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Mark Twain > Life On The Mississippi > Chapter 8

Life On The Mississippi

Chapter 8


                         Perplexing Lessons

At the end of what seemed a tedious while, I had managed to pack my head
full of islands, towns, bars, 'points,' and bends; and a curiously
inanimate mass of lumber it was, too. However, inasmuch as I
could shut my eyes and reel off a good long string of these names
without leaving out more than ten miles of river in every fifty,
I began to feel that I could take a boat down to New Orleans if I
could make her skip those little gaps. But of course my complacency
could hardly get start enough to lift my nose a trifle into the air,
before Mr. Bixby would think of something to fetch it down again.
One day he turned on me suddenly with this settler--

'What is the shape of Walnut Bend?'

He might as well have asked me my grandmother's opinion of protoplasm.
I reflected respectfully, and then said I didn't know it had any
particular shape. My gunpowdery chief went off with a bang, of course,
and then went on loading and firing until he was out of adjectives.

I had learned long ago that he only carried just so many rounds
of ammunition, and was sure to subside into a very placable and
even remorseful old smooth-bore as soon as they were all gone.
That word 'old' is merely affectionate; he was not more than
thirty-four. I waited. By and by he said--

'My boy, you've got to know the SHAPE of the river perfectly.
It is all there is left to steer by on a very dark night.
Everything else is blotted out and gone. But mind you, it hasn't
the same shape in the night that it has in the day-time.'

'How on earth am I ever going to learn it, then?'

'How do you follow a hall at home in the dark. Because you know
the shape of it. You can't see it.'

'Do you mean to say that I've got to know all the million trifling variations
of shape in the banks of this interminable river as well as I know the shape
of the front hall at home?'

'On my honor, you've got to know them BETTER than any man ever
did know the shapes of the halls in his own house.'

'I wish I was dead!'

'Now I don't want to discourage you, but----'

'Well, pile it on me; I might as well have it now as another time.'

'You see, this has got to be learned; there isn't any getting
around it. A clear starlight night throws such heavy shadows
that if you didn't know the shape of a shore perfectly you would
claw away from every bunch of timber, because you would take
the black shadow of it for a solid cape; and you see you would
be getting scared to death every fifteen minutes by the watch.
You would be fifty yards from shore all the time when you
ought to be within fifty feet of it. You can't see a snag
in one of those shadows, but you know exactly where it is,
and the shape of the river tells you when you are coming to it.
Then there's your pitch-dark night; the river is a very different
shape on a pitch-dark night from what it is on a starlight night.
All shores seem to be straight lines, then, and mighty dim ones, too;
and you'd RUN them for straight lines only you know better.
You boldly drive your boat right into what seems to be a solid,
straight wall (you knowing very well that in reality there is
a curve there), and that wall falls back and makes way for you.
Then there's your gray mist. You take a night when there's one
of these grisly, drizzly, gray mists, and then there isn't any
particular shape to a shore. A gray mist would tangle the head
of the oldest man that ever lived. Well, then, different kinds
of MOONLIGHT change the shape of the river in different ways.
You see----'

'Oh, don't say any more, please! Have I got to learn the shape of the river
according to all these five hundred thousand different ways? If I tried
to carry all that cargo in my head it would make me stoop-shouldered.'

'NO! you only learn THE shape of the river, and you learn it with such
absolute certainty that you can always steer by the shape that's IN YOUR HEAD,
and never mind the one that's before your eyes.'

'Very well, I'll try it; but after I have learned it can I depend on it.
Will it keep the same form and not go fooling around?'

Before Mr. Bixby could answer, Mr. W---- came in to take the watch,
and he said--

'Bixby, you'll have to look out for President's Island and all
that country clear away up above he Old Hen and Chickens.
The banks are caving and the shape of the shores changing
like everything. Why, you wouldn't know the point above 40.
You can go up inside the old sycamore-snag, now.It may not be necessary, but still it can do no harm to explain
that 'inside' means between the snag and the shore.--M.T.]>

So that question was answered. Here were leagues of shore changing shape.
My spirits were down in the mud again. Two things seemed pretty apparent
to me. One was, 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 the other was, that he must learn
it all over again in a different way every twenty-four hours.

That night we had the watch until twelve. Now it was an ancient river
custom for the two pilots to chat a bit when the watch changed.
While the relieving pilot put on his gloves and lit his cigar,
his partner, the retiring pilot, would say something like this--

'I judge the upper bar is making down a little at Hale's Point;
had quarter twain with the lower lead and mark twain'Quarter twain' is two-and-a-quarter fathoms, thirteen-and-a-half feet.
'Mark three' is three fathoms.]> with the other.'

'Yes, I thought it was making down a little, last trip.
Meet any boats?'

'Met one abreast the head of 21, but she was away over hugging the bar,
and I couldn't make her out entirely. I took her for the "Sunny South"--
hadn't any skylights forward of the chimneys.'

