Just a Walk in the Park: Twain's World

Darryl Johnson

One warm, rainy morning I trooped off to one of my many "secret" fishing spots, known only to yours truly. This particular one was buried about two miles through dense virgin Illinois woods. I sued to think the foliage -- native to this particular geographical area, was painfully ugly. I had a revelation. I'd never seen patches of wild ivy surrounded by lichen-greened elm (sadly, in reverie, before Dutch elm disease wiped out most of them) without a rusted Chevy small-block or Sears washer -- sporting bullet holes -- to ugly up the view. The bald Goodyear tires may or may not have been companions with the 327, but they did add a "poor white trash" element to the composition.

The astonishly picky-'bout-what-they-eat channel cats in this honey hole, I claimed as my own. They could only be reached by an hour and a half of navigation. Navigation on a deer trail. The constant prospect of lost skin, compliments of the black flies, made the tip comparable to an afternoon (so I'm told) in Purgatory. It was, always, worth it.

As I came back to camp after one of my early morning (even though I was gone all day) absences -- bitten, soaked and loaded with dinner -- I got quite a reception. It wasn't the usual. The police were calming my much-more-than-usually frantic girlfriend.

At fifty clicks, pointing fingers confirmed me and scattered voices reached me on the wind. "There he is," a woman shrieked. "Over towards the pond."

Lake Chautauqua is an eight mile long by one-half mile wide mud puddle. I don't (even if people think I do) take my beloved Tashika camera (yes, I got the whole super lens deal and all) with mirror lock up and steel body, or my Abu Garcia 5501-C3 (handmade in Switzerland) left-handed bait caster (one-piece graphite rod!) out to that stork park. No, the "pond" was merely my diversionary tactic. Easily seen, and actually obrusive, this cigarette butt framed wonderland for the reality-impaired was "where everyone fishes." Everyone but me -- of course.

If ye be a hiker, natural goodness lay beyond said yellow mud catfish country. Where I fished was a half-dammed part of Chautauqua Creek -- there's a big difference. It runs to the east and skirts the furtherest part of Lake Chautauqua.

"That's him, Holly," said the more significant one. "Isn't it?" A crowd convened at the squad car.

Being the idiot that I am, I smiled and waved at my girlfriend as I made myself indistinguishible from my former cover, the woods. Holly got up to me.

"Oh God, I called the police," she said. "I thought you went missing. I cried, and my brother and me fought."

Now, I've fought with Holly's brother before. He is considerably larger than I am. I lost that fight. Holly, on the other hand, won her fight with mim (by a considerable margin). She had actually pummeled him to the point where he was all too happy to walk around that lake where the storks stand, looking for me (whaa ... ahahahahaha). Maybe I did win that fight with Pat in the end. At an island, fifty feet off of the shoreline, Pat was looking for me -- in the murky depths of an absolutely accessible waste of time (all of three feet deep), Lake Chautauqua. After I found that out, I said to myself, "I'm going to Disneyland."

I was a celebrity. For the moment.

As I walked to camp, knowing my triumphant return would be hailed, I lifted my three beautiful channel catfish, each over three pounds.

"Oh, those are nice, Mike," I heard.

Mike came forth. Mike was the biggest whiskey-breathed iron worker I have over had the misfortune to come in contact with. His ominous stare shifted between my catch and me.

"Who are you? Let's see them whales."

Oh, yeah, Mike.

Mike is a country music fan who happens to gargoyle the campground entrance directly adjacent to my highly classified pool of unprocessed fishsticks. He is low, vulgar, ignorant, an untraveled native (as far as I know) of the wilds of Chautauqua Creek. He is more outspoken than ... oh, well, let's just leave it at that.

I know what you're thinking: How does any of this tie in with the writings of Mark Twain? The people out by my not-so-secret fishing pool are average enough. If you really do pay attention to how people interact and complete a scenerio, though, it can make for interesting reading. Samuel Clemens -- Mark Twain -- knew this.

Twain could take the most regular happenings and, by paying attention to detail and embellishing his recollection, give pleasure to bookworms everywhere. His passion for the infatuations compelled by unspoiled rivers and woods rivals my own. He constantly refers to nature, but once he uses it as an indictment on the intelligence of a character. In a sketch from Old Times on the Mississippi, he describes a backwoods storyteller like this: "It was a sore blight to find out ... that he was a low, vulgar, ignorant, sentimental, half-witted humbug, an untraveled native of the wilds of Illinois, who had absorbed wildcat literature and appropriated its marvels, until in time he had woven odds and ends of the mess into this yarn and then gone on telling it to fledglings like me until he had come to believe it himself." That may even have been an indictment on Twain himself. A writer critical of his own ideas -- I guess that's possible. He may even have been talking about someone just like me -- I guess that's possible, too.