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Mark Twain > Life On The Mississippi > Chapter 10

Life On The Mississippi

Chapter 10


                         Completing My Education

WHOSOEVER has done me the courtesy to read my chapters which have preceded
this may possibly wonder that I deal so minutely with piloting as a science.
It was the prime purpose of those chapters; and I am not quite done yet.
I wish to show, in the most patient and painstaking way, what a wonderful
science it is. Ship channels are buoyed and lighted, and therefore it is
a comparatively easy undertaking to learn to run them; clear-water rivers,
with gravel bottoms, change their channels very gradually, and therefore
one needs to learn them but once; but piloting becomes another matter
when you apply it to vast streams like the Mississippi and the Missouri,
whose alluvial banks cave and change constantly, whose snags are always
hunting up new quarters, whose sand-bars are never at rest, whose channels
are for ever dodging and shirking, and whose obstructions must be
confronted in all nights and all weathers without the aid of a single
light-house or a single buoy; for there is neither light nor buoy to be
found anywhere in all this three or four thousand miles of villainous
river. I
feel justified in enlarging upon this great science for the reason that I
feel sure no one has ever yet written a paragraph about it who had piloted
a steamboat himself, and so had a practical knowledge of the subject.
If the theme were hackneyed, I should be obliged to deal gently with
the reader; but since it is wholly new, I have felt at liberty to take up
a considerable degree of room with it.

When I had learned the name and position of every visible
feature of the river; when I had so mastered its shape that I
could shut my eyes and trace it from St. Louis to New Orleans;
when I had learned to read the face of the water as one would
cull the news from the morning paper; and finally, when I
had trained my dull memory to treasure up an endless array
of soundings and crossing-marks, and keep fast hold of them,
I judged that my education was complete: so I got to tilting
my cap to the side of my head, and wearing a tooth-pick in my
mouth at the wheel. Mr. Bixby had his eye on these airs.
One day he said--

'What is the height of that bank yonder, at Burgess's?'

'How can I tell, sir. It is three-quarters of a mile away.'

'Very poor eye--very poor. Take the glass.'

I took the glass, and presently said--'I can't tell.
I suppose that that bank is about a foot and a half high.'

'Foot and a half! That's a six-foot bank. How high was the bank
along here last trip?'

'I don't know; I never noticed.'

'You didn't? Well, you must always do it hereafter.'

'Why?'

'Because you'll have to know a good many things that it tells you.
For one thing, it tells you the stage of the river--tells you whether
there's more water or less in the river along here than there
was last trip.'

'The leads tell me that.' I rather thought I had the advantage
of him there.

'Yes, but suppose the leads lie? The bank would tell you so,
and then you'd stir those leadsmen up a bit. There was a ten-foot
bank here last trip, and there is only a six-foot bank now.
What does that signify?'

'That the river is four feet higher than it was last trip.'

'Very good. Is the river rising or falling?'

'Rising.'

'No it ain't.'

'I guess I am right, sir. Yonder is some drift-wood floating
down the stream.'

'A rise starts the drift-wood, but then it keeps on floating a while after
the river is done rising. Now the bank will tell you about this. Wait till
you come to a place where it shelves a little. Now here; do you see this
narrow belt of fine sediment That was deposited while the water was higher.
You see the driftwood begins to strand, too. The bank helps in other ways.
Do you see that stump on the false point?'

'Ay, ay, sir.'

'Well, the water is just up to the roots of it.
You must make a note of that.'

'Why?'

'Because that means that there's seven feet in the chute of 103.'

'But 103 is a long way up the river yet.'

'That's where the benefit of the bank comes in. There is water
enough in 103 NOW, yet there may not be by the time we get there;
but the bank will keep us posted all along. You don't run close
chutes on a falling river, up-stream, and there are precious few
of them that you are allowed to run at all down-stream. There's
a law of the United States against it. The river may be rising
by the time we get to 103, and in that case we'll run it.
We are drawing--how much?'

'Six feet aft,--six and a half forward.'

'Well, you do seem to know something.'

'But what I particularly want to know is, if I have got to keep up an
everlasting measuring of the banks of this river, twelve hundred miles,
month in and month out?'

'Of course!'

My emotions were too deep for words for a while.
Presently I said--'

And how about these chutes. Are there many of them?'

'I should say so. I fancy we shan't run any of the river this trip
as you've ever seen it run before--so to speak. If the river begins
to rise again, we'll go up behind bars that you've always seen
standing out of the river, high and dry like the roof of a house;
we'll cut across low places that you've never noticed at all,
right through the middle of bars that cover three hundred acres of river;
we'll creep through cracks where you've always thought was solid land;
we'll dart through the woods and leave twenty-five miles of river
off to one side; we'll see the hind-side of every island between New
Orleans and Cairo.'

