Chapter 8 Perplexing Lessons

At the end of what seemed a tedious while, I had managed to pack my headfull of islands, towns, bars, 'points,' and bends; and a curiouslyinanimate mass of lumber it was, too. However, inasmuch as Icould shut my eyes and reel off a good long string of these nameswithout 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 Icould make her skip those little gaps. But of course my complacencycould 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 anyparticular 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 roundsof ammunition, and was sure to subside into a very placable andeven remorseful old smooth-bore as soon as they were all gone.

That word 'old' is merely affectionate; he was not more thanthirty-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'tthe 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 knowthe shape of it. You can't see it.'

'Do you mean to say that I've got to know all the million trifling variationsof shape in the banks of this interminable river as well as I know the shapeof the front hall at home?'

'On my honor, you've got to know them BETTER than any man everdid 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 gettingaround it. A clear starlight night throws such heavy shadowsthat if you didn't know the shape of a shore perfectly you wouldclaw away from every bunch of timber, because you would takethe black shadow of it for a solid cape; and you see you wouldbe getting scared to death every fifteen minutes by the watch.

You would be fifty yards from shore all the time when youought to be within fifty feet of it. You can't see a snagin 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 differentshape 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 isa 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 oneof these grisly, drizzly, gray mists, and then there isn't anyparticular shape to a shore. A gray mist would tangle the headof the oldest man that ever lived. Well, then, different kindsof 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 riveraccording to all these five hundred thousand different ways? If I triedto 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 suchabsolute 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 allthat country clear away up above he Old Hen and Chickens.

The banks are caving and the shape of the shores changinglike everything. Why, you wouldn't know the point above 40.

You can go up inside the old sycamore-snag, now.

It may not be necessary, but still it can do no harm to explainthat '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 apparentto me. One was, that in order to be a pilot a man had got to learn more thanany one man ought to be allowed to know; and the other was, that he must learnit all over again in a different way every twenty-four hours.

That night we had the watch until twelve. Now it was an ancient rivercustom 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'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 hispartnerpilot'.]> would mention that we were in such-and-such a bend,and say we were abreast of such-and-such a man's wood-yardor plantation. This was courtesy; I supposed it was necessity.

But Mr. W---- came on watch full twelve minutes late onthis 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 surrenderedthe 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 itseemed incredible that Mr. Bixby should have left that poorfellow 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 blackcats that stood for an atmosphere, and never opened his mouth.

Here is a proud devil, thought I; here is a limb of Satan thatwould rather send us all to destruction than put himself underobligations to me, because I am not yet one of the salt of the earthand privileged to snub captains and lord it over everything deadand alive in a steamboat. I presently climbed up on the bench;I did not think it was safe to go to sleep while this lunaticwas 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 daywas 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 skinfulof dry bones and all of them trying to ache at once.

Mr. Bixby asked me what I had stayed up there for. I confessedthat it was to do Mr. W---- a benevolence,--tell him where he was.

It took five minutes for the entire preposterousness of the thingto filter into Mr. Bixby's system, and then I judge it filledhim 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 moredifferent 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 riverin 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 mewhich 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 utterlyruined a hundred dollars' worth of window-sash and stuff.'

I was glad this damage had been saved, for it would have mademe unpopular with the owners. They always hated anybodywho 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 eludingand 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 thatprojected far into the river some miles ahead of me, and go to laboriouslyphotographing its shape upon my brain; and just as I was beginning tosucceed to my satisfaction, we would draw up toward it and the exasperatingthing would begin to melt away and fold back into the bank! If therehad 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 upmy mind what its form really was, but it was as dissolving and changefulas 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 hadborne 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 shapesdidn'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 boomright along the way I'm going; but the moment it splits atthe top and forms a V, I know I've got to scratch to starboardin 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 behindthe other, I've got to waltz to larboard again, or I'll havea misunderstanding with a snag that would snatch the keelson outof this steamboat as neatly as if it were a sliver in your hand.

If that hill didn't change its shape on bad nights therewould be an awful steamboat grave-yard around here insideof a year.'

It was plain that I had got to learn the shape of the riverin all the different ways that could be thought of,--upside down,wrong end first, inside out, fore-and-aft, and 'thortships,'--and thenknow 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 thisknotty 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 throughthat 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 rememberthe exact spot and the exact marks the boat lay in when we hadthe shoalest water, in everyone of the five hundred shoal placesbetween St. Louis and New Orleans; and you mustn't get the shoalsoundings and marks of one trip mixed up with the shoal soundingsand 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 learnnot in the river vocabulary.]> a man the river, I mean it.

And you can depend on it, I'll learn him or kill him.'