Twain's Feast (13 page)

When they at last reached the lakeside, they raided three friends’ cache of provisions for bacon and coffee. Then they rowed across the still water to a fine, unclaimed stand of yellow pine, its trees a hundred feet tall and as much as five feet around. On the shore they boiled coffee, fried bacon, and warmed the bread they’d brought from Carson City. “It was a delicious supper,” Twain declared. “It was a delicious solitude we were in, too. Three miles away was a saw-mill and some workmen, but there were not fifteen other human beings throughout the wide circumference of the lake.” This was one of the fortunate moments that Twain would experience throughout his life, a moment intensely lived, lodged in his memory by all his senses together. There was silence here, and the sight of a mountain-girdled lake; there was hope of a fortune, the smell of pines, the taste of a hot meal after a long journey.

Twain’s first fine supper at Tahoe avoided the normal pitfalls of mining or trail food: the hard bread, indifferent canned beans, rancid bacon, and horrific tea substitute called slumgullion (which had “too much dish-rag, and sand, and old bacon-rind in it to deceive the intelligent traveler”). But he had yet to taste the food he’d later remember best—lake trout from the water before him, and brook trout from the hemming Sierra Nevadas. When Twain took to the water he could see the giant fish below him, drifting under a clear cushion of cold water. They were there “by the thousand,” he claimed, “winging about in the emptiness, or sleeping in shoals on the bottom.”

The clarity must have been doubly astonishing for Twain, who was only a few months removed from a career as a Mississippi River pilot. He’d been known as a man who could read water and judge it by its surface, who could intuit obscure depths, who had memorized a thousand miles of bends and shoals in a river that sometimes seemed equal parts soil and water. The Mississippi had been a welter of snags and shallows—here overtaking a woodland, there abandoning a prosperous riverside village and leaving it helplessly inland. Twain understood
that
water well—its dangers, its opacity.

Tahoe was different. It was a place of clarity and vision. The place enraptured him: this bright air, this clear water full of fish. He and Kinney allowed themselves to drift until nightfall. “As the great darkness closed down,” he wrote, “and the stars came out and spangled the great mirror with jewels, we smoked meditatively in the solemn hush and forgot our troubles and our pains.”

Troubles and pains. Before starting to read about Twain in earnest, I’d never realized how much of both he’d seen in childhood. I grew up on
Tom Sawyer,
falling completely in love with the way its genuine and imaginary adventures bled together (
Huckleberry Finn
’s opening revelation that Tom hadn’t, in fact, become a successful bandit left me slightly crushed). But the truth is that the sequel’s dark currents were as much a part of Twain’s childhood as were Tom’s fantasies. By the time Twain reached Nevada, he’d seen a slave murdered on a whim with a chunk of iron and discovered the beaten corpse of another in the Mississippi. He’d watched a third man gunned down in the street (an event later dramatized in
Huckleberry Finn
as Colonel Sherburn’s shooting of Boggs). He’d spied on his own father’s autopsy. He’d given matches to a drunken tramp, who later accidentally burned himself to death in a jail cell.

Worst of all had been the death of his younger brother, Henry, in the explosion of a steamboat Twain himself had left only the week before. Henry’s death haunted his dreams for decades; he told the story in letters, memoirs, and at last in his
Autobiography.
Each time he told the story, Henry lived a little longer. In each telling he was more heroic; in each he came closer to survival.

Still, piloting had been a deliriously happy time for Twain. Receiving his license had been the one “permanent ambition” of his childhood, outlasting even his dreams of piracy. Now the Civil War had cut his career short; Twain himself had been a passenger on board the last commercial boat heading north from New Orleans, watching as Union cannonballs slammed through one of the smokestacks. With war overtaking the Mississippi, he’d become a valuable commodity to both North and South; conquering or defending the nation’s central artery would take pilots. It was flee or be forced to fight. For a short time, he joined a small troop of irregular Confederate infantry roaming the Missouri countryside;
⁴
the group disbanded and scattered after accidentally gunning down a civilian. When his older brother, Orion, was offered the secretaryship of the Nevada Territory, the choice was clear for Sam: he ran.

