Beach Walk Day One: Birds – and Tracks!

I wake up just before six, despite the fact that my 5:45 alarm failed to go off. By 6:07 I’m on the beach.

I notice right away that my tide tables must be a little off. The tide is supposed to be rising, yet I see little tide pools left behind by a receding tide.

I take off my sandals and step into the cool tidepool water. I know this is the place to look for crabs and other critters left behind by the receding water, but I don’t spot anything. A black-headed laughing gull has the same idea, but has more skill than I. He probes the water with his barbed beak, hoping for breakfast.

I head south on the beach, walking under the pier. Barnacles coat its pilings. I remember a naturalist telling me that one of the rarest commodities in the ocean is a solid surface.

A flock of white ibis seems unperturbed by my presence. They probe the sand, looking for coquina clams and mole crabs. The mole crabs are thick on this beach; I’d noticed that the night before. Dig a little depression at the surf line and you’ll see dozens of tiny crabs, and a few larger ones, too.

Mole crabs are one of the great joys of the beach. Catch one in your palm and it’ll try to burrow backwards into the spaces between your fingers. They have no sharp parts, so it doesn’t hurt at all. I’ve never tried one, but they must be tasty, as these white ibis keep grabbing crabs even though I’m only a few feet away from them.

Further along, a great blue heron guards a tidepool. She’s not moving, no matter how close I get. There must be something good in there. The heron turns her face toward me, staring at me with both eyes at once.

a blurry heron

I notice that she’s got a band on her leg – she must have some experience with humans. Finally, as I watch as motionless as I can be, she strides away from her pool, walking gracefully to the north, step by elegant step, watching me all the way. I walk away from the ocean and toward the roped-off shorebird nesting area.

This area is full of black skimmers. I had marveled at their stability the evening before. They fly just above the water line, their lower beaks dipping into the water to scoop up unwary fish. What an amazing feat of engineering, to fly so level with one beak breaking the water line.

The nesting skimmers seem agitated, and I think maybe I’m too close. Then I see the source of their agitation. A laughing gull has infiltrated the group, and the skimmers are busy chasing the interloper off.

I walk a little further along, knowing my quarry. From our balcony the evening before I’d spotted the orange tape and four wooden stakes of a sea turtle nest. I want to get close to this nest, to feel the energy of those baby turtles nestled inside their eggs, buried in sand..

When I arrive at the nest I’m surprised to see the date – June 13! This is a brand new nest, build just Wednesday morning. It is nest 53 of the season, the first nest found after my last report from June 12. Only a few days before, an ancient reptile had climbed from the sea on this very spot, made her way through sugary white sand, and built a nest with perhaps 100 tiny bits of life buried inside.

Further along was another nest. I walked toward it, but was waylaid by a ghost crab hole. Ghost crabs are the sign of a healthy beach, so I’m glad to see this hole. I wait, hoping for a glimpse of the engineer buried deep inside, but his patience is greater than mine, and I finally move on. Further along I see two other ghost crab holes, these with tiny footprints made by the crabs’ sharp legs.

The second turtle nest is two days’ older – built the morning of June 11. A thought goes through my head. The same turtle will often build 3 or more nests in a season. Maybe these two nests, quite near one another, were built by the same mother loggerhead. Maybe she’s working her way north. Maybe her next nest will be closer to my condo. What an amazing thing that would be.

It’s ten minutes to sunrise, and I have one more target this morning – a group of rocks and pilings from a pier that is no more. I never make it.

I walk back toward the ocean, tracing the path of the mother turtle. I turn south and walk toward the pilings, but something stops me short. Tracks! Yes? No. Yes! These are sea turtle tracks. I recognize them from all the pictures I’d seen, and from my previous adventures with sea turtles. But this is something new. Something different. I follow these tracks up the beach. This is an unmarked nest!

I feel my heart racing. I dash back to the previous nest, looking for instructions on the yellow sign there. No phone number. Fortunately my smartphone is in my pocket, and I quickly find the phone number I want. I press in the numbers.

The phone rings.

“This is Mike.”

“Hi, I’m walking the beach and I think I’ve found sea turtle tracks to an unmarked nest.”

“Where are you?”

“About 25 yards south of nest 45.”

“We’re on the north end of the beach. We’ll be there soon.”

And then I wait. Standing there, watching the Sun rise over the beach houses before me, tears rolling down my cheeks. I’m at the fork in the turtle’s path, just beachward of the nest, at the place where her up-beach tracks stop and her down-beach path begins. Coming up the beach, she wandered a bit, looking for the right spot, her front flippers digging into the sand and pulling her along.

Her down-beach tracks are much more purposeful, a beeline back to her watery home. I wonder how long ago she passed, how long before she returns.

I wait. I feel responsible now, as if I alone stand between this nest and insensate evil. I’ll protect it against all comers, hooligans with a volleyball, raccoons looking for a snack, or a jogger daring to tread on my nest. I wait. And I wait. I feel a pain in my toe. A tiny red ant has taken a bite of me. Better me, I think, than my baby turtles over there. Even so, I squish the ant. I’m a vertebrate chauvinist at heart.

Finally at 8:01 am I see a four-wheeled buggy driving under the pier and heading my direction. They drive slowly, watching the sand. It’s Mike and a young woman, with a sign on the back of their vehicle that says, “Sea Turtle Patrol.”

I’d met Mike before, though I’m sure he doesn’t remember me. I ask him if I’d really found tracks. “Yes,” he answers. Is it a loggerhead? Yes again. He looks at the nest. Now I’m fearful. What if he tells me this is a false crawl, that the turtle had reached this spot but then changed her mind? What if there were no eggs at all? What if I were protecting an empty nest?

