1/4 less 3--[Depth of water. One-quarter less than three
fathoms.]----run shape of upper bar and go into the low place in
willows about 200(ft.) lower down than last year.
One simple little note out of hundreds far more complicated. It would
take days for the average mind to remember even a single page of such
statistics. And those long four-hour gaps where he had been asleep,
they are still there, and somehow, after more than fifty years, the
old heart-ache is still in them. He got a new book, maybe, for the next
trip, and laid this one away.
There is but one way to account for the fact that the man whom the
world knew as Mark Twain--dreamy, unpractical, and indifferent to
details--ever persisted in acquiring knowledge like that--in the vast,
the absolutely limitless quantity necessary to Mississippi piloting. It
lies in the fact that he loved the river in its every mood and aspect
and detail, and not only the river, but a steam boat; and still more,
perhaps, the freedom of the pilot's life and its prestige. Wherever
he has written of the river--and in one way or another he was always
writing of it we feel the claim of the old captivity and that it still
holds him. In the Huckleberry Finn book, during those nights and days
with Huck and Nigger Jim on the raft--whether in stormlit blackness,
still noontide, or the lifting mists of morning--we can fairly “smell”
the river, as Huck himself would say, and we know that it is because
the writer loved it with his heart of hearts and literally drank in its
environment and atmosphere during those halcyon pilot days.
So, in his love lay the secret of his marvelous learning, and it is
recorded (not by himself, but by his teacher) that he was an apt pupil.
Horace Bixby has more than once declared:
“Sam was always good-natured, and he had a natural taste for the river.
He had a fine memory and never forgot anything I told him.”
Mark Twain himself records a different opinion of his memory, with the
size of its appalling task. It can only be presented in his own words.
In the pages quoted he had mastered somewhat of the problem, and had
begun to take on airs. His chief was a constant menace at such moments:
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 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 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 know 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 about 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.
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 to it, and the exasperating thing would begin to melt away and
fold back into the bank!
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?”