The Complete Non-Fiction Writings of Mark Twain: Old Times on the Mississippi + Life on the Mississippi + Christian Science + Queen Victoria's Jubilee + My Platonic Sweetheart + Editorial Wild Oats. Mark Twain

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      CHAPTER 7

      Completing My Education

       Table of Contents

      WHOSOEVER has done me the courtesy to read my chapters which have preceded this may possibly wonder that I deal so minutely with piloting as a science. It was the prime purpose of those chapters; and I am not quite done yet. I wish to show, in the most patient and painstaking way, what a wonderful science it is. Ship channels are buoyed and lighted, and therefore it is a comparatively easy undertaking to learn to run them; clear-water rivers, with gravel bottoms, change their channels very gradually, and therefore one needs to learn them but once; but piloting becomes another matter when you apply it to vast streams like the Mississippi and the Missouri, whose alluvial banks cave and change constantly, whose snags are always hunting up new quarters, whose sandbars are never at rest, whose channels are for ever dodging and shirking, and whose obstructions must be confronted in all nights and all weathers without the aid of a single lighthouse or a single buoy; for there is neither light nor buoy to be found anywhere in all this three or four thousand miles of villainous river.{footnote [True at the time referred to; not true now (1882).]} I feel justified in enlarging upon this great science for the reason that I feel sure no one has ever yet written a paragraph about it who had piloted a steamboat himself, and so had a practical knowledge of the subject. If the theme were hackneyed, I should be obliged to deal gently with the reader; but since it is wholly new, I have felt at liberty to take up a considerable degree of room with it.

      When I had learned the name and position of every visible feature of the river; when I had so mastered its shape that I could shut my eyes and trace it from St. Louis to New Orleans; when I had learned to read the face of the water as one would cull the news from the morning paper; and finally, when I had trained my dull memory to treasure up an endless array of soundings and crossing-marks, and keep fast hold of them, I judged that my education was complete: so I got to tilting my cap to the side of my head, and wearing a toothpick in my mouth at the wheel. Mr. Bixby had his eye on these airs. One day he said —

      ‘What is the height of that bank yonder, at Burgess’s?’

      ‘How can I tell, sir. It is three-quarters of a mile away.’

      ‘Very poor eye — very poor. Take the glass.’

      I took the glass, and presently said — ’I can’t tell. I suppose that that bank is about a foot and a half high.’

      ‘Foot and a half! That’s a six-foot bank. How high was the bank along here last trip?’

      ‘I don’t know; I never noticed.’

      ‘You didn’t? Well, you must always do it hereafter.’

      ‘Why?’

      ‘Because you’ll have to know a good many things that it tells you. For one thing, it tells you the stage of the river — tells you whether there’s more water or less in the river along here than there was last trip.’

      ‘The leads tell me that.’ I rather thought I had the advantage of him there.

      ‘Yes, but suppose the leads lie? The bank would tell you so, and then you’d stir those leadsmen up a bit. There was a ten-foot bank here last trip, and there is only a six-foot bank now. What does that signify?’

      ‘That the river is four feet higher than it was last trip.’

      ‘Very good. Is the river rising or falling?’

      ‘Rising.’

      ‘No it ain’t.’

      ‘I guess I am right, sir. Yonder is some driftwood floating down the stream.’

      ‘A rise starts the driftwood, but then it keeps on floating a while after the river is done rising. Now the bank will tell you about this. Wait till you come to a place where it shelves a little. Now here; do you see this narrow belt of fine sediment That was deposited while the water was higher. You see the driftwood begins to strand, too. The bank helps in other ways. Do you see that stump on the false point?’

      ‘Ay, ay, sir.’

      ‘Well, the water is just up to the roots of it. You must make a note of that.’

      ‘Why?’

      ‘Because that means that there’s seven feet in the chute of 103.’

      ‘But 103 is a long way up the river yet.’

      ‘That’s where the benefit of the bank comes in. There is water enough in 103 NOW, yet there may not be by the time we get there; but the bank will keep us posted all along. You don’t run close chutes on a falling river, upstream, and there are precious few of them that you are allowed to run at all downstream. There’s a law of the United States against it. The river may be rising by the time we get to 103, and in that case we’ll run it. We are drawing — how much?’