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 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.{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 {footnote [Two fathoms.

'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 partner

{footnote ['Partner' is a technical term for 'the other pilot'.]} 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 learn {footnote ['Teach' is not in the

river vocabulary.]} a man the river, I mean it. And you can depend on

it, I'll learn him or kill him.'