Two Ways of Viewing a River

After reading this short story, I put my life in the same boat as Mark Twain. He was looking at the river for the first part of his life as a source of enjoyment. As a young boy, he had most likely spent the majority of his free time at the river fishing and swimming with his friends and having a grand old time. Once he got older and the river became his source of income, he had to put aside his prior life of using the river for pleasure and now he had to study it for dangerous items instead of pretty one. This is where I tie the way my life was to this story.
I grew up in Wasilla Alaska on the banks of a creek and would waste many hours playing around on the lake that our creek flowed from, fishing, waterskiing and swimming. When I left Alaska for the US Navy, I started to view the water in a completely different way for three years.

For a few years I had a nice 28-foot motor home that we had really loved travelling around in. Approximately six months after selling it, I started working at an R.V. repair shop that really changed the way I looked at motor homes, more as a way to make a living instead of pleasure for when you work on them you cannot afford one.

What Clemens really meant at the heart of the story is that people see things differently when they grow up playing in and around what becomes their life’s work, as they get older.