Literature’s great vagabonder: Huckleberry Finn

Uvita, Costa Rica

At the beginning of his book The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain lays out the hope that nobody will find a moral in the story. That, of course, is about as likely as nobody finding beards in Afghanistan.

The Costa Rican boy in this photograph was on a Pacific beach, not the Mississippi River, but still he reminded me of Huckleberry Finn. True, he wasn’t on a raft with a runaway slave, nor was he cussing and engaging in wonderful shenanigans while on land. He was, however, exploring the beach with grubby hands and hauling around a pretty little piece of driftwood. This was enough to make me think of literature’s great vagabonder, Huckleberry Finn.

Twain’s account of Huckleberry Finn and Jim’s journey down the Mississippi illustrates well the wall-breaching potential of travel. Through adventure and conversation, a white boy and a runaway slave come to develop a sort of friendship, something that wouldn’t have been possible had they stayed put in their normal situations in life. This has parallels to backpacking.

Like Huckleberry Finn and Jim’s nineteenth-century drifting down the Mississippi, vagabonding through distant lands in the twenty-first century is to journey into a complicated world of divisions and prejudices. Both journeys hold the possibility of getting lost and being found. Both are ways of living on the edge of society, of escaping it as a means to discover what it is missing and what it could be—or maybe even what it has possessed all along that for some reason you couldn’t see before. Both are movements beyond black and white and into a shared humanity. Both take you not only to scenic viewpoints; they carry you beyond the horizon itself, where transformation awaits and where you may even discover why you left home. (Both may include a little adventure as well.)

If you’re looking for a lightweight book to stick in your backpack, consider The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Huck Finn may be a fictitious character, but he is also a traveler with much to teach.