Years later, in
Roughing It,
he wrote that the decision to go west was a romantic one, driven by dreams of silver mines and Indians. But the truth is that his presence in Washoe was forced and unwilling. At times what he saw as barren land made him deeply uncomfortable; soon after arriving, he wrote to his mother that “it never rains here, and the dew never falls. No flowers grow here, and no green thing gladdens the eye. The birds that fly over the land carry their provisions with them. Only the crow and the raven tarry with us.”

Early the next year, he’d write her again: “I wish I was back there piloting up & down the river again. Verily, all is vanity and little worth—save piloting.” He’d steered some eighteen great boats from St. Louis to New Orleans. He’d reveled in the languages of the river and in the markets of New Orleans—its coffee and hot rolls, its pyramids of plantains, pineapples, and figs. But all that was closed to him now. Back home his beloved river was a battlefield.

So here he was. And now, he found, he had come at last to the great good place. Below him were trout in their thousands, the difficulty of catching them only adding to his sense of a place entirely at peace with itself. Even the fish here were sated. When he looked up, the lake surface was painted in clouds; Twain floated on a liquid diamond a thousand feet thick.

This, he thought, was the masterpiece of the universe.

Throughout Twain’s life the simple phrase “trout dinner” was synonymous with simple enjoyment, with pleasure at once luxurious and comforting. Whether he was in Germany or stagecoaching across the Nevada flats, when Twain wrote something to the effect that “we had a trout supper,” you can be sure that whatever had happened before, he ended the day contented.

But Twain didn’t include German trout on his menu, or trout from Missouri, or brook trout from back east, where mills and dams now dirtied the water and blocked once famous spawning runs. He didn’t ask for trout smothered in cream sauce, stewed with mushroom catsup, or preserved in a pot sealed with clarified butter. What he wanted was lake trout from Tahoe and brook trout from the Sierra Nevada range—fish he remembered frying with bacon fat and eating on the shore.

Twain was in Tahoe before prospectors spread rainbow trout throughout the Sierras and hatcheries began introducing fish from other waterways, states, and even continents. In 1872 fishery managers would introduce eastern brook trout from Pennsylvania to the mountains; in 1889 others released lake trout into Tahoe. During the next decade, they’d seed brown trout—hatched from eggs carried in iced moss from Europe—throughout the surrounding range. But when Twain was there, cutthroat trout remained what they’d been for centuries, even millennia: the true western trout, the only trout found from the crest of the Rockies to the Sierras’ eastern slope. His “lake trout, from Tahoe,” and “brook trout, from Sierra Nevadas” were actually a single subspecies, the Lahontan cutthroat.

This seems like a pretty big mistake to make, but it’s actually often hard to define different trout species. Many of the world’s trout, in fact, aren’t even trout: eastern brookies are char, and Lake Pontchartrain’s famed spotted trout are weakfish. On the other hand, Europe’s eleven historically recognized species of trout are all local varieties of browns. In the American West, fishermen distinguished among Sierra trout, Tahoe lake trout, Tahoe silver trout, Rocky Mountain trout, and so on—all one species, though they sometimes looked as distinct as oysters and mussels. Twain’s brook trout were mottled golden and brown—just right for life in a sunny stream—while those in Tahoe’s deeper waters had the silver-and-gray coloration of lake dwellers. It wasn’t until 1884 that a writer for
American Angler
named all cutthroat for the red stripe below the jaw.

Whatever he called them, the trout that Twain ate at Tahoe had been in the lake only minutes before hitting the frying pan. Years later he wrote about the taste of such fresh fish when the boys hide out on Jackson’s Island in
Tom Sawyer:
“They fried the fish with the bacon and were astonished; for no fish had ever seemed so delicious before. They did not know that the quicker a fresh water fish is on the fire after he is caught the better he is; and they reflected little upon what a sauce open air sleeping, open air exercise, bathing, and a large ingredient of hunger makes, too.” That last bit sounds like a pretty fair description of life at Tahoe, right down to cooking with bacon fat, which Twain and Kinney had a good supply of after raiding their friends’ cache.