“Well, it looks a little odd, but I see the sand sprayed off to the side,” Mike said. “Usually there’s a mound of sand, but probably she just crawled over it and flattened it out. We’ll mark it and then come back later to see if we can find eggs.”

And I breathed a sigh of relief. Mike marked the nest with stakes. The young woman with him told me it would be nest number 63. My nest.

It was a good day.

My daughter Caroline took this picture later when we went down the beach to look at my nest. Best Father’s Day ever!

Sea Turtles Here I Come!

Clearwater Marine Aquarium has already counted 52 sea turtle nests as of June 12. Several are close to where I’ll be staying. I’m looking forward to walking the beach every morning. Who knows? Maybe I’ll be the first to see a set of fresh tracks, or even a late arrival just finishing her work.

There’s something magical about sea turtles returning to their home sand to build their nests and lay their eggs. It’s in the long history – sea turtles have been performing this rite every spring for millions of years. It’s in the length of the journey – some sea turtles swim across half an ocean just to reach the beach from which they were born. It’s in the sadness I feel knowing that barely 1 in 1000 hatchlings will survive. No, I don’t believe the turtles themselves feel that same sadness, though the mothers do “cry” salty tears as they make their way up and down the beach. These mothers will never know their babies, of course; by the time the hatchlings scramble madly down the beach the mother will be far, far away.

It’s also in the way mysteries merge. The nighttime arrival from the dark and unknown sea. Not unknown to the turtle, of course, as it is her only home. Instead, it is our world of sand and air and beach chairs that is the mystery to her. It is the only time in her life she will venture onto land; what a terrifying journey it must be for her – if turtles can feel such emotions.

It is in the eggs, left cozied into their surrogate mother the sand. Born from the land, the warmth of the Sun and the cool night breezes, these tiny bits of life will literally swim down the beach until that first wave of salt water passes over their bodies and carries them out into the dark and dangerous sea that will be the only home they’ll ever know.

These creatures have seen our planet change and move over the millennia. They’ve seen other species come and go. They’ve watched our own species rise from a small, naked ape who fearfully approached the shoreline to a creature capable of sailing the seas, exploring its depths, and altering forever the lives of every other creature on the planet.

Don’t get me wrong; I think people are amazing, fantastic, the most significant creatures this planet has ever produced. But our way isn’t the only way. There’s something to be said, too, for an animal that lives its life quietly, away from the light and the noise, in my very favorite place on Earth, the place where the ocean meets the sky.

Here I come!

 

 

My Goodbye

Today I did the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do. I submitted my resignation from COSI.

In the summer of 1993, I applied for a job as a summer workshop teacher at COSI, a place I’d visited again and again in my childhood. Could COSI be my future? Could I be one of those people, like Mike Stanley with his ChemMystery show, Jarvis Carr and his trained rats, and Leonard Sparks, Mr. COSI himself, with his crazy Isaac Newton wig?

I decided to try. To really try. Not a sloppy, half-hearted attempt, like almost everything else in my life, but an all-out, no-holds-barred headfirst dive, the kind that my baseball heroes Pete Rose and Joe Morgan would have made. I decided to give COSI everything I had.

The day of my first interview, I was waiting by the pendulum. A little boy came up to me and asked me how it worked. The next thing I knew I was down on the floor with him, swinging a weight back and forth to help him discover the amazing secret: the Earth below us, seemingly so solid and unchanging, is in fact moving every day!

Heather (my first boss at COSI) came over to me and said, “You must be Steve!” I don’t think it mattered what happened in the interview after that.

Twenty years later, COSI has changed me in ways that I never expected. I knew coming in that I loved to teach, but I never expected to get such joy from performance. As a kid I was meek, painfully shy, quiet to the point of pathology. At COSI I found my voice. On my show sheets I always write, “I am the Black Swan”; my way of saying that I just gave everything I am and everything I have to that performance.

Even more so, I never expected to become a leader. I am overwhelmed by the kind words and thoughts of those who have told me, to my complete and utter amazement, how I have inspired them. I never expected the joy I would experience at seeing those whom I’ve guided teach others with that same passion, commitment, and love that I feel in my own teaching. Even more than that, though, is the pride and pleasure I feel when I see young teachers truly discover themselves, not just my influence, but their own unique inner truth. You know who you are.

When it became clear that I must leave COSI, my first reaction was anger – at myself. I had let myself care too much. I had loved a place, and that place had not loved me back. How foolish of me not to take the advice, “It’s not personal, it’s business.”

But then my colleagues came to me, one after the other. They told me what my passion and my love had meant to them. They told me how I had changed them, how they were different, better people for having watched me follow my bliss. And then I knew: it is personal. It has to be personal. You have to feel it. Yes, it makes the pain so much greater when it finally ends. But that pain is better than not feeling at all. I wouldn’t change a thing.

Some people believe that everything happens for a reason. While I deeply respect this belief, I cannot share it. What, then, do I believe? I believe that all knowledge is fallible, and therefore mistakes are inevitable. But, as a friend recently reminded me, we are teachers. We teach anyway. When you’re in love, you want to tell the world.

I’m still in love.

Goodbye, everyone, and go find your starfish!

SW

What I Learned

Just as with Moby-Dick, I began this project on Adventures of Huckleberry Finn hoping I would learn something. What about it? It’s hard to say if I learned something this time as opposed to all my other readings, as I’ve read the book now maybe nine or ten times. But there are some impressions that are perhaps evolving.

My view of the world has changed considerably since reading The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch and The Better Angels of Our Nature by Steven Pinker. This includes, I think, my view of Huck Finn. Before reading those two life-changing books I would have seen Huck as a pure soul, and society at large as the evil entity that chipped away at his purity – the classic idea of the noble savage contaminated by the world. Huck, being somewhat outside society, is still affected by it, but is able to recognize things about society that others cannot. Tom Sawyer, on the other hand, is entirely immersed in his society and so his soul is lost.

