Six or eight feet more water. Shape bar till high timber on towhead gets
nearly even with low willows. Then hold a little open on right of low
willows--run 'em close if you want to, but come out 200 yards when you
get nearly to head of towhead.
The average mind would not hold a single one of these notes ten seconds,
yet by the time he reached St. Louis he had set down pages that to-day
make one's head weary even to contemplate. And those long four-hour gaps
where he had been asleep--they are still there; and now, after nearly
sixty years, the old heartache is still in them. He must have bought a
new book for the next trip and laid this one away.
To the new "cub" it seemed a long way to St. Louis that first trip, but
in the end it was rather grand to come steaming up to the big, busy city,
with its thronging waterfront flanked with a solid mile of steamboats,
and to nose one's way to a place in that stately line.
At St. Louis, Sam borrowed from his brother-in-law the one hundred
dollars he had agreed to pay, and so closed his contract with Bixby. A
few days later his chief was engaged to go on a very grand boat indeed--a
"sumptuous temple," he tells us, all brass and inlay, with a pilot-house
so far above the water that he seemed perched on a mountain. This part
of learning the river was worth while; and when he found that the
regiment of natty servants respectfully "sir'd" him, his happiness was
complete.
But he was in the depths again, presently, for when they started down the
river and he began to take account of his knowledge, he found that he had
none. Everything had changed--that is, he was seeing it all from the
other direction. What with the four-hour gaps and this transformation,
he was lost completely.
How could the easy-going, dreamy, unpractical man whom the world knew as
Mark Twain ever have persisted against discouragement like that to
acquire the vast, the absolute, limitless store of information necessary
to Mississippi piloting? The answer is that he loved the river, the
picturesqueness and poetry of a steamboat, the ease and glory of a
pilot's life; and then, in spite of his own later claims to the contrary,
Samuel Clemens, boy and man, in the work suited to his tastes and gifts,
was the most industrious of persons. Work of the other sort he avoided,
overlooked, refused to recognize, but never any labor for which he was
qualified by his talents or training. Piloting suited him exactly, and
he proved an apt pupil.
Horace Bixby said to the writer of this memoir: "Sam was always
good-natured, and he had a natural taste for the river. He had a fine
memory and never forgot what I told him."
Yet there must have been hard places all along, for to learn every crook
and turn and stump and snag and bluff and bar and sounding of that twelve
hundred miles of mighty, shifting water was a gigantic task. Mark Twain
tells us how, when he was getting along pretty well, his chief one day
turned on him 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 replied respectfully and 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 that is left to steer by on a very dark night. Everything else
is blotted out and gone. But mind you, it hasn't got the same shape
in the night that it has in the daytime."
"How on earth am I 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!"
But the reader must turn to Chapter VIII of "Life on the Mississippi" and
read, or reread, the pages which follow this extract--nothing can better
convey the difficulties of piloting. That Samuel Clemens had the courage
to continue is the best proof, not only of his great love of the river,
but of that splendid gift of resolution that one rarely fails to find in
men of the foremost rank.
[3] Depth of water. One-quarter less than three fathoms.