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“Introduction” to |
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fter I graduated from high school, I couldn’t wait to escape from this tiny town. Even though I had a good family and many close friends, Clearwater stifled me. Like Huck Finn, I hopped on my raft to “light out for the territory.” In reality, I only moved as far away as Minneapolis and into a cozy apartment with other Clearwater girls who were also yearning for freedom and independence.
Even though I came back home many times before I married and left for good, wherever I have lived--Mississippi, Oregon, South Dakota--I often became caught up in waves of homesickness. But not until I started teaching The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to my high school students did I realize that I was a child of the Old Man and anchored to this neck of the Mississippi River.
Clearwater, like many of the river towns Mark Twain writes about, has been made up of saints and scoundrels and others of varying fathoms in between. When I reflect on Clearwater’s history and its notable and not so notable characters, I wonder what Twain, the great Wisecracker, would have said if he’d ever come this far north. Would he have been cynical of the town’s stagnation since it lost its opportunity to become a major commercial center back in the 1800s? Would he have developed a few of the town drunks or regular visiting train bums into central characters for one of his famous novels? It is hard to say. But Clearwater, like many small river towns, has many stories waiting to be told.
The poems and essays in this book are about the type of individuals, situations, and places that impressed me as I grew up. And like Mark Twain, who Huck states “told the truth, mainly,” except for those “things which he stretched,” occasionally this author makes murky illusions to the past. |
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Available from Heritage Books or the author. |
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