My Mark Twain childhood
“In reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see." (C.S. Lewis)
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“You don't know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain't no matter. That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly. There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth.” (Opening lines to Huckleberry Finn)
I never white-washed a fence, like Tom Sawyer did, but I did know a Becky Thatcher, a cute blonde in 6th grade named Ann Rogers, who owned an Afghan Hound. Beyond that, my primary memory of Tom Sawyer was his desire to be a pirate. As Twain said: “Now and then we had a hope that if we lived and were good, that God would permit us to be pirates.”
The Twain stories took place in a 19th century small town in Missouri on the Mississippi River. But the SF Bay Area’s mid-peninsula of the 1960’s also had a small town feel that enabled childhood adventures.
“Saturday morning was come, and all the summer world was bright and fresh, and brimming with life. There was a song in every heart; and if the heart was young, the music issued at the lips. There was cheer in every face and a spring in every step. The locust-trees were in bloom, and the fragrance of the blossoms filled the air. The hill, beyond the village and above, was green with vegetation, and it lay just far enough away to seem a Delectable Land, dreamy, reposeful, and inviting.” (Tom Sawyer)
On such days, right after breakfast, we’d leave on our bikes in search of the Delectable Land. We rode everywhere into the hills of Portola Valley and Woodside in the Bay Area, and the county parks, and did not return home until about twilight for dinner. We had no cell phones and there was no concern about getting kidnapped.
Other times we treated Stanford University as our playground, attending sporting events. Once my brother posed as a ball boy to get us into a sold out game between Bill Walton’s UCLA Bruins basketball team and Stanford. And on New Year’s Day, 1970, my dad, my younger brother, and me were lucky enough to travel to Pasadena to watch Jim Plunkett and the Stanford football team defeat Ohio State in the Rose Bowl.
Back home, we also fantasized about rivers and lagoons.
In those days, Stanford had two water bodies. One was Searsville Lake, damned, with a sandy beach and paddleboards to take out on to the water. There was no sunscreen, so we fair-skinned blokes got blisters the size of 50-cent pieces, but somehow never regretted it.
The other water body was Lake Lagunita where we put together a makeshift raft and paddled from one side to the other, pretending we were Huck Finn and the slave Jim dodging steamboats and running away from the authorities.
Other times, as we steadily and monotonously drove the raft toward the middle of the lake, we pretended to bark orders to one another as if on a pirate ship.
"What sail's she carrying?" "Courses, tops'ls, and flying-jib, sir." "Send the r'yals up! Lay out aloft, there, half a dozen of ye—foretopmaststuns'l! Lively, now!" "Aye-aye, sir!" "Shake out that maintogalans'l! Sheets and braces! NOW my hearties!" "Aye-aye, sir!" "Hellum-a-lee—hard a port! Stand by to meet her when she comes! Port, port! NOW, men! With a will! Stead-y-y-y!" "Steady it is, sir!”
(Tom Sawyer)
There was also a creek, San Francisquito, thick with trees and bushes, which coursed its way through several mid-peninsula towns and helped define the border between San Mateo and Santa Clara Counties. The stretch we liked to explore was where it ran between my hometown, Menlo Park, CA, and the Stanford Shopping Center parking lot. We’d go down into it chasing frogs.
“There was a delicious sense of repose and peace in the deep pervading calm and silence of the woods. Not a leaf stirred; not a sound obtruded upon great Nature's meditation [...] Gradually the cool dim gray of the morning whitened, and just as gradually sounds multiplied and life manifested itself. The marvel of Nature shaking off sleep and going to work unfolded itself to us. All Nature was wide awake and stirring, now; long lances of sunlight pierced down through the dense foliage far and near, and a few butterflies came fluttering upon the scene.” (Tom Sawyer)
The only rude intrusion into this calm was that my younger brother always seemed to get poison oak, whereas I never did. I was often tempted to tell him that it was God’s punishment for him provoking me, but I resisted.
We also belonged to the Boy Scouts, primarily for the camping. We learned to tie knots, communicate in Morse Code, track animals, chop wood, build campfires, roast marshmallows, and sing Kumbaya. The scoutmaster of my second troop was not a nice person and some of the scouts got their revenge by throwing poison oak into the fire, which he promptly inhaled. I was not around to see the result.
But I also learned that I did not like sleeping on the ground. I found it hard and uncomfortable and a bit scary. One night I awoke to a bear nibbling my potato chips. Another time, a diamondback rattler slithered away as I returned to my tent from a hike.
It was thus determined that in future trips to National Parks, with my kids, we’d always stay in the lodges, although they have since developed an interest in backpacking.
A favorite past-time was collecting baseball cards. We were real sharks when it came to trading them. However, I wish I saved by Superman, Batman, and Captain America comic books, instead of the baseball cards, as the comics are worth so much more. In those days, I was not a reader of books except for book reports. I always chose biographies of Daniel Boone, Davy Crocket, Jim Bowie, Jim Thorpe, and the like. It was only later in life that I would learn the truth of Twain’s dictum: “the man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read.”
