College Buddies Re-Enact Huck and Jim's Mississippi Trek

Two intrepid students from the University of Northern Colorado have followed in the "footsteps" of the main characters in Mark Twain's most beloved novel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

According to a story in the Colorado Springs Gazette, 20-year-old Nathan Oligmueller came up with the idea after falling in love with Twain and his book in high school. He convinced his friend and fellow Twain fan Dave Brandsma to help him build an elaborate raft out of plywood and steel, using 30 plastic fertilizer barrels for flotation.

"We decided this was something we wanted to do while we were still young: the Huck Finn adventure - an American dream kind of thing," Oligmueller told the Gazette via cell phone from his raft (an amenity Huck and Jim could never have dreamt of).

Oligmueller's father and another college friend initially joined the boys for the 930-mile voyage from Iowa to Louisiana, but bailed out early after encountering Iowa floods.

For a month, Oligmueller and Brandsma made their way down the Mississippi in emulation of Twain's heroes, smoking corn cob pipes and watching the sun set from the roof of their cabins. They stopped every few days for gas and supplies, also managing a brief layover in Clemens' hometown of Hannibal, Missouri. As for food, the adventurers have relied on the help of kind strangers along the way, who were happy to take the boys in just to hear their amazing story. One man even drove them to a hospital to treat Brandsma's swollen foot.

To read more about the journey, check out www.bearnakedrafting.com--a website Oligsmueller actually created while aboard the raft, using a laptop computer plugged into a solar generator! Upon checking the site myself, I discovered that the boys had made it to Louisiana, and are on their way back to Colorado. Once they get there, they plan to write a book about the whole thing.

I applaud these two fine gentlemen for their dedication, ingenuity and sense of adventure. It's one thing to fall in love with Twain and his work--but it's quite another to go out there and live it.

The Last Mississippi Steamboat to Hit the Scrap Heap

Although constructed in 1926, the Delta Queen is the last traditional, 19th-century style paddle steamboat currently traveling the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers. It is the last connection to a type of ship that is a part of Americana; the type of ship once piloted by Twain, and written about in his memoir Life on the Mississippi.

However, the U.S. Coast Guard has decided that the Delta Queen is too old and dangerous to remain in service, and so it has been scheduled for decommissioning, according to the international news website EURSOC.

That isn't stopping those who want to preserve this iconic piece of American culture. That's right, there's a movement afoot to save the Delta Queen. Those interested should visit save-the-delta-queen.org.

Styron's "A Literary Forefather" Reprinted in New Essay Collection

In 1995, the late novelist William Styron, best remembered as the author of Sophie's Choice and Confessions of Nat Turner, published in The New Yorker the essay "A Literary Forefather", in which he illustrated the parallels he saw between himself and one of his greatest inspirations.

"Our early surroundings possessed a surface sweetness and innocence - under which lay a turmoil we were pleased to expose - and we both grew up in villages on the banks of great rivers that dominated our lives," he wrote, referring to Twain's Mississippi River and his own James River in Tidewater, Virginia. Now this essay, and others, can be found in the brand-new collection Havanas in Camelot, reviewed yesterday in the Boston Globe.

Like Twain, Styron also grew up in the shadow of slavery (albeit a century later), living in a Southern culture with slaveholding in his family's history. And also like Twain, he wasn't afraid to deal with it in his writings.

Jim Post's Laughing River Returns

Folk singer Jim Post rolled out the acclaimed one-man musical show "Mark Twain and the Laughing River"--which he introduced in 1997--last night at Galena, Illinois' Trolley Depot Theater, according to the Tribune Herald of Dubuque, Iowa.

The show is a celebration of Twain's childhood on the Mississippi River, which he often cited as a major inspiration of his life. The Smithsonian Institution has this to say:

"Post's depiction of Mark Twain is nothing less than brilliant, and each sentence and song is a gem... nothing but kudos from our audience members of all ages... This is a show that should be on Broadway."

Post regularly performs the show throughout the Illinois/Iowa area, and even brought it out to California last February.

DeSoto, TN to Hold Community Tom Sawyer Reading

With a $20,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, the DeSoto Arts Council in suburban Memphis will be organizing a community reading of Mark Twain's seminal classic of idealized boyhood, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, according to the Memphis Commercial Appeal.

The reading will take place throughout the month of October, and include an outdoor gathering of artists on the Mississippi River, as well as school dramatizations of the novel. Part of the NEA's "Big Read" initiative to encourage community involvement in reading, the event was built around Tom Sawyer in particular due to the proximity of DeSoto County to the great river that is so central to both The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Twain's work in general.

Other planned activities include dance and musical productions, a "visit with Mark Twain", oral and visual history of life on the river in DeSoto County, adventures on the Mississippi River, exhibits of historic fishing equipment and photographs of the Mississippi River. There will even be a workshop on creating a graphic novel based on the book.

For more information, check out desotoarts.com.