1/4 less 3*—run shape of upper bar and go into the low place in willows
about 200(ft.) lower down than last year.
* Depth of water. One-quarter less than three fathoms.
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?”