Now I think that interpretation is just silly. Huck is a good person at heart, but it isn’t because society hasn’t affected him. Of course he’s been affected. Huck may live most of his life on the margins of society, but those margins are still part of the world of people. Look at Huck’s use of a gun, fire, fishing line, the raft itself. All these things are human creations.

More deeply, Huck’s morality and world view come from his society, too. It just so happens that Huck lives in a society that has a built-in and irresolvable cognitive dissonance, a society that thinks of itself as moral, and in many ways is more moral than earlier societies, but at its heart holds the belief that blacks are inherently inferior, not even truly human. Yet the society does have a very clearly-defined idea of what makes someone human, and that idea has truth in it. Eventually, someone is bound to realize another truth –  black people are people, and owning them as property is just plain wrong.

Huck has no desire to hurt others; he knows this is wrong. He’s smart enough to figure out that those who have hurt him – his father, in particular – are living life poorly, while those who have given him some measure of help – the Widow, JudgeThatcher – are better, more worthy people.

What about Jim? In the beginning, Huck doesn’t see Jim in the same category as the Widow or Judge Thatcher, or even pap. Jim is just a prop, a plaything. Huck is prone to loneliness, and therefore he’s happy to have Jim along as they each try to escape in their own way from society. Huck’s also prone to adventures, and helping Jim escape is at first a great adventure. Huck is none too fond of Miss Watson, Jim’s owner, and so he’s unconcerned in the beginning about Miss Watson’s loss of property.

Soon, though, things start to change. On the one hand, Huck begins to see that Jim isn’t just a plaything; he’s a person with thoughts and feelings and hopes and dreams, just like any other person. This comes as a shock, as it doesn’t match what society has taught Huck about blacks. On the other hand, Huck begins to feel the depth of the crime he’s committing against that society. When a society is built upon a great immorality, the only way it can preserve that immorality is to stigmatize the very notion of questioning.

The institution of slavery is not something to be even questioned, let alone challenged. Why? Because it doesn’t take much questioning to find that the institution itself is immoral. As Huck begins to discover Jim’s true character, he realizes that those ideas he’s absorbed from society – one, good people are better than bad people and two, blacks are inherently inferior, in fact are not truly people at all – are mutually incompatible. When you recognize a cognitive dissonance like that, you have to do something about it or go crazy. You have to accommodate your world view to a new way of seeing the world. This dissonance is so radical that Huck has to build a new world view to accommodate it. But world-building is never perfect, and takes time. Huck’s new construct has room only for Jim, and not blacks in general, as people. But Huck is evolving, as we see throughout this extraordinary book. Perhaps, with time and experience, Huck will grow a little more. And as readers, so will we.

OK, I’ll finish with one more scene that makes me laugh. At the funeral of Peter Wilkes, the services are interrupted by a commotion from the basement of the church.

They had borrowed a melodeum—a sick one; and when everything was ready a young woman set down and worked it, and it was pretty skreeky and colicky, and everybody joined in and sung, and Peter was the only one that had a good thing, according to my notion.  Then the Reverend Hobson opened up, slow and solemn, and begun to talk; and straight off the most outrageous row busted out in the cellar a body ever heard; it was only one dog, but he made a most powerful racket, and he kept it up right along; the parson he had to stand there, over the coffin, and wait—you couldn’t hear yourself think.  It was right down awkward, and nobody didn’t seem to know what to do.  But pretty soon they see that long-legged undertaker make a sign to the preacher as much as to say, “Don’t you worry—just depend on me.”  Then he stooped down and begun to glide along the wall, just his shoulders showing over the people’s heads.  So he glided along, and the powwow and racket getting more and more outrageous all the time; and at last, when he had gone around two sides of the room, he disappears down cellar.  Then in about two seconds we heard a whack, and the dog he finished up with a most amazing howl or two, and then everything was dead still, and the parson begun his solemn talk where he left off.  In a minute or two here comes this undertaker’s back and shoulders gliding along the wall again; and so he glided and glided around three sides of the room, and then rose up, and shaded his mouth with his hands, and stretched his neck out towards the preacher, over the people’s heads, and says, in a kind of a coarse whisper, “He had a rat!”  Then he drooped down and glided along the wall again to his place.  You could see it was a great satisfaction to the people, because naturally they wanted to know.  A little thing like that don’t cost nothing, and it’s just the little things that makes a man to be looked up to and liked.  There warn’t no more popular man in town than what that undertaker was.

So long, Huck. It’s been a great ride.

Those Last Few Chapters

Ernest Hemingway said the book should have ended after Huck makes his decision on the raft. The last few chapters, Hemingway says, are cheating. One writer (John Seelye) even wrote a version of the book that does end shortly after the “I’ll go to hell” scene (I won’t give away the ending, in case you want to read it. It’s pretty good.)

Still, there are still some important matters to attend to. The first is the conclusion of the king and duke affair. Huck and his new “partner” Tom Sawyer (more on him below) rush off one evening when they hear that the king and the duke are about to be caught in the act of bilking another town, but they’re too late to help:

(T)hen- here comes a raging rush of people, with torches, and an awful whooping and yelling, and banging tin pans and blowing horns; and we jumped to one side to let them go by; and as they went by, I see they had the king and the duke astraddle of a rail- that is, I knowed it was the king and the duke, though they was all over tar and feathers, and didn’t look like nothing in the world that was human- just looked like a couple of monstrous big soldier-plumes. Well, it made me sick to see it; and I was sorry for them poor pitiful rascals, it seemed like I couldn’t ever feel any hardness against them any more in the world. It was a dreadful thing to see. Human beings can be awful cruel to one another.

