Twain's Feast (14 page)

Twain did get used to trail food, once describing fried bacon, bread, molasses, and black coffee as part of “earthly luxury.” But most meals he remembered were those that provided a break from what were basically shipboard provisions—long-lasting, easily carried stuff. Put fried lake trout—wonderful in its own right—beside that spread of dried, rotten, or indifferently packed food and it’s easy to see why Twain would remember it decades later. And though the taste of perfectly fresh fish had a lot to do with Twain’s love for it, I think it also had a lot to do with the place and the heady memory of those roving, exploratory days when he was on the verge of discovering his voice—discovering, in a real sense, just who he’d be for the rest of his life.

Twain did make one rare aesthetic misstep at the lake; he preferred the name “Lake Bigler” to Tahoe, which was a corruption of the Washoe Indian word for “water in a high place.”
⁵
In the September 4, 1862,
Virginia City Territorial Enterprise
(he often wrote for the paper under the wince-inducing, double-entendre pen name “Josh”) Twain wrote that though “of course Indian names are more fitting than any others for our beautiful lakes and rivers, which knew their race ages ago, perhaps, in the morning of creation,” he wanted nothing “so repulsive to the ear as ‘Tahoe’ for the beautiful relic of fairy-land forgotten and left asleep in the snowy Sierras when the little elves fled from their ancient haunts and quitted the earth.”

Why “Bigler” should beat out “Tahoe” as the name of a beautiful relic of forgotten fairyland is, to put it gently, unclear. The only upside to “Bigler” is that, unlike “Tahoe,” it can’t easily be slapped on a Chevy (though admittedly that’s a pretty serious upside). But whatever he called it, Twain’s love for the lake was pure and absolute. I imagine him cresting that last, “three thousand mile high” mountain, gasping and exhausted, the blue basin suddenly visible below; I imagine his breath catching in his throat. Twain wrote about Tahoe so lovingly that it’s difficult to pick out any one passage—it even feels like slighting him to try. Still, there is this:

And this:

And also this, years later, while standing before the Sea of Galilee:

And then dinner.
This
is why Twain loved Tahoe trout; this is why I take the menu seriously. On one level the menu is a joke, sure—it certainly began that way. But these things, these places, mattered to Twain. He wasn’t a conservationist in the classic sense—he’d come to the lake, after all, with the intention of cutting down as many trees as he could. But his love of place is still moving; it can still inspire. His memory of the lake helped to mark out his life; it returned him to life when he was a young man just fled from war, trailing fingers in cold water.

In his 1825
Physiology of Taste,
the great gastronome Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin described the experience of a man eating a peach. First he “is agreeably struck by the perfume which it exhales; he puts a piece of it into his mouth, and enjoys a sensation of tart freshness,” then swallows and experiences the full aroma. But “it is not until it has been swallowed that the man, considering what he has just experienced, will say to himself, ‘Now there is something really delicious!’” Memory, for Brillat-Savarin, was not simply the recollection of a taste; memory was
part
of taste, the means to understanding and holding the fullness of a flavor.

Surely it’s true that memory is what makes taste something more than a momentary sensation. Memory is how a flavor becomes part of our lives. Remembering a taste, a smell—even the sound of cooking, of fresh fish sizzling in bacon fat—can summon vanished landscapes, aspirations, hopes. It can remind you of who you were, and help you see your present life more clearly.

Years later, in
A Tramp Abroad,
Twain would rant about seeing a modern house in the Alps, a “prim, hideous, straight-up-and-down thing, . . . so stiff, and formal, and ugly and forbidding, and so deaf and dumb to the poetry of its surroundings, that it suggests an undertaker at a picnic, a corpse at a wedding, a Puritan in Paradise.” I wish we had him to comment on Tahoe’s casinos, which are, objectively, some of the worst places in the world and which brag on billboards about how completely their food doesn’t belong, their lakeshore restaurants serving Maine lobster and Chilean sea bass and other seafood from half a world away. It’s true that some of the world’s best chefs have set up shop in Las Vegas casinos (even the Vegas egg cooks are legendary, to the point that scientists have done studies on their preternatural timing and control). I just really hate casinos—for me, eating food created by Mario Batali within a stone’s throw of the slots would be like spotting a rainbow in the Port Authority men’s room. And it’s worse when you’re in a place like the Tahoe lakeshore, which the casinos just utterly deform.

When Twain knew Tahoe, nothing was out of place, nothing other than exactly as it should be. And Tahoe trout, cooked over a campfire, was not something borne on sweltering ships, hauled by stagecoach, or packed over mountains. Trout belonged.

