T H I S+W E E K Favorite travel books By Don George, Editor Two Towns in Provence by M.F.K. Fisher Natural Opium by Diane Johnson The Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiessen >Roughing It by Mark Twain _ _ _ _ _ Hong Kong Farewell By Simon Winchester D E P A R T M E N T S Postmark | Brighton: Absurd in England By Andrew Ross The Surreal Gourmet Bananas for Bastille Day By Bob Blumer Readers' Tips and Tales Why does the world love to hate U.S. tourists? - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Your virtual travel agency - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - LA S T+W E E K Tuesday, July 1 American Byways Summer festivals, great road books and other glories A full list of all Wanderlust articles

r o u g h i n g _i t_____ BY MARK TWAIN PENGUIN BOOKS 590 PAGES _ _ _ _ _ _ BY LYNN FERRIN in the early 1960s, shortly after arriving in the West, I came across an article in the San Francisco Sunday newspaper magazine about Mono Lake. Its opening sentence went reeling like a runaway wagon into its subject, and I was hooked: "Mono Lake lies in a lifeless, treeless, hideous desert, eight thousand feet above the level of the sea ..." At the time, I had just been traveling east of the Sierra, and had been awed by the great alkali lake. I was anxious to know more, but as I read I discovered the story was not only wonderfully descriptive of the stark landscape, but full of tall tales, puns and outright silliness. It was, in fact, the best piece of writing I had seen on the West. I was captivated, and wondered who might have written it. I flipped back the pages and looked for the byline. There it was, in a smallish typeface: "--from 'Roughing It,' by Mark Twain." As a child of Louisiana, I had been raised on Twain, but for some reason had never read his work on the West. Within a few days, I had bought a paperback copy of the book (expensive then, at $1.75). Today, 35 years later, it is the most thumbed and crinkled volume in my library; I cannot imagine rambling around certain mountains and deserts of the West without Twain as my companion. In one part, he describes the experience of his hapless dog jumping into Mono's stinging waters: "He yelped and barked and howled as he went -- and by the time he got to the shore there was no bark to him -- for he had barked the bark all out of his inside, and the alkali had cleaned the bark all off his outside, and he probably wished he had never embarked in any such enterprise ... He finally struck out over the mountains, at a gait which we estimated at about two hundred and fifty miles an hour, and he is going yet. That was about nine years ago." "Roughing It" is, in Twain's words, "a record of several years of variegated vagabondizing." He recounts his adventures in the 1860s when he came by stagecoach across the Great Plains and rambled through the silver mining country of Nevada and the Mother Lode country of California, and his later exploration of Hawaii, then known as the Sandwich Islands. Twain wrote about the monumental, raw landscapes far from the gentle civilized hillsides of the East; and about the uncouth, greedy, brave and funny men he met here; and about the tragicomedy of life on the rugged Western frontier during the Nevada silver rush. We think of Twain as a witty yet compassionate observer of humanity, but he also wrote evocatively about nature and landscape. As years pass and my love affair with the West continues to grow, I reread chapters from "Roughing It" again and again. I've discovered that I can still find places that haven't changed much since Twain cast his bright eyes upon them. The streets of Virginia City are still boisterous and ramshackle. Mono Lake is as weird and lonely as it was then. You can throw snowballs at Donner Lake and, in an hour or so, gather roses in Sacramento. You can sit by a mountain campfire and watch the stars dance on Lake Tahoe. Some passages, like those about Lake Tahoe, are so familiar I can quote them. Sometimes I find things that seem totally new and relevant. Last summer, I found myself in Montana, at the headwaters of the Missouri, and discovered what Twain had to say -- that this river would "flow through unknown plains and deserts and unvisited wildernesses; and add a long and troubled pilgrimage among snags and wrecks and sand bars; and enter the Mississippi, touch the wharves of St. Louis and still drift on, traversing shoals and rocky channels, then endless chains of bottomless and ample bends, walled with unbroken forests, then mysterious byways and secret passages among woody islands ... then by New Orleans and still other chains of bends -- and finally, after two long months of daily and nightly harassment, excitement, enjoyment, adventure and awful peril of parched throats, pumps and evaporation, pass the gulf and enter into its rest upon the bosom of the tropic sea, never to look upon its snow peaks again or regret them." Of course he would think of the river's point of view. Twain's books are still the best ever written about American rivers. And another thing: That sentence, in its entirety, runs on for more than 200 words, and yet it holds you rapt and expectant until the very end. Travelers of the West will not find more wise and jovial company as a copy of "Roughing It." And sometime, when you feel a need to howl, check out Twain's description of the coyote. July 8, 1997 Lynn Ferrin is the editor of VIA magazine. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ Do you have a favorite travel book that you want to recommend? Discuss the best of travel reads in the Wanderlust section of Table Talk.

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