And so on. And as the relieving pilot took the wheel his
partnerpilot'.]> would mention that we were in such-and-such a bend,
and say we were abreast of such-and-such a man's wood-yard
or plantation. This was courtesy; I supposed it was necessity.
But Mr. W---- came on watch full twelve minutes late on
this particular night,--a tremendous breach of etiquette;
in fact, it is the unpardonable sin among pilots.
So Mr. Bixby gave him no greeting whatever, but simply surrendered
the wheel and marched out of the pilot-house without a word.
I was appalled; it was a villainous night for blackness,
we were in a particularly wide and blind part of the river,
where there was no shape or substance to anything, and it
seemed incredible that Mr. Bixby should have left that poor
fellow to kill the boat trying to find out where he was.
But I resolved that I would stand by him any way.
He should find that he was not wholly friendless.
So I stood around, and waited to be asked where we were.
But Mr. W---- plunged on serenely through the solid firmament of black
cats that stood for an atmosphere, and never opened his mouth.
Here is a proud devil, thought I; here is a limb of Satan that
would rather send us all to destruction than put himself under
obligations to me, because I am not yet one of the salt of the earth
and privileged to snub captains and lord it over everything dead
and alive in a steamboat. I presently climbed up on the bench;
I did not think it was safe to go to sleep while this lunatic
was on watch.

However, I must have gone to sleep in the course of time,
because the next thing I was aware of was the fact that day
was breaking, Mr. W---- gone, and Mr. Bixby at the wheel again.
So it was four o'clock and all well--but me; I felt like a skinful
of dry bones and all of them trying to ache at once.

Mr. Bixby asked me what I had stayed up there for. I confessed
that it was to do Mr. W---- a benevolence,--tell him where he was.
It took five minutes for the entire preposterousness of the thing
to filter into Mr. Bixby's system, and then I judge it filled
him nearly up to the chin; because he paid me a compliment--
and not much of a one either. He said,

'Well, taking you by-and-large, you do seem to be more
different kinds of an ass than any creature I ever saw before.
What did you suppose he wanted to know for?'

I said I thought it might be a convenience to him.

'Convenience D-nation! Didn't I tell you that a man's got to know the river
in the night the same as he'd know his own front hall?'

'Well, I can follow the front hall in the dark if I know it IS the front hall;
but suppose you set me down in the middle of it in the dark and not tell me
which hall it is; how am I to know?'

'Well you've GOT to, on the river!'

'All right. Then I'm glad I never said anything to Mr. W----'

'I should say so. Why, he'd have slammed you through the window and utterly
ruined a hundred dollars' worth of window-sash and stuff.'

I was glad this damage had been saved, for it would have made
me unpopular with the owners. They always hated anybody
who had the name of being careless, and injuring things.

I went to work now to learn the shape of the river; and of all the eluding
and ungraspable objects that ever I tried to get mind or hands on,
that was the chief. I would fasten my eyes upon a sharp, wooded point that
projected far into the river some miles ahead of me, and go to laboriously
photographing its shape upon my brain; and just as I was beginning to
succeed to my satisfaction, we would draw up toward it and the exasperating
thing would begin to melt away and fold back into the bank! If there
had been a conspicuous dead tree standing upon the very point of the cape,
I would find that tree inconspicuously merged into the general forest,
and occupying the middle of a straight shore, when I got abreast of it!
No prominent hill would stick to its shape long enough for me to make up
my mind what its form really was, but it was as dissolving and changeful
as if it had been a mountain of butter in the hottest corner of the tropics.
Nothing ever had the same shape when I was coming downstream that it had
borne when I went up. I mentioned these little difficulties to Mr. Bixby.
He said--

'That's the very main virtue of the thing. If the shapes
didn't change every three seconds they wouldn't be of any use.
Take this place where we are now, for instance.
As long as that hill over yonder is only one hill, I can boom
right along the way I'm going; but the moment it splits at
the top and forms a V, I know I've got to scratch to starboard
in a hurry, or I'll bang this boat's brains out against a rock;
and then the moment one of the prongs of the V swings behind
the other, I've got to waltz to larboard again, or I'll have
a misunderstanding with a snag that would snatch the keelson out
of this steamboat as neatly as if it were a sliver in your hand.
If that hill didn't change its shape on bad nights there
would be an awful steamboat grave-yard around here inside
of a year.'

It was plain that I had got to learn the shape of the river
in all the different ways that could be thought of,--upside down,
wrong end first, inside out, fore-and-aft, and 'thortships,'--and then
know what to do on gray nights when it hadn't any shape at all.
So I set about it. In the course of time I began to get the best of this
knotty lesson, and my self-complacency moved to the front once more.
Mr. Bixby was all fixed, and ready to start it to the rear again.
He opened on me after this fashion--

'How much water did we have in the middle crossing at Hole-in-the-Wall,
trip before last?'

I considered this an outrage. I said--

'Every trip, down and up, the leadsmen are singing through
that tangled place for three-quarters of an hour on a stretch.
How do you reckon I can remember such a mess as that?'

'My boy, you've got to remember it. You've got to remember
the exact spot and the exact marks the boat lay in when we had
the shoalest water, in everyone of the five hundred shoal places
between St. Louis and New Orleans; and you mustn't get the shoal
soundings and marks of one trip mixed up with the shoal soundings
and marks of another, either, for they're not often twice alike.
You must keep them separate.'

When I came to myself again, I said--

'When I get so that I can do that, I'll be able to raise the dead,
and then I won't have to pilot a steamboat to make a living.
I want to retire from this business. I want a slush-bucket and a brush;
I'm only fit for a roustabout. I haven't got brains enough to be a pilot;
and if I had I wouldn't have strength enough to carry them around,
unless I went on crutches.'

'Now drop that! When I say I'll learnnot in the river vocabulary.]> a man the river, I mean it.
And you can depend on it, I'll learn him or kill him.'


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