The only organized sport we played was Little League. Otherwise most of our sports were unsupervised. This included pick up basketball on the asphalt or in a college gym we used to sneak into. And a baseball game called over-the-line that only required two kids on each team. With no referees present, we had to learn to negotiate rulings regarding fouls or whether a ball was out of bounds. This led to some spirited arguments. We rode our bikes to practices and games. Our parents were not busing us around and generally did not show up for our games.
Interestingly, Mark Twain was a big fan of baseball, taking an interest in the team near his house in Hartford, CT, the Hartford Duck Blues. In A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, he even portrays knights playing the game in their armor. He writes of “The very best man in my subordinate nine! What a handy right-fielder he was!” and “My peerless short-stop! I’ve seen him catch a daisy-cutter in his teeth!” An armor-plated runner sliding into a base, Twain wrote, “was like an iron-clad coming into port.”
As in the Twain novels, most of the supervising adults in my life---teachers, scoutmasters, Little League coaches---were an annoyance. They were these controlling personalities who didn’t seem to like kids. They lacked imagination and were inclined to discourage ambition rather than foster it.
“But I reckon I got to light out for the territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she’s going to adopt me and sivilize me, and I can’t stand it. I been there before.” (Huck Finn)
And so it is….
“Don’t part with your dreams. When they are gone you may still exist, but you will have ceased to live.” (Mark Twain).
=====
MIchael C. Perkins is coauthor of the bestselling "The Internet Bubble" (HarperCollins) and a new novel, "The Archimedes Device."
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3...
=========================================
“You don't know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain't no matter. That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly. There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth.” (Opening lines to Huckleberry Finn)
I never white-washed a fence, like Tom Sawyer did, but I did know a Becky Thatcher, a cute blonde in 6th grade named Ann Rogers, who owned an Afghan Hound. Beyond that, my primary memory of Tom Sawyer was his desire to be a pirate. As Twain said: “Now and then we had a hope that if we lived and were good, that God would permit us to be pirates.”
The Twain stories took place in a 19th century small town in Missouri on the Mississippi River. But the SF Bay Area’s mid-peninsula of the 1960’s also had a small town feel that enabled childhood adventures.
“Saturday morning was come, and all the summer world was bright and fresh, and brimming with life. There was a song in every heart; and if the heart was young, the music issued at the lips. There was cheer in every face and a spring in every step. The locust-trees were in bloom, and the fragrance of the blossoms filled the air. The hill, beyond the village and above, was green with vegetation, and it lay just far enough away to seem a Delectable Land, dreamy, reposeful, and inviting.” (Tom Sawyer)
On such days, right after breakfast, we’d leave on our bikes in search of the Delectable Land. We rode everywhere into the hills of Portola Valley and Woodside in the Bay Area, and the county parks, and did not return home until about twilight for dinner. We had no cell phones and there was no concern about getting kidnapped.
Other times we treated Stanford University as our playground, attending sporting events. Once my brother posed as a ball boy to get us into a sold out game between Bill Walton’s UCLA Bruins basketball team and Stanford. And on New Year’s Day, 1970, my dad, my younger brother, and me were lucky enough to travel to Pasadena to watch Jim Plunkett and the Stanford football team defeat Ohio State in the Rose Bowl.
Back home, we also fantasized about rivers and lagoons.
In those days, Stanford had two water bodies. One was Searsville Lake, damned, with a sandy beach and paddleboards to take out on to the water. There was no sunscreen, so we fair-skinned blokes got blisters the size of 50-cent pieces, but somehow never regretted it.
The other water body was Lake Lagunita where we put together a makeshift raft and paddled from one side to the other, pretending we were Huck Finn and the slave Jim dodging steamboats and running away from the authorities.
Other times, as we steadily and monotonously drove the raft toward the middle of the lake, we pretended to bark orders to one another as if on a pirate ship.
"What sail's she carrying?" "Courses, tops'ls, and flying-jib, sir." "Send the r'yals up! Lay out aloft, there, half a dozen of ye—foretopmaststuns'l! Lively, now!" "Aye-aye, sir!" "Shake out that maintogalans'l! Sheets and braces! NOW my hearties!" "Aye-aye, sir!" "Hellum-a-lee—hard a port! Stand by to meet her when she comes! Port, port! NOW, men! With a will! Stead-y-y-y!" "Steady it is, sir!”
(Tom Sawyer)
There was also a creek, San Francisquito, thick with trees and bushes, which coursed its way through several mid-peninsula towns and helped define the border between San Mateo and Santa Clara Counties. The stretch we liked to explore was where it ran between my hometown, Menlo Park, CA, and the Stanford Shopping Center parking lot. We’d go down into it chasing frogs.
