Multimedia Mania/abacus-multimedia-mania.iso/dp/0136/01368.txt

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$Unique_ID{bob01368}
$Pretitle{}
$Title{Life On The Mississippi
Chapter VIII}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Twain, Mark}
$Affiliation{}
$Subject{shape
river
night
learn
bixby
different
every
now
pilot
hall}
$Date{1917}
$Log{}
Title:       Life On The Mississippi
Author:      Twain, Mark
Date:        1917

Chapter VIII

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 gun-powdery 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 star-light 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 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." ^1

[Footnote 1: 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 ^2 with the other."

[Footnote 2: Two fathoms.  Quarter twain is 2 1/4 fathoms, 13 1/2 feet. Mark
three is three fathoms.]

     "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 ^1
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 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 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.

[Footnote 1: "Partner" is technical for "the other pilot."]

     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 down-stream 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 ^1 a man the river, I mean it. And
you can depend on it, I'll learn him or kill him."

[Footnote 1: "Teach" is not in the river vocabulary.]