Again we see Huck refusing to rise above. Even though these two were directly responsible for Jim’s return to slavery, Huck (unlike, I suspect, most readers including myself) feels no satisfaction at their comeuppance. Twain gives us this moment of justice; we wanted it, after the final dirty trick these two frauds perpetrated on Jim, even though our hero Huck feels only remorse.

But there’s much more in the final chapters than this – some of it at least funny until you remember what’s at stake. I think in these final chapters – (if you’re not familiar, here’s a synopsis: Tom Sawyer is a frat boy who decides to play out his own twisted version of The Count of Monte Cristo and every other maudlin escape fantasy ever written with Jim, who in reality is already free but doesn’t know it, as his own personal toy) I think in these final chapters,Twain is just taking more cracks at the sort of literature he despises, and also showing how Tom Sawyer would have ruined so many of Huck’s brilliant plans with his style.

In the end, Tom’s childishness nearly results in the deaths of Tom, Jim, and Huck, and we see Jim captured, chained, and abused – another rude slap amid all the “fun” of Tom’s ridiculous escape plans. Then, finally, Tom reveals that – ha ha – Miss Watson had already set Jim free in her will. Oh, Tom you scamp! (grrr) In reading, I beg and plead every time for Huck to kick Tom’s frat boy ass and get Jim out of there, but of course no matter how many times I read it never happens. Maybe Hemingway was right; maybe the book should have ended before Tom Sawyer came into the story once again. I’m not sure I’ve decided yet.

But before Tom Sawyer’s epic escapade, there occurs incident I feel I must mention. For me it lay at the heart of the book and all the issues it raises. Before Huck knows who he’s supposed to be to Aunt Sally, he tells a lie about a steamboat ride to their farm.

“Now I can have a good look at you: and laws-a-me, I’ve been hungry for it a many and a many a time, all these long years, and it’s come at last! We been expecting you a couple of days and more. What’s kep’ you?- boat get aground?”

“Yes’m–she–”

“Don’t say yes’m- say Aunt Sally. Where’d she get aground?”

I didn’t rightly know what to say, because I didn’t know whether the boat would be coming up the river or down. But I go a good deal on instinct; and my instinct said she would be coming up- from down towards Orleans. That didn’t help me much, though; for I didn’t know the names of bars down that way. I see I’d got to invent a bar, or forget the name of the one we got aground on- or- Now I struck an idea, and fetched it out:

“It warn’t the grounding- that didn’t keep us back but a little. We blowed out a cylinder-head.”

“Good gracious! anybody hurt?”

“No’m. Killed a nigger.”

“Well, it’s lucky; because sometimes people do get hurt.”

Ouch! I wince every time I read that passage. Some will read this as an indictment of Huck; perhaps he hasn’t come nearly as far as I suggested in the previous entry. His later comment that Jim was “white inside” adds fuel to that fire. But while the “white inside” comment is horrible and I won’t try to defend it, the above passage is, I believe, something else entirely.

Recall the passage immediately after Huck declared “I’ll go to hell.”

It was awful thoughts, and awful words, but they was said. And I let them stay said; and never thought no more about reforming. I shoved the whole thing out of my head; and said I would take up wickedness again, which was in my line, being brung up to it, and the other warn’t. And for a starter, I would go to work and steal Jim out of slavery again; and if I could think up anything worse, I would do that, too; because as long as I was in, and in for good, I might as well go the whole hog.

And how does Huck take up wickedness? He goes after Jim using any tool that’s handy to help him get Jim back. In particular, Huck lies without remorse.

Isaac Asimov said that lies should be close to the truth to be believed, and that the truth itself is the best lie of all. Huck disguises his lie to Aunt Sally with a deep “truth” he knows Aunt Sally believes. A nigger isn’t a person, isn’t an “anybody.” This “truth” added to his lie will make a person like Aunt Sally believe it every time.  Huck knows better; he knows Jim is a person. That’s why he’s going against everything and everyone he’s ever known to set Jim free. But he realizes that Aunt Sally, otherwise a fine and caring person, breaks humans into two distinct categories, “people” and “niggers.” And never the twain shall meet.

So why, then, does later Twain have Huck utter the detestable sentiment that Jim is “white inside”? I believe it’s to show that Huck is not entirely reformed. Huck certainly hasn’t become an abolitionist. He doesn’t believe that slavery is wrong. He isn’t there yet. Instead, Huck merely wants Jim to be free; Jim, whom Huck loves and who loves Huck; Jim, who took care of Huck on the river again and again; Jim, who valued the safety of Huck, and even of Tom Sawyer, over his own freedom. Huck isn’t quite there yet; he doesn’t understand that Jim’s enslavement isn’t just a personal tragedy, but a tragedy for all of us. But we, who are glad the king and the duke got what was coming to them, also see that it isn’t just Jim’s freedom that is precious, but freedom for all. Jim isn’t “white inside,” he’s a person inside, and people deserve freedom. Huck is still evolving; maybe someday he’ll get there with us.

OK, the funny scene. Honestly I can’t pick any of Tom Sawyer’s foolishness. Even though there’s plenty to laugh about, always in the background is the knowledge that Tom is playing a childish game with a man’s freedom, and Huck is just passively letting it happen. So let’s go back to the beginning of the book, when Huck is still thinking for himself:

Miss Watson she took me in the closet and prayed, but nothing come of it. She told me to pray every day, and whatever I asked for I would get it. But it warn’t so. I tried it. Once I got a fish-line, but no hooks. It warn’t any good to me without hooks. I tried for the hooks three or four times, but somehow I couldn’t make it work. By-and-by, one day, I asked Miss Watson to try for me, but she said I was a fool. She never told me why, and I couldn’t make it out no way.

