How Location Affects People sample essay

People do get influenced by the place they live in, because the place defines lifestyle of the community, and its worldview. Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain is a good book to support this statement. This work of the great author is an autobiography of his young years when he was a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi. The river is present in many other books of the author, thus we see that it made a great impact on his life. In fact, Twain could not avoid image of the river in any book about communities of the area he grew up in. People depicted by Twain lived, worked and rested by the river - it was an integral part of their lives, which shaped their personalities.

An answer to the question whether location affects people can be found through simple analysis of Twain’s book Life on the Mississippi. Twain was born and raised on the Mississippi, so we can trust his opinion. Twain starts his book about life of people of the area by telling about the river. There was nothing until there was the river and there were no white settlers there until it was discovered. Thus life of these people started from the river and continued due to resources provided by the river. Apparently you could hardly find anything else that would have a greater impact on the community than the Mississippi.

Twain himself was born on the bank of the river, in the state of Missouri. His family was poor and things became even worse when his father died. Twain was twelve at that time. He had to leave school and start working. Still being a boy he worked as a boat pilot on the Mississippi. Apart from the fact that Mark grew up in a community, whose life was impossible without the river, Mississippi became Twain’s first working experience and turned a boy into a man, who had to be strong and self-confident in order to steer boats safely.

Twain writes that the work was extremely challenging and required strong character. He admitted that he did not imagine how hard it would be when he dreamed of this profession. There was no place for uncertainty in the job. A pilot “must know it; for this is eminently one of the "exact" sciences. With what scorn a pilot was looked upon, in the old times, if he ever ventured to deal in that feeble phrase ‘I think’, instead of the vigorous one ‘I know!’” (115). A pilot must absolutely know every little detail of the river, which is twelve hundred miles long. Now imagine what an influence made such a responsibility on a twelve year old boy.

The way Twain tells numerous stories that happened on the river, describes nights on the watch and people aboard makes it obvious that Mississippi was a whole planet for the people. All their work, fun, rest, friends were connected to the river. Twain writes about Mississippi with great affection. He loved learning the science of navigation. His feelings towards the river were those of awe and admiration. He describes it as a “majestic, unchanging sameness of serenity, repose, tranquility, lethargy, vacancy - symbol of eternity, realization of the heaven pictured by priest and prophet, and longed for by the good and thoughtless!" (62).

River was an absolute authority, friend and god to the people. Boys grew up with the dream of becoming steamboat men. Twain writes that it “was one permanent ambition” (62) among all the boys from his village. Boys usually dream of becoming somebody strong, courageous and attractive, somebody who is a hero figure to them. Riverboat pilots were such heroes for them because they seemed to master their local god – the majestic Mississippi River. Besides, steamboat industry was the king of river commerce, which in its turn had such a great importance for the community of such small town as depicted in the book.

People lived and matured together with the river. For example Twain describes the change that happened to him when he finally learned the science of navigation and got to know it as well as an alphabet. While prior to becoming a steamboat man he admired grace, beauty and poetry of the river, now these things were gone. Everything that had value to him now was limited to what could be useful for safe piloting of the boat. Thus, we see that as the boy’s relationships with the river changed, his world perception changed as well.

River taught him a lot, allowed him to learn more than others are allowed to know. It was his responsibility to know the river in all possible details. Looking at the water, he was looking for signs, which would tell him where to guide his boat. The river turned out to be so multiple-sided and ever-changing that a steamboat pilot had to be constantly on guard. Twain writes that “in order to be a pilot a man had got to learn more than any one man ought to be allowed to know; and … that he must learn it all over again in a different way every twenty-four hours” (87).

Thus we see that while location made the little boy dream of becoming a steamboat pilot, the river turned the boy into a responsible and strong-willed man, who managed to learn more than other people could or were allowed to know about the river. The river made him cautious and self-confident.

At first glance these two characteristics may seem to be controversial, however from the Twain’s words we see that a pilot had to not only be confident of what to do, he also had to always keep in mind that Mississippi is never the same, thus he had to develop apparently impossible tandem of skills: knowing the river to the smallest details and knowing that it never stays the same for longer than a day.

Indeed, this type of skills could not be achieved by a teenager in any location other than the bank of the Mississippi River. Mark Twain would not be the person we know if he would be born in New York for example. He would not dream there of becoming a steamboat pilot, he would rather dream of becoming a fireman or a policeman, because every community has its own heroes and values, which to a large extent are influenced by the location of the place.

Bibliography

Twain, Mark. Life on the Mississippi. New York: Penguin Books USA edition, 1984.
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