Another Mark Twain Sunset

Mark Twain’s career began as an apprentice riverboat pilot on the Mississippi, but this crashed with the onset of our Uncivil War, and he then drifted into adventure journalism. Decades later, he took a nostalgia steamboat ride, recording his memory of Iowa along the way:

“And I remember Muscatine – still more pleasantly – for its summer sunsets. I have never seen any, on either side of the ocean, that equaled them. They used the broad, smooth river as a canvas, and painted on it every imaginable dream of color, from the mottled daintiness and delicacies of the opal, all the way up, through cumulative intensities, to blinding purple and crimson conflagrations, which were enchanting to the eye, but sharply tried it at the time. All the Upper Mississippi region has these extraordinary sunsets as a familiar spectacle. It is true Sunset Land: I am sure no other country can show so good a right to the name.” (Life On The Mississippi, Dover, p 258)

One of my favorite Mark Twain sunsets is attached, but my camera couldn’t capture the rapture. A fleet of wispy cirrus clouds was coming in below the horizon and as the sun’s rays refracted through them, delicate opaline colors rippled out concentrically through the rays, like ripples in a pond.

For a week or so thereafter, I polled friends to chit chat about the amazing light show, which lasted perhaps 15 minutes. And it transpired that I was the lone observer. Almost everyone was indoors, most were looking at a screen. A sad state of affairs, from my perspective. So I’m hoping you get out more in 2017. One of the best ways? Check out any of the interesting Bur Oak Land Trust properties!