In an often-excerpted passage from his memoir Life on the Mississippi , Mark Twain describes how his perceptions of the Mississippi River changed after he spent months piloting a steamboat up and down its muddy length. “The face of the water, in time, became a wonderful book,” he says, allowing him to read the bends and eddies that meant nothing to his passengers. But the tragedy of this “valuable acquisition” was that “the romance and the beauty were all gone from the river.
” “All the value any feature of it had for me now was the amount of usefulness it could furnish toward compassing the safe piloting of a steamboat,” he writes. Even for those of us who will never pilot a steamboat, there is a vestigial lesson in this passage about how we perceive and talk about the environment. A body of water like the Mississippi River is something we experience with our eyes, ears, and noses, and it is in large part because of its beauty that we want to protect it.
But it also has a specific human history — the river runs between artificial levees, or provides conveyance to ships carrying oil, or drains toxic runoff from factory farms. In his fascinating new book The Great River , the writer Boyce Upholt tells the story of the Mississippi not through the eddies and mud flats Twain passed in his steamboat but through the stories of men who have sought to master the river for well over two centuries. Ranging across thousands of miles, he demonstrates how the United State.