I set down, one time, back in the woods, and had a long think about it. I says to myself, if a body can get anything they pray for, why don’t Deacon Winn get back the money he lost on pork? Why can’t the widow get back her silver snuff-box that was stole? Why can’t Miss Watson fat up? No, says I to myself, there ain’t nothing in it. I went and told the widow about it, and she said the thing a body could get by praying for it was “spiritual gifts.” This was too many for me, but she told me what she meant- I must help other people, and do everything I could for other people, and look out for them all the time, and never think about myself. This was including Miss Watson, as I took it. I went out in the woods and turned it over in my mind a long time, but I couldn’t see no advantage about it- except for the other people- so at last I reckoned I wouldn’t worry about it any more, but just let it go.

The Decision

We come now to the heart of the book, some of the most beautiful and meaningful writing I know. After the king and the duke lose all their money trying to rob Mary Jane and her family, the king sells Jim back into slavery for forty dollars. It’s a sharp slap in the face to readers who may have gotten caught up in the adventure and forgotten (as apparently Huck has forgotten) that Jim is in peril every moment he spends in the South. Now reality sinks in, and Huck is faced with the decision he’s been putting off ever since the pair missed Cairo in the fog.

The crucial thing to remember is this: everything Huck knows from his society, every single thing, screams to him that he is doing wrong. Not just wrong, but sinfully wrong. He is stealing. This isn’t like borrowing a chicken or even a canoe. This is taking property so valuable an entire way of life is built around it. More than that, everyone in Huck’s society knows about people who want to free slaves, and they all despise them. Recall Huck’s quote, “(T)hey’ll call me a dirty Abolitionist.”

Huck knows now that the game is up. Jim has been captured. He’ll either end up with a new master, or else go back to Miss Watson, a woman who even before Jim ran away wanted to sell him to a plantation in New Orleans. The words are too beautiful to paraphrase; I’ll just quote them. It’s way too much for a blog entry, I know, but you need the entire passage to truly understand.

Once I said to myself it would be a thousand times better for Jim to be a slave at home where his family was, as long as he’d got to be a slave, and so I’d better write a letter to Tom Sawyer and tell him to tell Miss Watson where he was. But I soon give up that notion for two things: she’d be mad and disgusted at his rascality and ungratefulness for leaving her, and so she’d sell him straight down the river again; and if she didn’t, everybody naturally despises an ungrateful nigger, and they’d make Jim feel it all the time, and so he’d feel ornery and disgraced. And then think of me! It would get all around that Huck Finn helped a nigger to get his freedom; and if I was ever to see anybody from that town again I’d be ready to get down and lick his boots for shame. That’s just the way: a person does a low-down thing, and then he don’t want to take no consequences of it. Thinks as long as he can hide, it ain’t no disgrace. That was my fix exactly. The more I studied about this the more my conscience went to grinding me, and the more wicked and low-down and ornery I got to feeling. And at last, when it hit me all of a sudden that here was the plain hand of Providence slapping me in the face and letting me know my wickedness was being watched all the time from up there in heaven, whilst I was stealing a poor old woman’s nigger that hadn’t ever done me no harm, and now was showing me there’s One that’s always on the lookout, and ain’t a-going to allow no such miserable doings to go only just so fur and no further, I most dropped in my tracks I was so scared. Well, I tried the best I could to kinder soften it up somehow for myself by saying I was brung up wicked, and so I warn’t so much to blame; but something inside of me kept saying, “There was the Sunday-school, you could ‘a’ gone to it; and if you’d ‘a’ done it they’d ‘a’ learnt you there that people that acts as I’d been acting about that nigger goes to everlasting fire.”

It made me shiver. And I about made up my mind to pray, and see if I couldn’t try to quit being the kind of a boy I was and be better. So I kneeled down. But the words wouldn’t come. Why wouldn’t they? It warn’t no use to try and hide it from Him. Nor from me, neither. I knowed very well why they wouldn’t come. It was because my heart warn’t right; it was because I warn’t square; it was because I was playing double. I was letting on to give up sin, but away inside of me I was holding on to the biggest one of all. I was trying to make my mouth say I would do the right thing and the clean thing, and go and write to that nigger’s owner and tell where he was; but deep down in me I knowed it was a lie, and He knowed it. You can’t pray a lie—I found that out.

So I was full of trouble, full as I could be; and didn’t know what to do. At last I had an idea; and I says, I’ll go and write the letter—and then see if I can pray. Why, it was astonishing, the way I felt as light as a feather right straight off, and my troubles all gone. So I got a piece of paper and a pencil, all glad and excited, and set down and wrote:

Miss Watson, your runaway nigger Jim is down here two mile below Pikesville, and Mr. Phelps has got him and he will give him up for the reward if you send. HUCK FINN.

I felt good and all washed clean of sin for the first time I had ever felt so in my life, and I knowed I could pray now. But I didn’t do it straight off, but laid the paper down and set there thinking—thinking how good it was all this happened so, and how near I come to being lost and going to hell. And went on thinking. And got to thinking over our trip down the river; and I see Jim before me all the time: in the day and in the night-time, sometimes moonlight, sometimes storms, and we a-floating along, talking and singing and laughing. But somehow I couldn’t seem to strike no places to harden me against him, but only the other kind. I’d see him standing my watch on top of his’n, ‘stead of calling me, so I could go on sleeping; and see him how glad he was when I come back out of the fog; and when I come to him again in the swamp, up there where the feud was; and such-like times; and would always call me honey, and pet me, and do everything he could think of for me, and how good he always was; and at last I struck the time I saved him by telling the men we had smallpox aboard, and he was so grateful, and said I was the best friend old Jim ever had in the world, and the only one he’s got now; and then I happened to look around and see that paper.