The fish themselves were remarkable, even astonishing. You might confuse the local varieties of Lahontan cutthroat, but you’d never mistake one for a comparatively puny eastern fish: comparing a brook trout to a Lahontan is like comparing a fish stick to a barracuda. More than forty years earlier, Thomas De Voe had reported that brook trout sold in New York ranged from half a pound to four pounds, and he made special mention of one “mammoth” fish, “one of the largest brook trout perhaps ever known in this country,” which weighed in at seven pounds two ounces. Cutthroats, by contrast, were simply colossal—the record catch in Tahoe, in 1911, weighed better than thirty-one pounds. Twain joked about the difficulty of catching trout in the lake, saying that they averaged less than a fish a week—but even if that’s true, that one might have fed them until their next take. If he’d seen one of Tahoe’s larger specimens, only his experience with Mississippi River catfish (he called a six-foot, 250-pounder a “roaring demon”) might have muted his amazement.

Good fish come from good water—and even in 1861 good water wasn’t a given in America, especially close to the cities. In 1734 the nation’s first fishing regulation had restricted fishers working Manhattan’s Collect Pond (today a very dry park, not far from Chinatown) to hooks and lines. Now, many fish were failing in New York City’s polluted water, which also imparted an awful, muddy taste; a friend of De Voe’s who caught eels in the Hudson afterward “supposed the gas-works or refuse from that place cast into the river had affected them, as he found the taste much as the gas-tar smelled.”

Tahoe’s water wasn’t just clear compared to the Mississippi or the Hudson; it was one of the world’s most transparent large bodies of water. Even today, with visibility diminished by more than twenty feet from what it was in Twain’s day, it’s a challenge to stay oriented while scuba diving. Without floating sediment to orient you, you feel like you’re hovering perfectly still as you sink down, and down, and finally bounce off a boulder. That clarity may be one reason Twain had such a hard time catching the trout—he thought it was an advantage to see the trout but didn’t consider that they could also see him.

Light bends when it enters water; this means that outside a given ring—known as Snell’s window—a floating object can’t be seen from below. Beyond Snell’s window, which gets wider and wider the deeper the viewer sinks, the surface looks more like a mirror. But the cutthroats in Tahoe were very deep indeed and could have seen Twain’s boat rowing around for a good long while before it came to rest straight overhead (which was, of course, exactly the easiest place to be seen). What’s more, light slows in water, so Twain looked much closer to the trout than they did to him. Finally, the eyes of trout continue to grow along with their overall body size, and larger eyes mean more cones (and thus sharper vision). Twain knew that trout might detect his line, but he didn’t realize that the bigger fish could probably have counted the hairs on his knuckles. He just wasn’t a wily angler.

The trout in Tahoe lived in water famous for clarity and purity and were fresh as any fish could be; they probably tasted especially delicious considering that a lot of frontier food was awful. Twain later enjoyed the beer, cheese, and mustard of Virginia City, whose ten thousand tents, dugouts, cabins, and frame houses (he described them as “‘papered’ inside with flour-sacks sewed together” and decorated with engravings from
Harper’s
) were serviced by fifteen restaurants and fifty-one saloons. He at least respected the spartan cooking of the prospectors, whom he described as “young men who made their own bacon and beans.” He’d relished a ham-and-egg breakfast on board a stagecoach. But these were exceptions.

Most food on the trails west was dried, burned, or borderline rotten; butter could take nearly a year to reach Washoe or California. It was also monotonous; 1870s Dakota settler Annie Tallent remembered trail menus of “for breakfast, hot biscuit, fried bacon, and black coffee; for dinner, cold biscuit, cold baked beans, and black coffee; for supper, black coffee, hot biscuit, and baked beans warmed over.” Sometimes canned goods were an option (the two big early booms in the canning industry came with the Gold Rush and the Civil War), or even a necessity—Twain might as well have crossed an ocean to reach Washoe from Missouri, jolting for over a month across prairie and uncertain desert. But useful as they could be on long journeys, the cans usually held gray meat or limp, pale vegetables. Too often the contents had spoiled; until 1895, canners believed that it was the lack of air that sterilized the cans, and sometimes they failed to boil them long enough to kill off bacteria.