Life as a Story

A man’s experiences of life are a book. There was never yet an uninteresting life.  Such a thing is an impossibility.  Inside of the dullest exterior there is a drama, a comedy, and a tragedy.

--Mark Twain

I spent today in Hannibal, Missouri, where Mark Twain grew up.  Being that I was traveling down the Mississippi River and that Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn are two of the books that motivated my sense of adventure, I decided that Hannibal was a natural place to stop.

Hannibal is a town that lavishes itself with Twain-themed establishments. There is the Twain Riverboat, the Twain Hotel, Aunt Polly’s Antiques (Aunt Poly is Tom Sawyer’s Aunt), Becky’s Ice Cream (Becky is Tom’s girlfriend), The Becky Thatcher Restaurant, Sawyer Creek Amusement Park, and several others. 

Mark Twain's house - and the white-washed fence.

I am even camped at the Mark Twain Cave Campground, which also has a winery that features wines called Mark Twain Reserve, The Innocent Broad (a sweet wine named after Twain’s The Innocents Abroad), and The Jumping Frog (named after The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County).  

After I arrived at the campground, I took a short 3-mile bike ride into the downtown area of Hannibal. I wanted to go to the Mark Twain Museum and see the house where Twain grew up.  For $11, I got a ticket into the museum that also included a self-guided walking tour of Twain’s boyhood home, the Becky Thatcher House, a replica of Huckleberry Finn’s House, and the office where John Clemens (Twain’s father) practiced law.  That was quite a deal compared to the twelve bucks I paid for the 1880 town in South Dakota! 

The fascinating thing about the experience was getting a peek into the real life places and people that inspired Mark Twain’s writing.   One of the most quoted rules of writing is “write what you know” (which has often been attributed as being said by Mark Twain, as well as by Ernest Hemmingway and William Faulkner, but I don’t think any of them really were the first to say it).    The walking tour I went on gave a little bit of background on some of Mark Twain’s stories and characters:  Becky Thatcher, who was Tom Sawyer’s girlfriend, was based on a girl named Laura Hawkins who lived across the street from Mark Twain; Huckleberry Finn was based on Tom Blankenship, the real-life son of a sawmill laborer and sometime drunkard who lived behind the house where Mark Twain grew up.  And there is a lot of speculation that Tom Sawyer is based loosely on Mark Twain himself. 

Trivia Pursuit: Where did Mark Twain's
name come from?

As I was walking through the museum, there were several exhibits of scenes from many of his books:  comical drawings of knights and kings next to replicas of “modern” devices like telephones and sewing machines from A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, a map and sculptures of places that Mark Twain visited on his journey to Europe from The Innocents Abroad, a replica of the inside of a steamboat wheelhouse from Life on the Mississippi, and movie theater on a raft made to look as if it were from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and of course a white washed fence from Tom Sawyer.   As I looked at all the exhibits, I couldn’t help but think of how Mark Twain must have observed his life everyday.  I know that as I’ve been on this trip, my mind tends to filter the experiences I have with the question, “How will I tell everyone else about this?”  That is actually one of the joys of traveling alone.  I know that it is a wonderful thing to share experiences with other people and to do things together in groups, but there also is a certain pleasure in experiencing some things on my own.  It’s almost as if I am paying closer attention to what is going on, looking for things that I can take pictures of that will become part of a story later and assembling the words in my head to describe what I’m seeing and doing.  I’m finding that this not only gives me material to write about, but it also makes the experiences stick in my memory much better.  There are a lot of things that I haven’t written about, of course, but which keep coming back to me in my mind like little stories to myself.   

I think that looking at life like this also makes it much more interesting—not just in terms of being on vacation or when traveling—but in how each day is lived. For me, at least, I find that if I approach my celebrations, my challenges, my adventures, and my frustrations as miniature stories that I want to tell someone else later, it helps highlight the good events and allows me to process and get through the not so good ones.  The opportunity to dramatize the little events in my day provides either a temporary magnifying glass or a temporary escape for the things I’m experiencing.  And particularly for the unpleasant situations, the story-telling aspect of it helps me turn them into events that I can laugh at later (ask me sometime about nearly being washed out to sea in a little skiff or getting covered from head to toe with poison oak after getting stuck on an errant off-roading trip). 

The town of Hannibal on the Mississippi

Walking through the museum, the houses, and the town of Hannibal, I kept wondering if Mark Twain did a similar type of thing in telling stories to himself.  I pondered what events in his stories were things that he personally experienced, which ones were things that he experienced through others, and which ones were completely made up.  I suppose that somehow, though, it was a little mixture of all of those.  Because for everyone, that’s what our lives really are—just a continuous book of short stories that is continuously written each day that we are alive.