Pure and Simple

By Lyman Hafen

Several years ago on a business trip to the Midwest, I drove up the Mississippi River from St. Louis to Hannibal, Missouri. Standing in the places where Samuel Langhorne Clemens lived, worked, and played as a boy was a seminal experience for me. There is nothing quite as satisfying to an American boy of my generation than to actually be in those places where Mark Twain first conjured the likes of Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer. As I walked along the whitewashed fence and stepped into the Clemens family home at 206 Hill Street, I was overcome by a powerful form of nostalgia, recalling scenes from The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and equating them to my own memories of youth in my own small-town neighborhood.

In his writing, Twain drew from every part of his life, but his memories of Hannibal always remained the true north of his compass of fact. “If you attempt to create & build a wholly imaginary incident, adventure or situation,” he once wrote in a notebook, “you will go astray, & the artificiality of the thing will be detectable. But if you found on a fact in your personal experience, it is an acorn, a root, & every created adornment that grows up out of it & spreads its foliage & blossoms to the sun will seem realities, not inventions. You will not be likely to go astray; your compass of fact is there to keep you on the right course.”

Something struck me during the few hours I sauntered around the neighborhood in Hannibal. Samuel Clemens was born right there on the western fringe of civilization in 1835. My great-greatgrandfather Lyman Lafayette Woods was born just two years earlier in 1833, hundreds of miles to the northeast on the remote western edge of upstate New York. But by the early 1840s, as a boy of nine or ten years old, he was living just up the river from Hannibal in a newly-built town called Nauvoo.

In his tales of Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer, Mark Twain showed us that most aspects of childhood are universal. In the mid-1960s, when I first opened Twain’s books, I identified with most everything those boys felt. The physical circumstances of their lives were very different from mine, but the hopes, fears, dreams, and emotions were the same more than a hundred years later on the edge of another frontier in southern Utah.

Recently, in rereading Twain’s Hannibal books, I discovered one particular artifact of boyhood that carried the same fascination for Tom Sawyer as it did for me. It is the absolute allure of the simplest yet most affecting treasure of boyhood.

Marbles.

I treasured my marbles as I played with them, sorted them, counted them, and traded them in the red sand of the backyards and schoolyards of my boyhood. More than a half century later, the sight of a majestic marble or the feel of one of those glassy, cool orbs in my hand makes time stop and carries me back in an instant.

The boyhoods of Samuel Clemens and Lyman Woods would have been similar in many ways, both emotionally and physically. I realize now that even though Twain’s Hannibal books were fiction, there is much I can learn about my ancestor by reading them. Twain captured and defined life on the American frontier in the mid-1800s for all of us. From the familiar, he made the universal and proved that every life is an epic.

There is a passage in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer where young Tom resolves to run away from home. In preparation, he returns to a rotten log in the woods to retrieve what he had hidden there. It was a “shapely little treasure house whose bottom and sides were of shingles.” In it lay one of his greatest treasures: “…a marble.”

What I take from this passage is that marbles in the 1840s meant as much to Sam Clemens and most likely to my great-greatgrandfather as they did to me in the 1960s. Those magnificent glass orbs were just as precious to boys playing on the banks of the Mississippi as they were for me a century and a half later playing along the floodplain of the Virgin River.

I still have a small collection of marbles in a wooden box on my office shelf. I realize now that it’s time to make sure, in this complex age of digital preoccupation, that my children have passed along their affection for the pure and simple allure of marbles to my grandchildren.

About the Author

Lyman is the author of a dozen books intent on connecting landscape and story in the American Southwest. He is executive director of the Zion National Park Forever Project, and is past president of the national Public Lands Alliance. He’s been writing and publishing for more than 35 years, with several hundred magazine articles in publications ranging from Western Horseman to Northern Lights, and was the founding editor of St. George Magazine in 1983. He’s been recognized on several occasions with literary awards from the Utah Arts Council, and won the Wrangler Award from the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum. He lives in Santa Clara, Utah, with his wife Debbie, and together they have 6 children and 18 grandchildren.

Lyman Hafen