from Life on the Mississippi
Mark Twain
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 smoothbore
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 daytime.”
“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 anymore, 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 the 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.”
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 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 partner would mention
that we were in such and such a bend, and say we were abreast of such and such a
man’s woodyard 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 pilothouse 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
anyway. 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 graveyard 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 “thort-ships”—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 every one 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 learn a man the river, I mean it. And you can
depend on it, I’ll learn him or kill him.”