Multimedia Mania/abacus-multimedia-mania.iso/dp/0137/01370.txt

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$Unique_ID{bob01370}
$Pretitle{}
$Title{Life On The Mississippi
Chapter X}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Twain, Mark}
$Affiliation{}
$Subject{river
bank
run
water
you've
new
now
always
get
learn}
$Date{1917}
$Log{}
Title:       Life On The Mississippi
Author:      Twain, Mark
Date:        1917

Chapter X

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; clearwater 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 forever
dodging and shirking, and whose obstructions must be confronted in all nights
and all weathers without the aid of a single lighthouse 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. ^1 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 was 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.

[Footnote 1: True at the time referred to; not true now (1882).]

     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
toothpick 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 would 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 driftwood floating down the
stream."

     "A rise starts the driftwood, but then it keeps on floating awhile 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 sha'n'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 a 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 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 brimful 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 daytime, 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
crawfishing, then, to get away from the obstruction.  We often hit white logs
in the dark, for we could not see them until 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 headwaters of the Mississippi, coal-barges from
Pittsburg, little tradingscows from everywhere, and broadhorns 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 coal-boatman sent a bullet
through our pilot-house when we borrowed a steering-oar of him in a very
narrow place.