Life On The Mississippi, Part 2. - Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)
'She'll not make it!' somebody whispered.
The water grew shoaler and shoaler, by the leadsman's cries, till it was
down to--
'Eight-and-a-half!.... E-i-g-h-t feet!.... E-i-g-h-t feet!.... Seven-
and--'
Mr. Bixby said warningly through his speaking tube to the engineer--
'Stand by, now!'
'Aye-aye, sir!'
'Seven-and-a-half! Seven feet! Six-and--'
We touched bottom! Instantly Mr. Bixby set a lot of bells ringing,
shouted through the tube, 'NOW, let her have it--every ounce you've
got!' then to his partner, 'Put her hard down! snatch her! snatch her!'
The boat rasped and ground her way through the sand, hung upon the apex
of disaster a single tremendous instant, and then over she went! And
such a shout as went up at Mr. Bixby's back never loosened the roof of a
pilot-house before!
There was no more trouble after that. Mr. Bixby was a hero that night;
and it was some little time, too, before his exploit ceased to be talked
about by river men.
Fully to realize the marvelous precision required in laying the great
steamer in her marks in that murky waste of water, one should know that
not only must she pick her intricate way through snags and blind reefs,
and then shave the head of the island so closely as to brush the
overhanging foliage with her stern, but at one place she must pass
almost within arm's reach of a sunken and invisible wreck that would
snatch the hull timbers from under her if she should strike it, and
destroy a quarter of a million dollars' worth of steam-boat and cargo in
five minutes, and maybe a hundred and fifty human lives into the
bargain.
The last remark I heard that night was a compliment to Mr. Bixby,
uttered in soliloquy and with unction by one of our guests. He said--
'By the Shadow of Death, but he's a lightning pilot!'
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.'
Chapter 9 Continued Perplexities
THERE was no use in arguing with a person like this. I promptly put
such a strain on my memory that by and by even the shoal water and the
countless crossing-marks began to stay with me. But the result was just
the same. I never could more than get one knotty thing learned before
another presented itself. Now I had often seen pilots gazing at the
water and pretending to read it as if it were a book; but it was a book
that told me nothing. A time came at last, however, when Mr. Bixby
seemed to think me far enough advanced to bear a lesson on water-
reading. So he began--
'Do you see that long slanting line on the face of the water? Now,
that's a reef. Moreover, it's a bluff reef. There is a solid sand-bar
under it that is nearly as straight up and down as the side of a house.
There is plenty of water close up to it, but mighty little on top of it.
If you were to hit it you would knock the boat's brains out. Do you see
where the line fringes out at the upper end and begins to fade away?'
'Yes, sir.'
'Well, that is a low place; that is the head of the reef. You can climb
over there, and not hurt anything. Cross over, now, and follow along
close under the reef--easy water there--not much current.'
I followed the reef along till I approached the fringed end. Then Mr.
Bixby said--
'Now get ready. Wait till I give the word. She won't want to mount the
reef; a boat hates shoal water. Stand by--wait--WAIT--keep her well in
hand. NOW cramp her down! Snatch her! snatch her!'
He seized the other side of the wheel and helped to spin it around until
it was hard down, and then we held it so. The boat resisted, and refused
to answer for a while, and next she came surging to starboard, mounted
the reef, and sent a long, angry ridge of water foaming away from her
bows.
'Now watch her; watch her like a cat, or she'll get away from you. When
she fights strong and the tiller slips a little, in a jerky, greasy sort
of way, let up on her a trifle; it is the way she tells you at night
that the water is too shoal; but keep edging her up, little by little,
toward the point. You are well up on the bar, now; there is a bar under
every point, because the water that comes down around it forms an eddy
and allows the sediment to sink. Do you see those fine lines on the
face of the water that branch out like the ribs of a fan. Well, those
are little reefs; you want to just miss the ends of them, but run them
pretty close. Now look out--look out! Don't you crowd that slick,
greasy-looking place; there ain't nine feet there; she won't stand it.
She begins to smell it; look sharp, I tell you! Oh blazes, there you
go! Stop the starboard wheel! Quick! Ship up to back! Set her back!
The engine bells jingled and the engines answered promptly, shooting
white columns of steam far aloft out of the 'scape pipes, but it was too
late. The boat had 'smelt' the bar in good earnest; the foamy ridges
that radiated from her bows suddenly disappeared, a great dead swell
came rolling forward and swept ahead of her, she careened far over to
larboard, and went tearing away toward the other shore as if she were
about scared to death. We were a good mile from where we ought to have
been, when we finally got the upper hand of her again.
During the afternoon watch the next day, Mr. Bixby asked me if I knew
how to run the next few miles. I said--
'Go inside the first snag above the point, outside the next one, start
out from the lower end of Higgins's wood-yard, make a square crossing
and--'
'That's all right. I'll be back before you close up on the next point.'
