This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars.

In 1883, Samuel Clemens, alias

in 1883, Samuel Clemens, alias Mark Twain, published his memoir, Life on the Mississippi.

In it, Twain describes his love for the Great River and how it captured his imagination from

boyhood. In fact, the pen name Mark Twain is probably a reference

to what a deckhand on a Mississippi River boat would call out to indicate a depth of two

vathos. These are recordings from a real steam

work from 1939.

Twain would have heard this call many times. As a young man, he worked as a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi.

This was a job that required him to learn everything

there is to know about the river. That's Orion Kyloth. He's a reporter at New Orleans

public radio. Working on steamboats, Twain would come to memorize every shoal, bend, rock, island,

bluff reef, wind reef, Eddie, Snag, Sandbar, and he would learn how all those things changed when the river was high or when it was low in calm breezes high winds at night time and daytime

Twain wrote,

The Face of the Water became a wonderful book.

There never was so wonderful a book written by a man.

Mark Twain loved working on the river, but he found it came with a price.

As he gained knowledge about the workings of the Mississippi,

he began to lose something too.

His sense of wonder about the Great River.

Twain writes about this in his memoir.

I had lost something which could never be restored to me while I lived.

...