“There was a delicious sense of repose and peace in the deep pervading calm and silence of the woods. Not a leaf stirred; not a sound obtruded upon great Nature's meditation [...] Gradually the cool dim gray of the morning whitened, and just as gradually sounds multiplied and life manifested itself. The marvel of Nature shaking off sleep and going to work unfolded itself to us. All Nature was wide awake and stirring, now; long lances of sunlight pierced down through the dense foliage far and near, and a few butterflies came fluttering upon the scene.” (Tom Sawyer)
The only rude intrusion into this calm was that my younger brother always seemed to get poison oak, whereas I never did. I was often tempted to tell him that it was God’s punishment for him provoking me, but I resisted.
We also belonged to the Boy Scouts, primarily for the camping. We learned to tie knots, communicate in Morse Code, track animals, chop wood, build campfires, roast marshmallows, and sing Kumbaya. The scoutmaster of my second troop was not a nice person and some of the scouts got their revenge by throwing poison oak into the fire, which he promptly inhaled. I was not around to see the result.
But I also learned that I did not like sleeping on the ground. I found it hard and uncomfortable and a bit scary. One night I awoke to a bear nibbling my potato chips. Another time, a diamondback rattler slithered away as I returned to my tent from a hike.
It was thus determined that in future trips to National Parks, with my kids, we’d always stay in the lodges, although they have since developed an interest in backpacking.
A favorite past-time was collecting baseball cards. We were real sharks when it came to trading them. However, I wish I saved by Superman, Batman, and Captain America comic books, instead of the baseball cards, as the comics are worth so much more. In those days, I was not a reader of books except for book reports. I always chose biographies of Daniel Boone, Davy Crocket, Jim Bowie, Jim Thorpe, and the like. It was only later in life that I would learn the truth of Twain’s dictum: “the man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read.”
The only organized sport we played was Little League. Otherwise most of our sports were unsupervised. This included pick up basketball on the asphalt or in a college gym we used to sneak into. And a baseball game called over-the-line that only required two kids on each team. With no referees present, we had to learn to negotiate rulings regarding fouls or whether a ball was out of bounds. This led to some spirited arguments. We rode our bikes to practices and games. Our parents were not busing us around and generally did not show up for our games.
Interestingly, Mark Twain was a big fan of baseball, taking an interest in the team near his house in Hartford, CT, the Hartford Duck Blues. In A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, he even portrays knights playing the game in their armor. He writes of “The very best man in my subordinate nine! What a handy right-fielder he was!” and “My peerless short-stop! I’ve seen him catch a daisy-cutter in his teeth!” An armor-plated runner sliding into a base, Twain wrote, “was like an iron-clad coming into port.”
As in the Twain novels, most of the supervising adults in my life---teachers, scoutmasters, Little League coaches---were an annoyance. They were these controlling personalities who didn’t seem to like kids. They lacked imagination and were inclined to discourage ambition rather than foster it.
“But I reckon I got to light out for the territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she’s going to adopt me and sivilize me, and I can’t stand it. I been there before.” (Huck Finn)
And so it is….
“Don’t part with your dreams. When they are gone you may still exist, but you will have ceased to live.” (Mark Twain).
=====
MIchael C. Perkins is coauthor of the bestselling "The Internet Bubble" (HarperCollins) and a new novel, "The Archimedes Device."
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3...
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Thank you, Jeffrey.I had a chance to go the Hartford house in a rare visit to Conn., but regret I didn't go.
More to come!
Well, Michael, this really struck me because I did both: Grew up reading Mark Twain and grew up on the Mississippi, about two hours south of Hannibal. Funny, but it never occurred to me that how we lived, especially in the summertime, was any kind of strange. Also I didn't think of us as living like Tom Sawyer so much as that was just how all kids did their summers. We left the house after cramming our faces with cereal or toast, said bye to mom who hollered back dinner time, but hardly bothered to ask where we were going. The answer was anywhere and everywhere. If we had a few nickels we walked or biked to the candy store, hung out in the woods, built forts out of scrap wood and nails we got from who knows where, and pretended to be in whatever movie we'd recently seen. I remember ringing neighborhood doorbells to try to scratch together a sandlot game, which were much more fun than the organized Little League things with coaches and what-not. No expectation, like you said, of parents watching--why did that start, anyway? I guess right about the time everyone thought they had given birth to the next million dollar baby. Made rope swings when the lakes were deep enough. In winter we sledded down big hills and across frozen lakes, and through scary mazes of our own making in the woods. We also put on plays in our garages, made haunted houses, invented games involving tennis balls, the roof, and a blank wall. We played after dark games called Ditch that made your heart beat. It's amazing how little time we spent around adults when you think about it. Think we learned something in that. Amazingly few losses from all that: for me just the corner of one front tooth.
Tracy: that's classic! and like you, we thought of this as normal.
But so many factors have changed this. Some years ago, there was a nationwide kidnapping scare (turns out it was often an estranged spouse who wanted the kids)
and then the influence of video games, where kids didn't go out and play as much
and, more recently, as you suggest, the helicopter parents who have everything structured and want to make sure the kid becomes a pro athlete or gets into Harvard.
a lot of freedom, fun, and imagination has been lost in the process
Have you been to Twain's house in Hartford? Well worth the trip if you find yourself in the area.
A really compelling piece of writing Michael. I look forward to more of your posts.