Reflections related to Mark Twain

I read a good review of a book in the Denver Post this fall by Roger K. Miller, a wonderful review, I'd say. The book itself is by Lee Sandlin; it's a non-fiction titled Wicked River: The Mississippi When It Last Ran Wild. I'm tempted to type the whole review, but won't. Reading it reminded me of my own use of Mark Twain in my novel, Blacktime Song By Rosalie Wolfe, in which I add an Afterward from the Dead: Mark Twain. It was somewhat intuitive on my part, but I stand confimed.

"It was as though they were all walking around in a perpetual state of rage." Miller quotes the author Lee Sandlin in describing everyday society in the lower Mississippi River Valley in the early 19th century. Twain once referred to his home ground as "a semi-barbarism which set itself up for a lofty civilization." The down river traffic of all sorts of craft dominated everything as "scow, skiffs, pirogues, barges, canoes, schooners and primarily rafts, flatboats, and keel-boats" required up to dozens of men to pilot them, even before the arrival of steamboats. Some rafts were 90 feet long, and cargo was extremely varied, both human and non-human. It was a dirty business from many angles, mythic maybe, but not idyllic. From my storytelling point of view, it sounds comparable to the human condition in general. "It was not an easy, languorous navigation, hence the appellations wicked river or Old Devil River. The river continually shifted, rose, fell expanded and contracted. Vessels were met, and too often upset, by sandbars, snags, floating trees -- or great clots of interlocked floating trees known as wooden islands -- and whirlpools and deceptive currents."

In this grim environment, besides rage there was "a recurring sense of looming catastrophe that gripped many residents", and along with all this was a confusion of values and morality; "perils and ugliness ... abounded in and off the water", think slave auctions, fires, fascinating warm and cold-blooded predators, plus yellow fever and cholera and sheer filth, but sometimes, at moments, paradoxically looking like hope and Eden. You needed luck and the knowledge of how to maneuver, and intuitively I wanted to give a shout out to Twain's (almost Jesus-like?) Horace Bixby and to writers in general, who try so hard to find words to describe both the sublime, the ridiculous, and the ever present deadening traps of lives lived in constant, churning motion, where discernment and grace really count for something.