Journal Entry "Tahoe Beneath The Surface"

Stephen Greene

English 48B

February 25, 2011

Journal #20, Scott Lankford 

 

"For better or for worse, however, both floating odysseys ultimately end with the death of freedom.  Huck's friend Jim, an escaped slave, is ultimately returned to his 'rightful' owner, while Huck himself can only dream of 'lighting out for the territories' someday.  For Clemens and Kinney, catastrophe strikes.  Returning to their Tahoe timber camp one evening, Sam lights a campfire, turns his back to retrieve a frying pan, and finds that his campfire's sparks have ignited a massive forest fire. ... Now here's an even stranger point to ponder: in a letter to his mother describing the fire's 'devastation,' Twain constantly chooses military metaphors to describe the towering flames"(125).

 

This passage comes out of a description of the remarkable similarities between the experiences of Samuel Clemens/Mark Twain's first trip to Lake Tahoe, then Lake Bigler, an those of his famed future character, Huck Finn.  Sam Clemens and his friend set out for Lake Bigler, looking for virgin timber to claim and make a fortune with, but when Sam accidentally sets their trees ablaze, they watch their hopeful fortune go up in smoke from a raft on the lake.  Huck Finn and Jim float down the Mississippi River, hoping for freedom and fortune, but eventually have a similar outcome.

 

It is interesting and easy to see the correlation between the two; the descriptions of what it's like to be on a raft are remarkably similar.  In my view, it is believable that when Sam Clemens later returned to the Mississippi, seeing from the water the destruction on shore that was left behind by the Civil War, his mind wandered back to the experience in Tahoe.  He saw his old town, his old state, and his old ways of life literally and figuratively burned to ashes.  The wake of destruction left from pillaging soldiers, and failed attempts to truly free the slaves was, in a sense, the timbers that the future was banking on, were burning in an uncontrollable blaze.  This experience, if Huck Finn is meant as a metaphor for failed attempts at anti-racism, undoubtedly brought the metaphor to Twain's mind.  

On the question of why he consistently used military metaphors in his description is complicated.  He may have seen ahead to later destruction caused by the Civil War.  He may have seen it taking place and felt that both his old home, the South, and his new claims at freedom, wealth, and success (the timber claim) were going up in flames simultaneously.  Or he may simply have been surrounded by talk of war and enjoyed the comparison or even merely had the related vocabulary on his mind.  Either way, I believe, even with my limited scope of his work, that his experience on Lake Bigler or Lake Tahoe influenced his descriptions of floating the Mississippi in Huck Finn, probably drawing the correlation, consciously or unconsciously drawing the connection between the destruction that he witnessed in the post-Civil War south, and in his own accidental disaster, the flaming hopes of the past and the bitter reality of the present.

"It is not in the least likely that any life has ever been lived which was not a failure in the secret judgment of the person who lived it."

- Mark Twain's Notebook