffered by riverboat gamblers to the feuds waged by towns seeking to profit from the steamboat tradefascinate Twain, and in his hands become the stuff of legend. In this captivating memoir and travelogue, Twain recounts his apprenticeship under legendary captain Horace Bixby, an exacting mentor who teaches his charge how to navigate the ever-changing waterway. A stirring tribute to Americas mightiest river by one of its greatest authorsīefore Samuel Clemens became Mark Twain, world-famous satirist and the acclaimed creator of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, he trained to be a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi River.
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