I’d like to pause, briefly, to praise ice water. Twain was devoted to the stuff. The very last item on his feast menu was “ice-water—not prepared in the ineffectual goblet, but in the sincere and capable refrigerator.” He conceded that the European term, “
iced
water,” was at least more accurate than the American, which described water made from melted ice. Nevertheless, he said, most European water was “flat and insipid beyond the power of words to describe,” and that most hotels “merely give you a tumbler of ice to soak your water in, and that only modifies its hotness, doesn’t make it cold. Water can only be made cold enough for summer comfort by being prepared in a refrigerator or a closed ice-pitcher.” So when, on a blazing afternoon, he came to a pool of the “pure and limpid ice-water” flowing from a glacier, he stretched himself out, dipped his face in, and “drank till [his] teeth ached.” He scoffed at the European notion that ice water hurt digestion. “How do they know? They never drink any.”

Years later he told an audience, “I think that there is but a single specialty with us, only one thing that can be called by the wide name ‘American.’ That is the national devotion to ice-water. All Germans drink beer, but the British nation drinks beer, too; so neither of those peoples is the beer-drinking nation. I suppose we do stand alone in having a drink that nobody likes but ourselves.” Americans, devotees of the refrigerator and the “cold ice-pitcher,” were also devotees of ice. In Massachusetts, or even Virginia, ice cut from frozen winter ponds could be packed in sawdust and stored in icehouses, to be brought out in the hottest days of August. But New Orleans and Atlanta had to look farther away; ice was probably never more prized than during a Southern summer’s swelter.

The keys, as with so much else, were the steamships and railroads, which carried ice to cool rooms, frost drinks—and, of course, to preserve and ship food. By 1842 railroads were experimenting with using ice-filled cars to ship fish. Exactly twenty-five years later, one J. B. Sutherland received a patent for a refrigerated train car; cold air sank from huge overhead ice blocks, driving out warm air and cooling the contents (the same basic idea had been used in home refrigerators since the 1820s). Ice let prairie chickens reach New York in frozen barrels and oysters reach most everywhere. It brought fresh milk to cities from the countryside—replacing that from urban “swill dairies” where cows had been fed on whiskey mash—and enabled large-scale brewing of beer. Maybe the biggest changes were to beef; after Gustavus Swift built a line of icehouses to supply refrigerated cars, beef butchered and packed at the Chicago stockyards replaced the bruised, battered meat from live cattle that had endured the long trip from the Midwest. By 1885 Swift was shipping some 292 million pounds of beef along the Grand Trunk Railroad.

Until the advent of large-scale ice factories, all this ice came from winter or the mountains, and one of the first things the Virginia & Truckee Railroad shipped after its 1872 completion was “Sierra ice.” Cut from the Sierras’ ponds and lakes and loaded into cars just north of Tahoe, much of the ice was used in the Washoe mines, lowered to the bottoms of shafts that could otherwise reach 140 degrees. But much more of it cooled refrigerated train cars, allowing the shipment of trout, game, and—most important—produce back east. Sierra ice helped to shape California; without it the state’s Central Valley might not have become a dominant source for lettuce and other vegetables until decades later than it did.

Much of the ice was for shipping food; more ended in champagne buckets from Chicago to New Orleans (ice, in Louisiana, was as much a long-distance product as a California orange). But I absolutely love the fact that the only drink Twain lists on his menu is ice water, America’s “single specialty.” Thinking of him drinking until sated, then drinking for sheer pleasure until his throat went numb, makes me feel nostalgic—weirdly nostalgic, considering it’s for something a century before I was born. It’s just nice to remember that sometimes ice water, on a hot day, is as good a drink as there is.

In the decades after Twain left Tahoe dams sealed off mountain spawning runs, and surrounding rivers and lakes went murky from mining and logging runoff; in the 1920s pathogens from newly introduced species of trout caused huge die-offs. The last Lahontan cutthroats disappeared from the lake by 1940, and they aren’t likely to return anytime soon; in 2003, the UC Davis Tahoe Research Group said it would be more effective to concentrate restoration efforts on lakes with less human impact. Today Lahontan cutthroats are nearly gone from the waters that once froze into clear Sierra ice.

But north of Carson City, across sixty miles of what Twain believed to be a desert of only the “purest, . . . most unadulterated, and uncompromising
sand,
” lay Pyramid Lake, a body of water nearly as large as Tahoe. And Pyramid Lake’s
tomoo agai—
the Paiute name for the Lahontan cutthroat’s winter run—were the biggest trout in the world, bigger even than Tahoe’s titans. Before the Truckee River was straightened, its flow dammed, trout from Pyramid followed it through a hundred miles of desert and mountain, climbing thousands of feet until they came at last to Tahoe and its inlet tributaries. In Twain’s day some of the trout in Tahoe came there only to spawn; some hatchlings remained in the surrounding streams only long enough to attain a safe size before returning to Pyramid. Before the dams, the lakes were linked. If I want to find out what’s happened to Lahontan cutthroat trout in the last hundred years, the Paiute hatcheries at Pyramid Lake are a good place to start.