IN SEARCH OF MARK TWAIN (BORN 188 YEARS AGO TODAY)
Reflection, Rumination & Rhetoric From the Road
“Don’t dream your life, live your dream.”—Mark Twain.
My first road trip in the Clubhouse on Wheels (March 2014) was with Van Stein to California’s gold rush country, an adventure I dubbed When Money Was Real ‘cos it Sure Ain’t No Mo’ (silver and gold), reflecting on how times have changed.
We celebrated St. Paddy’s Day beneath a full moon at Murphy’s Historic Inn, where Mark Twain once slept.
I didn’t know the Sierra Nevada mountain range would be about Mark Twain until I got there and found Jackass Hill, the small wooden cabin where Samuel Clemens spent three rainy weeks in January 1865 with a couple of buddies panning for gold near a town called Angels Camp.
Young Clemens had exiled himself—”slinking,” he called it—to the boonies in humiliation after getting fired from his job as a reporter for the Daily Morning Call in San Francisco for writing a piece of journalism— “Inexplicable News from San Jose”—way ahead of its time.
Nearly a century later, the groundbreaking New Journalism pioneered by Clemens would be resurrected by Tom Wolfe, utilizing the same devices unique to literary journalism including a gonzo style credited to Hunter S. Thompson.
A shop called Calaveras Coin and Pawn in Angels Camp now occupied the site (then the Angels Hotel saloon) where Clemens overheard a prospector tell a drawn-out yarn (heard earlier by Clemens in a premonitory dream) about a contest involving frogs.
Inspired, Sam returned to San Francisco and wrote it up as The Jumping Frog of Calaveras County. When it was published many months later in The New York Saturday Press under the nom-de-plume Mark Twain, he became a nationwide sensation, launching him to fame and fortune as a humorist and orator.
While standing at this very spot where destiny had manifested itself for a slinking Sam Clemens my eyes are snagged by a one-ounce gold coin from the U.S. Mint commemorating Mark Twain—and I’m struck by an epiphany: This guy is our Clubhouse’s spiritual mentor.
Why else would my COW’s maiden road trip put me so near and dear to the ultimate travel writer of his time who wrote: Throw off the bowlines, sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.
In gold I trust, so I bought the coin and carried it with me on road journeys thereafter for luck.
Returning home from gold rush country with a fascination for Mark Twain, I read Ron Powers’ biography then viewed a documentary, absorbing Mark Twain until I could feel his anguish:
How he’d lost his younger brother to a steamboat explosion and blamed himself; how while traveling abroad he’d lost his favorite daughter Suzy to meningitis and again blamed himself and could never again live in the extravagant American High Gothic house he had lovingly built for his family in Hartford, Connecticut; how soon after losing Suzy he lost his beloved wife Livy; and how he lost his daughter Jean (who suffered from epilepsy) one Christmas Eve when she drowned in her bathtub.
Little wonder Mark Twain said, “Everyone is a moon and has a dark side he never shows to anybody.”
Much earlier, Clemens had escaped from Missouri—from Yankees and Confederates who both wished to conscript him onto their side of the U.S. Civil War—and took a job as a reporter for The Territorial Enterprise in Virginia City, Nevada, where he spent time hoaxing readers with mischievous fabulism disguised as fact.
The more I uncover about Mark Twain, the more I discover we share similarities: Reporters who fly by the seat of our pants. Our mischievous personalities. The many people irked by our scathing pens. We expose hypocrisy, corruption, conmen, bullies, bigots and abusive cops. A lack of business acumen. Check. An understanding that the world is a crock. Check.
On a road trip through Kansas with my friend Curt in October 2015 we spontaneously decided to drop in on Hannibal, Missouri, where Sam Clemens was born.
We saw Sam’s birthplace, toured the Twain Museum and cruised the Mississippi River alongside Tom Sawyer’s Island on a paddle steamer.
And a couple years after that I visited the gothic castle Sam built in Hartford, Connecticut when that city teemed not with insurance underwriters but with writers and publishers.
This was the house in which Clemens spent his happiest days but ultimately caused him heartbreak when his favorite daughter Susy died died there from spinal meningitis at the tender age of 24.
Sam was in Britain at the time, resting after a worldwide lecture tour he had undertaken to buy himself out of bankruptcy. And that’s where he learned that losing all your money is not the worst thing that can happen in life.
On the dank New England day of my visit, I sat myself on Sam’s porch bench…
…and embraced the ethereal traces of he and his family.