 It was a close place. I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was a-trembling, because I’d got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself:

“All right, then, I’ll go to hell”—and tore it up.

As modern readers, it’s hard to put ourselves in Huck’s place. We know slavery is a great evil; we know Jim is not property; we know Huck is doing the right thing by helping Jim escape. But Huck doesn’t know any of this. Every single influence in his life insists with a certainty that cannot be questioned that slavery is natural and right, that Jim belongs to Miss Watson, that helping a slave escape is not just wrong but a deep and mortal sin. Huck would be not just despised by his neighbors but condemned to hell. Huck doesn’t just feel guilty. He is also scared! He is convinced that not just human but divine retribution awaits if he doesn’t turn Jim in.

But something isn’t right. How can it be that Jim cares for his family? How can it be that Jim cares so deeply about Huck? How can it be that Jim is a man, far more of a father to Huck than his own father ever was?

Back in education school we called such events examples of “cognitive dissonance.” Our brains want to make sense of the world, and Huck has come to a realization. A world in which a human being such as Jim can be property just doesn’t make sense. Huck can’t assimilate this realization about Jim into his model of the world. Instead, Huck must remake his model. Even though it means punishment, and shame, and guilt, and hell, Huck can’t turn Jim in. He has to follow his heart.

This is where Adventures of Huckleberry Finn goes from being just a cleverly written and funny follow-up on The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and becomes a great work of American Literature – maybe the first truly American book. Who knows? What I do know is in that moment, Huck makes a choice. He asserts his own individual truth, and in doing so becomes my hero. This is the moment we’ve been waiting for. This is the moment when we leave fate and predestination behind, and begin depending upon ourselves. This is the moment that Huck, and through Huck all us modern readers, realize that we control our fates, our minds, our future. Existence belongs to us. In the words of the poet,

That you are here

That life exists – and identity

That the powerful play goes on and you will contribute a verse

-          Walt Whitman

Shepherdsons, Boggses, Kings, Dukes, and Mary Janes

A book is more than its climax, of course, and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn builds to that climax not just by drawing Huck and Jim closer together, but by contrasting their relationship with the other characters in the book. There are too many to mention here, but a short diversion into these side stories will help us understand Huck’s looming decision.

Shortly after Jim and Huck realize that they’ve missed Cairo, Illinois, Twain needs a plot device to keep the pair moving down river. He finds it in a steamboat that crashes into the raft, sending Jim one way and Huck the other. Huck, apparently unconcerned with Jim’s well-being, swims for shore where a new adventure awaits.

Yes, this is a weakness in the story. How could Huck just abandon Jim, not knowing if Jim were dead, injured, or picked up by a passing ferry? One might argue that it’s Huck’s attempt to escape from his conscience, but there’s no indication of that in the text. Instead, I have to believe Twain inserted this forced separation of Jim and Huck simply because he wanted to tell a different story, one in which Jim could play no part.

Shortly Huck is taken in by a family known as the Grangerfords. Again we see Huck refusing to rise above.

Col Grangerford was a gentleman, you see. He was a gentleman all over; and so was his family. He was well born, as the saying is, and that’s worth as much in a man as it is in a horse, so the Widow Douglas said, and nobody ever denied that she was of the first aristocracy in our town; and pap he always said it, too, though he warn’t no more quality than a mudcat himself.

If pap is a mudcat, Huck by extension is, as well. We know better. We know Huck is more than the sum of his mother and father, and yet we love Huck’s humility.

After some niceties and a hilarious exploration of the works of the Grangerfords’ deceased daughter Emmeline (more on her below), Huck learns that the Grangerfords are in a long and deadly feud with a family called the Shepherdsons. We see the feud for what it is, senseless violence that can end only when everyone is dead, and we see how silly is the idea that the Grangerfords and the Shepherdsons are somehow “well born.”

At the end of the feud incident, Huck is reunited with Jim on the raft again (turns out it wasn’t “smashed all to flinders” but was just fine and was found caught on a snag by the Grangerfords’ slaves. What a coinkidink!). Huck and Jim aren’t alone for long, however, before two con men known as the king and the duke hop aboard and start giving orders. Again we see a weakness in the book, as surely Huck and Jim could have found a way to escape from these two if they really wanted to, and were really serious about heading upriver. But that doesn’t fit where Twain wants to go.

The king and the duke are an interesting contrast. The duke, younger and more sophisticated, is again and again outdone by the king (even in their names, as the duke chose only to go for imitating a lesser nobility while the king went right after the French throne!). The king lacks all the duke’s pretense, and yet consistently manages to bilk more cash from the locals and to find the more lucrative con games. Some of the funniest scenes come when the duke, playing a deaf mute, has to bite his tongue as the king again and again says the most ridiculous things while imitating an English reverend.

Before the crucial king and duke scenes, however, comes a strange passage in which Huck witnesses a murder. As Huck has already seen plenty of killing in the feud, one wonders why Twain felt the need to add another body to the count. My feeling is that the murder of Boggs by Col. Sherburn was meant as more fuel to the idea that there’s something rotten in society, bringing into question anything that society might believe. The murder and its aftermath expose the worst traits of humanity, until you start to believe that Twain has given up.

But then there’s Mary Jane. The eldest of the three sisters the king and the duke attempt to rob blind, Mary Jane becomes the one person in the entire book (with the exception of Jim, of course) that we are supposed to truly like. Huck, young boy that he is, seems particularly attracted to the redheaded 19-year-old MJ and decides to take a chance by telling her the truth about the king and the duke. What was Twain getting at with Mary Jane and Huck? I honestly don’t know. Maybe he wanted Huck to encounter at least one good person before he must make his own crucial choice. Maybe he needed to make sure no one was rooting for the king and the duke, because he knew their betrayal and eventual comeuppance was on its way. Maybe he just wanted to explore a hint of some sexual feelings in Huck. I’ll need to think more about it.