'Then I've got to go to work and learn just as much more river
as I already know.'

'Just about twice as much more, as near as you can come at it.'

'Well, one lives to find out. I think I was a fool when I went
into this business.'

'Yes, that is true. And you are yet. But you'll not be
when you've learned it.'

'Ah, I never can learn it.'

'I will see that you DO.'

By and by I ventured again--

'Have I got to learn all this thing just as I know the rest of the river--
shapes and all--and so I can run it at night?'

'Yes. And you've got to have good fair marks from one end
of the river to the other, that will help the bank tell you
when there is water enough in each of these countless places--
like that stump, you know. When the river first begins
to rise, you can run half a dozen of the deepest of them;
when it rises a foot more you can run another dozen;
the next foot will add a couple of dozen, and so on:
so you see you have to know your banks and marks to a dead
moral certainty, and never get them mixed; for when you start
through one of those cracks, there's no backing out again,
as there is in the big river; you've got to go through,
or stay there six months if you get caught on a falling river.
There are about fifty of these cracks which you can't run at all
except when the river is brim full and over the banks.'

'This new lesson is a cheerful prospect.'

'Cheerful enough. And mind what I've just told you; when you
start into one of those places you've got to go through.
They are too narrow to turn around in, too crooked to back out of,
and the shoal water is always up at the head; never elsewhere.
And the head of them is always likely to be filling up, little by little,
so that the marks you reckon their depth by, this season, may not
answer for next.'

'Learn a new set, then, every year?'

'Exactly. Cramp her up to the bar! What are you standing up
through the middle of the river for?'

The next few months showed me strange things. On the same day that we held
the conversation above narrated, we met a great rise coming down the river.
The whole vast face of the stream was black with drifting dead logs,
broken boughs, and great trees that had caved in and been washed away.
It required the nicest steering to pick one's way through this
rushing raft, even in the day-time, when crossing from point to point;
and at night the difficulty was mightily increased; every now and then
a huge log, lying deep in the water, would suddenly appear right
under our bows, coming head-on; no use to try to avoid it then;
we could only stop the engines, and one wheel would walk over that log
from one end to the other, keeping up a thundering racket and careening
the boat in a way that was very uncomfortable to passengers.
Now and then we would hit one of these sunken logs a rattling bang,
dead in the center, with a full head of steam, and it would stun the boat
as if she had hit a continent. Sometimes this log would lodge, and stay
right across our nose, and back the Mississippi up before it; we would
have to do a little craw-fishing, then, to get away from the obstruction.
We often hit WHITE logs, in the dark, for we could not see them till we
were right on them; but a black log is a pretty distinct object at night.
A white snag is an ugly customer when the daylight is gone.

Of course, on the great rise, down came a swarm of prodigious
timber-rafts from the head waters of the Mississippi,
coal barges from Pittsburgh, little trading scows from everywhere,
and broad-horns from 'Posey County,' Indiana, freighted with 'fruit
and furniture'--the usual term for describing it, though in plain
English the freight thus aggrandized was hoop-poles and pumpkins.
Pilots bore a mortal hatred to these craft; and it was returned
with usury. The law required all such helpless traders to keep
a light burning, but it was a law that was often broken.
All of a sudden, on a murky night, a light would hop up,
right under our bows, almost, and an agonized voice,
with the backwoods 'whang' to it, would wail out--

'Whar'n the ---- you goin' to! Cain't you see nothin', you dash-dashed
aig-suckin', sheep-stealin', one-eyed son of a stuffed monkey!'

Then for an instant, as we whistled by, the red glare from our furnaces
would reveal the scow and the form of the gesticulating orator
as if under a lightning-flash, and in that instant our firemen and
deck-hands would send and receive a tempest of missiles and profanity,
one of our wheels would walk off with the crashing fragments
of a steering-oar, and down the dead blackness would shut again.
And that flatboatman would be sure to go into New Orleans and sue
our boat, swearing stoutly that he had a light burning all the time,
when in truth his gang had the lantern down below to sing and lie
and drink and gamble by, and no watch on deck. Once, at night, in one
of those forest-bordered crevices (behind an island) which steamboatmen
intensely describe with the phrase 'as dark as the inside of a cow,'
we should have eaten up a Posey County family, fruit, furniture, and all,
but that they happened to be fiddling down below, and we just caught
the sound of the music in time to sheer off, doing no serious damage,
unfortunately, but coming so near it that we had good hopes for a moment.
These people brought up their lantern, then, of course; and as we backed
and filled to get away, the precious family stood in the light of it--
both sexes and various ages--and cursed us till everything turned blue.
Once a coalboatman sent a bullet through our pilot-house, when we borrowed a
steering oar of him in a very narrow place.


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