Twain's Feast - Andrew Beahrs [87]
The only men able to maneuver these fragile but imposing craft were the pilots. While his steamboat was under way, a river pilot had authority even over the captain, who might set destination, cargo, and schedule but was legally bound to defer to the pilot in matters of navigation. A river pilot, Twain thought, was “the only unfettered and entirely independent human being that lived in the earth.” Kings, by comparison, were underlings; writers were “manacled servants of the public.” Twain would look back on this time as the happiest of his working life, when he commanded his howling, splashing dreams, his days and nights all in motion.
The river, Twain thought, was “a wonderful book . . . 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.” The river seemed to change shape in the night; it transformed under the stars and in pitch-blackness, in gray mist and by the light of a multitude of moons. His hulking paddle wheeler slid between shoals and sandbars, over blind crossings, and past hidden snags; charts were nonexistent, the water opaque as a wall. Twain had to memorize the river, steering by the constantly revised shape in his head; it was a job few could do at all, and fewer still could do well.
Change always fascinated Twain; calling a person or a story “monotonous” was an expression of intense disdain. Now he watched the varied light on the river’s surface; the Mississippi was always in flux—always rending and re-forming the world around. The mud it carried built a maze of channels and sandbars. Currents lodged dead trees like hidden spears or washed all away in a night. When pilots came together, they would talk always, and only, about the river: how high it was running, how they’d run the crossings themselves, where bars and shoals had risen, which landmarks—dead trees, woodpiles, old barns—were gone.
The same changes that made the Mississippi fascinating, that made it beautiful, also made it deadly. “My nightmares, to this day,” Twain wrote in 1883, “take the form of running down into an overshadowing bluff, with a steamboat. . . . My earliest dread made the strongest impression on me.” Accidents and disasters were amazingly common; between 1811 and 1841, nearly a thousand boats crashed, exploded, or had their bottoms ripped out by a snag. Ten of the fifteen boats Twain piloted were destroyed on the river—none, fortunately, while he was piloting, though in 1860 he did back into the New Orleans levee—with two more blown up to avoid capture by Union troops. “The muddy Mississippi” is a cliché today, but its murk once made it genuinely dangerous—and made pilots essential. It took a skilled and experienced man to read the riffles and currents and swirls, to sense what was caused by wind and what signified a submerged trunk that could destroy a boat.
During a two-year apprenticeship, and then a two-year career as a licensed pilot, Twain mastered the river’s language. It was a great achievement—but one that carried its own losses. While still a young cub pilot, he remembered, he had watched a sunset in a “speechless rapture”:
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