But he wasn't. He was still below when I rounded it and entered upon a
piece of river which I had some misgivings about. I did not know that
he was hiding behind a chimney to see how I would perform. I went gaily
along, getting prouder and prouder, for he had never left the boat in my
sole charge such a length of time before. I even got to 'setting' her
and letting the wheel go, entirely, while I vaingloriously turned my
back and inspected the stem marks and hummed a tune, a sort of easy
indifference which I had prodigiously admired in Bixby and other great
pilots. Once I inspected rather long, and when I faced to the front
again my heart flew into my mouth so suddenly that if I hadn't clapped
my teeth together I should have lost it. One of those frightful bluff
reefs was stretching its deadly length right across our bows! My head
was gone in a moment; I did not know which end I stood on; I gasped and
could not get my breath; I spun the wheel down with such rapidity that
it wove itself together like a spider's web; the boat answered and
turned square away from the reef, but the reef followed her! I fled, and
still it followed, still it kept--right across my bows! I never looked
to see where I was going, I only fled. The awful crash was imminent--why
didn't that villain come! If I committed the crime of ringing a bell, I
might get thrown overboard. But better that than kill the boat. So in
blind desperation I started such a rattling 'shivaree' down below as
never had astounded an engineer in this world before, I fancy. Amidst
the frenzy of the bells the engines began to back and fill in a furious
way, and my reason forsook its throne--we were about to crash into the
woods on the other side of the river. Just then Mr. Bixby stepped calmly
into view on the hurricane deck. My soul went out to him in gratitude.
My distress vanished; I would have felt safe on the brink of Niagara,
with Mr. Bixby on the hurricane deck. He blandly and sweetly took his
tooth-pick out of his mouth between his fingers, as if it were a cigar--
we were just in the act of climbing an overhanging big tree, and the
passengers were scudding astern like rats--and lifted up these commands
to me ever so gently--
'Stop the starboard. Stop the larboard. Set her back on both.'
The boat hesitated, halted, pressed her nose among the boughs a critical
instant, then reluctantly began to back away.
'Stop the larboard. Come ahead on it. Stop the starboard. Come ahead
on it. Point her for the bar.'
I sailed away as serenely as a summer's morning Mr. Bixby came in and
said, with mock simplicity--
'When you have a hail, my boy, you ought to tap the big bell three times
before you land, so that the engineers can get ready.'
I blushed under the sarcasm, and said I hadn't had any hail.
'Ah! Then it was for wood, I suppose. The officer of the watch will
tell you when he wants to wood up.'
I went on consuming and said I wasn't after wood.
'Indeed? Why, what could you want over here in the bend, then? Did you
ever know of a boat following a bend up-stream at this stage of the
river?'
'No sir,--and I wasn't trying to follow it. I was getting away from a
bluff reef.'
'No, it wasn't a bluff reef; there isn't one within three miles of where
you were.'
'But I saw it. It was as bluff as that one yonder.'
'Just about. Run over it!'
'Do you give it as an order?'
'Yes. Run over it.'
'If I don't, I wish I may die.'
'All right; I am taking the responsibility.' I was just as anxious to
kill the boat, now, as I had been to save her before. I impressed my
orders upon my memory, to be used at the inquest, and made a straight
break for the reef. As it disappeared under our bows I held my breath;
but we slid over it like oil.
'Now don't you see the difference? It wasn't anything but a WIND reef.
The wind does that.'
'So I see. But it is exactly like a bluff reef. How am I ever going to
tell them apart?'
'I can't tell you. It is an instinct. By and by you will just
naturally KNOW one from the other, but you never will be able to explain
why or how you know them apart'
It turned out to be true. The face of the water, in time, became a
wonderful book--a book that was a dead language to the uneducated
passenger, but which told its mind to me without reserve, delivering its
most cherished secrets as clearly as if it uttered them with a voice.
And it was not a book to be read once and thrown aside, for it had a new
story to tell every day. Throughout the long twelve hundred miles there
was never a page that was void of interest, never one that you could
leave unread without loss, never one that you would want to skip,
thinking you could find higher enjoyment in some other thing. There
never was so wonderful a book written by man; never one whose interest
was so absorbing, so unflagging, so sparkingly renewed with every
reperusal. The passenger who could not read it was charmed with a peculiar
sort of faint dimple on its surface (on the rare occasions when he did
not overlook it altogether); but to the pilot that was an ITALICIZED
passage; indeed, it was more than that, it was a legend of the largest
capitals, with a string of shouting exclamation points at the end of it;
for it meant that a wreck or a rock was buried there that could tear the
life out of the strongest vessel that ever floated. It is the faintest
and simplest expression the water ever makes, and the most hideous to a
pilot's eye. In truth, the passenger who could not read this book saw
nothing but all manner of pretty pictures in it painted by the sun and
shaded by the clouds, whereas to the trained eye these were not pictures
at all, but the grimmest and most dead-earnest of reading-matter.
Now when I had mastered the language of this water and had come to know
every trifling feature that bordered the great river as familiarly as I
knew the letters of the alphabet, I had made a valuable acquisition. But
I had lost something, too. I had lost something which could never be
restored to me while I lived. All the grace, the beauty, the poetry had
gone out of the majestic river! I still keep in mind a certain
wonderful sunset which I witnessed when steamboating was new to me. A
broad expanse of the river was turned to blood; in the middle distance
the red hue brightened into gold, through which a solitary log came
floating, black and conspicuous; in one place a long, slanting mark lay
sparkling upon the water; in another the surface was broken by boiling,
tumbling rings, that were as many-tinted as an opal; where the ruddy
flush was faintest, was a smooth spot that was covered with graceful
circles and radiating lines, ever so delicately traced; the shore on our
left was densely wooded, and the somber shadow that fell from this
forest was broken in one place by a long, ruffled trail that shone like
silver; and high above the forest wall a clean-stemmed dead tree waved a
single leafy bough that glowed like a flame in the unobstructed splendor
that was flowing from the sun. There were graceful curves, reflected
images, woody heights, soft distances; and over the whole scene, far and
near, the dissolving lights drifted steadily, enriching it, every
passing moment, with new marvels of coloring.