At any rate, once the adventures with Mary Jane, the duke and the king reach their hideous and hilarious climax, it’s time to move to the meat of the story.

Once more, though, a passage that always makes me laugh. Emmeline Grangerford, described above, was a painter and a poet obsessed with death. She wrote poetic obituaries for anyone who had died. She painted pictures of mourning and sorrow. She could write about anything, her brother reports, so long as it was “sadful.” But then she herself withered away and died after failing to find a rhyme for a dead person named Whistler. And Huck gets off one of the best lines anywhere.

Everybody was sorry she died, because she had laid out a lot more of these pictures to do, and a body could see by what she had done what they had lost. But I reckoned that with her disposition she was having a better time in the graveyard.

Huck and Jim

We first meet Jim at the beginning of Chapter 2. He is the classic caricature: an ignorant, superstitious braggart who schemes a way to get a counterfeit quarter from young Huck with a mysterious hairball oracle. I believe this initial treatment of Jim is wholly intentional. One of the remarkable things about Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is the way our narrator changes as the story marches along. Instead of a moralized, sanitized account of events after the fact, we get from Huck his actual thoughts at the time he is having them. As a result, his ideas about Jim change with events in the narrative. It’s perhaps not realistic (nor, frankly, is the idea that the character Huck would sit down to write this book in the first place), but it is effective in letting us see a relationship slowly unfold.

When Huck first encounters Jim on the island, he learns that Jim has run away from his owner, Miss Watson. Huck makes a rash promise, one that he’ll have trouble keeping later on:

“(Y)ou wouldn’t tell on me if I ‘us to tell you, would you Huck?”

“Blamed if I would, Jim.”

“Well, I b’lieve you, Huck. I – I run off.”

“Jim!”

“But mind, you said you wouldn’ tell – you know you said you wouldn’ tell, Huck.”

“Well, I did. I said I wouldn’t, and I’ll stick to it. Honest injun, I will. People would call me a lowdown Abolitionist and despise me for keeping mum – but that don’t make no difference . . .”

Our first indication that Jim is more than a caricature comes when Huck and Jim are separated in a fog. After considerable trouble, Huck finds his way back to Jim and the raft. Jim, exhausted from the ordeal, has fallen asleep sitting up. Instead of greeting Jim, Huck decides to play a trick, making Jim believe that the fog and the separation were all just a dream. Afterwards, Huck reveals the damage and debris left by the adventure, asking Jim to explain it, and Jim responds:

“Dat truck dah is trash; en trash is what people is dat puts dirt on de head er dey fren’s en makes ‘em ashamed.” Then he got up slow and walked to the wigwam, and went in there without saying anything but that. But that was enough. It made me feel so mean I could almost kissed his foot to get him to take it back. It was fifteen minutes before I could work myself up to go and humble myself to a nigger; but I done it, and I warn’t ever sorry for it afterward, neither. I didn’t do him no more mean tricks, and I wouldn’t done that one if I’d ‘a’ knowed it would make him feel that way.

Huck is beginning to see Jim in a different way. He’s not the caricatured sub-human Huck thought he was. Jim has feelings. But other forces tug on Huck, as well. Soon after the fog incident, Huck begins to feel guilty about promising to help Jim escape slavery.

I begun to get it through my head that he was most free—and who was to blame for it? Why, me. I couldn’t get that out of my conscience, no how nor no way. It got to troubling me so I couldn’t rest; I couldn’t stay still in one place. It hadn’t ever come home to me before, what this thing was that I was doing. But now it did; and it stayed with me, and scorched me more and more.

Huck soon faces a clear choice. While paddling to shore to learn their location, Huck encounters two men hunting for runaway slaves.

One of them says: “What’s that yonder?”

“A piece of a raft,” I says.

“Do you belong on it?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Any men on it?”

“Only one, sir.”

“Well, there’s five niggers run off to-night up yonder, above the head of the bend. Is your man white or black?”

I didn’t answer up prompt. I tried to, but the words wouldn’t come. I tried for a second or two to brace up and out with it, but I warn’t man enough—hadn’t the spunk of a rabbit. I see I was weakening; so I just give up trying, and up and says:

“He’s white.”

Huck goes on to tell as deft a lie as you’ll find in the book, convincing the men through what he doesn’t say that the man on the raft has smallpox and is deadly contagious. It’s the sort of cleverness that Huck denigrates in himself, though we see that his brains and his heart have once again saved the day. Huck feels no pride in his good deed, but only guilt. And we love him all the more for his self-deprecation.

Jim knows exactly what Huck has done.

“I was a-listenin’ to all de talk, en I slips into de river en was gwyne to shove for sho’ if dey come aboard. Den I was gwyne to swim to de raf agin when dey was gone. But lawsy, how you did fool ‘em, Huck! Dat wuz de smartes’ dodge! I tell you, chile, I ‘spec it save’ ole Jim—ole Jim ain’t going to forgit you for dat, honey.”

Much later, Jim reveals more about his character to Huck, and again we see Huck surprised to learn that Jim is a human being.

I went to sleep, and Jim didn’t call me when it was my turn. He often done that. When I waked up just at daybreak he was sitting there with his head down betwixt his knees, moaning and mourning to himself. I didn’t take notice nor let on. I knowed what it was about. He was thinking about his wife and his children, away up yonder, and he was low and homesick; because he hadn’t ever been away from home before in his life; and I do believe he cared just as much for his people as white folks does for their’n. It don’t seem natural, but I reckon it’s so.

