How Mark Twain Tried to Cure My Cold

It’s all the smoke …

My friend R urged me to read Mark Twain’s “How to Cure a Cold” as point of relevance for my sometimes style of writing.

I read “How to Cure a Cold”(1) and downloaded it to save in my computer. It does remind me of something I would write, other than that Twain uses, of course, the language of 1863 when he wrote the essay. Interestingly, I believe I had that same cold last summer as he. It lasted all summer and with a cough that dragged across months. I tried every possible remedy and my doctor was so afraid to let me visit his office, we had to communicate by telemed calls. Wine helped. I would recommend it. I spent most of the summer languishing. I had been thinking maybe I should go to San Francisco, as Mark Twain had, but I already know from living on the coast in Southern California, that fog, which he encountered, congests my lungs. Especially in June, the season of the June Gloom. (It sounds like a person, doesn’t it? A woman you’d likely try to avoid like the plague.)

I had lived my whole life, 25 years, in the northeastern United States where it’s very cold in the winter and very hot in the summer. In the spring and fall you get a nice month or two. I got married and the U.S. Navy sent us to Southern California where my husband would undergo training and then be shipped out to the South China Sea. This was during the Vietnam war. My husband and I packed our suitcases and with our four-month-old daughter drove out there along the actual, pulsating Route 66. There existed no system of interstate highways back then.

We traveled all across country, in June 1967, across the Mississippi River, past the newly constructed Gateway Arch in St. Louis, over the plains and over Wolf Creek Pass in the Colorado Rockies where the snow still on the ground in June amazed us, and across the desert and through Monument Valley. The temperature there was 115 degrees. The incessant hot sun made our skin and hair feel like parchment; our daughter’s little face was red and we were thirsty. And then we arrived in Southern California and it was cold and we had to dig out of our deep trunk winter clothes to warm ourselves in the fog and drizzle. Oddly, newly arrived there in June, I asked a woman in a bar when one wears winter clothes in supposedly sunny Southern California. She looked at me like I was depraved.

Buy me a coffee …

Well, the June gloom didn’t make me sick that year, only congested and chilly and I didn’t experience my first earthquake for four years. After the first four months, the fog and sea mist lifted and I saw from our apartment that the fog barons had set out Santa Catalina Island in the middle of the ocean and the Santa Monica Mountains up the coast. For four months I hadn’t known they were out there, on a clear day visible from our high patio on the hill.

I’m back living in the U.S. Northeast now, not far from Washington, D.C., and last summer the smoke from those devasting wild fires all over the West and Canada reached across the continent to us. You might have thought the White House had been set on fire, as Mark Twain alluded to when he got sick while he was in Virginia, probably from the smoke from the White House fire.(2) That smoke must have reached across the decades, for Mark Twain was in Virginia years after the Brits burned the White House (unless they were burning trash out back) on August 24, 1814, in retaliation for tariffs acts of destruction American troops did to the Canadas during the War of 1812. Last summer I got sick from the smoke, which, as I said, did blow here in part from Canada, chest congestion and an unrelenting cough and couldn’t rid myself of the beleaguerment. Even now, it keeps coming back. Besides, I was and am very tired, sick of this siege, really, lacking the energy to concoct a remedy to this overall dizzying drama. To concoct, for my now faded eyes, a remedy, other than to get out of this century, someplace where it’s not been so hot, someplace where one’s money extends far beyond sneezing and coughing, maybe someplace like the 1970s.

~Samantha Mozart

1
Published September 30, 1863.

2
Mark Twain said he was staying at the White House, there was a fire in the room under his and he jumped out the window. He had commenced his regular letter to San Francisco but was never permitted to finish it, therefore. [San Francisco Daily Call/July 30, 1863] I can only add here that I apologize for being late publishing this letter to you, because a couple days ago I was at the White House and the same thing happened. All that smoke choked me.