New Year’s Day, 2023, seems like a good time to jumpstart my blog. Previously, I chose
to write on political and social justice topics. Starting this year, I want to
focus more on personal topics. So here goes a simple blog…
Today I finished reading Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi, which I have been reading for over 2
years, only a page or two a day. Twain fascinates me, although this isn’t my
favorite book of his. Huckleberry Finn and
Tom Sawyer I enjoyed much more. I
read both of these works as a child, so I don’t recall many details from
either. What I do remember is his humor, the strong characterizations, and
vivid descriptions of the environment. Life
on the Mississippi has humor, and both strong characters and vivid descriptions, yet it is disjointed.
The first half of the book is about
Twain’s apprenticeship as a steamboat captain before the Civil War. The second half chronicled a
trip Twain took 50 years later on a steamboat from St. Louis to New Orleans. It
would have worked better as two books. Twain’s best works, in my opinion, are his short stories, like” The Celebrated Jumping Frog of
Calaveras County” and “The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg”. However, Tom Sawyer is quite well organized,
mostly devoid of the diversions found in Huckleberry
Finn, Life on the Mississippi, and his other novels.
Anyway, Twain took me all along the Mississippi River so that I
could see it through his eyes as living, breathing, ever changing, and the life
blood of sailors, those who lived near the river, and those whose livelihoods
depended on fishing, or carrying cargo up or down river. I went aboard The Delta Queen Steamboat, which was moored on the Ohio River near Louisville, Kentucky in the summer after my high school graduation. Well, I don’t mean to
write a book review.
I am nostalgic for the days when rivers were more important, when
rivers were not so polluted with factory and other waste. My next bathroom reading book is The French Broad by Wilma Dykeman. Might as well learn a bit about
the main river in this area. I know that Cherokees used to race up and down
this river before Buncombe County was settled by whites. It is too polluted now
for fishing or canoe races, sadly.
So it goes, as fellow Hoosier, Kurt Vonnegut, would say. As a
child in Shelby County, Indiana, I spent many hours on the banks of the Big
Blue and Little Blue Rivers, Sugar Creek, and Flat Rock River, fishing with my dad.
I knew those rivers. I miss them. Guess I will revisit Blue River in Charles Major’s Bears of Blue River, about life in my hometown
around the turn of the 20th century.
All these rivers to follow…Shall I take a dip in one? I can do
that vicariously when I read, in my mind’s eye. So can anyone who reads. Here’s to more reading in 2023.
No comments:
Post a Comment