All this, Huck’s guilt about helping Jim escape, his growing realization that Jim is a person, his knowledge that a choice is coming, and his insistence on being honest with himself – and with us – leads Huck to the climax of the book, and for me one of the great moments, maybe the great moment, in all of fiction.

Before we get to that, though, I promised another funny moment from this deeply funny book.

Early on in their adventure, before the fog, before the runaway slave hunters, Huck and Jim discuss the idea of “borrowing” to get the things they need. Huck says:

Every night now I used to slip ashore toward ten o’clock at some little village, and buy ten or fifteen cents’ worth of meal or bacon or other stuff to eat; and sometimes I lifted a chicken that warn’t roosting comfortable, and took him along. Pap always said, take a chicken when you get a chance, because if you don’t want him yourself you can easy find somebody that does, and a good deed ain’t ever forgot. I never see pap when he didn’t want the chicken himself, but that is what he used to say, anyway.

“You Don’t Know About Me . . .”

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is a silly book about a silly boy who thinks the world is a movie and he’s the star. Tom Sawyer is the original frat boy, self-centered, egotistical, not exactly mean but so caught up in his own narrative that he likely thinks the rest of us are robots. He certainly treats us as such. It’s in his silly book that we first meet Huckleberry Finn.

In his first scene, Huck has a dead cat that he’s going to use to cure himself of warts. Twain gives us no indication at all of the character that Huck will become; instead, he’s used as a flat prop for Tom’s various shenanigans. At one particularly telling point, while Tom is sick in bed the entire town “gets religion” after a revival meeting. Afterwards, when Tom can’t find a single sinner to play with, he seeks out Huck – surely he won’t have reformed. But no, even Huck greets Tom with a quote from scripture, and Tom is plunged deeper into personal misery. Pure prop, as what we learn of Huck later convinces us that this would simply never happen.

Enough with that silly book. As soon as I open Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, I know I’m in for something different. “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.” Exactly.

Huck’s language is a joy to read. This is not the flat, featureless character we encountered in the earlier book. No, Huck is a boy who notices things. He describes a world we never knew we knew.

The river looked miles and miles across. The moon was so bright I could ‘a’ counted the drift-logs that went a-slipping along, black and still, hundreds of yards out from shore. Everything was dead quiet, and it looked late, and smelt late. You know what I mean—I don’t know the words to put it in.

I think you do, Huck.

Above all, Huck sees the irony in others, and helps us see it, too, without ever rising above. That’s what makes this Huckleberry utterly different from his Tom Sawyer doppelganger. In his own book, Huck will never rise above.

A wonderful example of this occurs as Huck is attempting escape from his abusive, alcoholic father (known affectionately as Pap). While Huck plans a getaway that is so perfect no one will ever think to chase him, he says, “I did wish Tom Sawyer was there; I knowed he would take an interest in this kind of business, and throw in the fancy touches. Nobody could spread himself like Tom Sawyer in such a thing as that.”

Well, we know exactly what Tom Sawyer would do. He’d make Huck scrabble some inscription on the wall in his own blood, train a cockroach to make flapjacks, and write a letter to Pap warning him of the impending jailbreak (fortunately Pap can’t read). In short, he’d ruin the whole thing. But Huck doesn’t rise above.

One thing to remember about Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is that it is a deeply, deeply funny book. This as much as anything else keeps me coming back. In several of these entries, I’ll quote a passage that makes me laugh.

Huck has one of his funniest lines soon after the getaway, in which Huck has deftly faked his own murder. While hiding on Jackson Island, Huck watches fascinated as Tom Sawyer, Pap, and a gaggle of other people search the Mississippi for Huck’s “remainders.” They’re busy firing a cannon over the water, attempting to get Huck’s corpse to come loose and float to the surface, not realizing that Huck himself is watching their every move from an island right up against the boat’s bow.

Then the captain sung out: “Stand away!” and the cannon let off such a blast right before me that it made me deef with the noise and pretty near blind with the smoke, and I judged I was gone. If they’d ‘a’ had some bullets in, I reckon they’d ‘a’ got the corpse they was after.

The steamboat eventually gives up searching for Huck, and soon our story begins in earnest as Huck discovers he’s not alone on the island, but instead is sharing it with a runaway slave* named Jim.

*I use the term “slave” here to ease everyone in to what is to come. As you likely know, “slave” is not the term Twain uses most often in the book to describe Jim and the other forced servants, and it’s not the term I’ll use as I move forward. Instead, I’ll use a word that (rightfully) has become among the most offensive words in the language. It has to be there, and you’ll see why if you keep reading.

My Favorite Book – Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

In times of trouble I often return to my favorite piece of fiction, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Is it a great book? I have no idea; I haven’t read nearly enough fiction to say. Is it deeply flawed? Oh, yes, even I can see that. We’ll get to the flaws by and by (as Huck might say). Is it racist? I’m no authority and can’t say, but quite frankly race doesn’t interest me much. What does interest me is individuality. As Tom Hanks says in Joe vs. the Volcano, “I don’t have any people of my own, Chief. I’m my only hope for a hero.” And this idea of finding the hero inside yourself draws me to Huck like a catfish to corn pone. Or something like that. It’s that attribute of Huck’s character that I hope to explore.

Why finally write a series of entries about my favorite book? And why on a science blog, of all places? Mostly because I hope to learn something, about the book and about myself. I’ve contrasted Huck Finn to the biblical Abraham, as well as to Ahab of Moby-Dick fame. Now it’s time for Huck to have the page all to himself. Maybe I’ll discover why I keep returning to him. Or maybe I’ll just have a good time writing about rafting and fishing and lazying in the Sun. Let’s see what happens . . .