Life on the Mississippi

When I was a boy on the Mississippi River, there was only one permanent ambition among my comrades: to be a steamboat man.I gained the position of cub pilot, but I soon found that learning the river was a far harder task than I had ever imagined.My teacher, Mr. Bixby, told me I must learn the shape of the river so perfectly that I could call it up in my mind in the dark, from memory alone.

I said that if I ever got the river by heart, I would be able to see it in my sleep, and he replied that yes, and that was exactly the point.So I set to work, and began to note every point, bend, bar, island, snag and hill along twelve hundred miles of river, in both directions.Just when I had a shape nearly learned, awake, Mr. Bixby would ask me the same question at night, in pitch darkness, and I would have nothing to say.

One night I finally admitted that I could see nothing at all in the dark, and he shouted at me that I must learn to ‘read’ the river as if it were a book, printed in a language of its own.I nearly despaired. It seemed to me that to be a pilot, I must learn a hundred things, and unlearn none of them.But little by little, from hundreds of trips up and down, the face of the river did become a wonderful book to me, telling its secrets without reserve.

There was never a page that was void of interest; a broken line on its surface always meant a broken bottom underneath, and a slanting mark meant a bluff reef.Now, whenever I looked at the river, I could not help reading it, the way another man might read a newspaper he had read every day of his life.But there came a day when I began to cry out at a wonderful sunset on the water, and stopped, realizing something had been lost as well as gained.

I had lost something, too. All the grace, the beauty, the poetry, had gone out of that majestic river; I saw it now only as so much floating timber, so many feet of water, so many hidden dangers to be steered around.I still mourn for that first, unconscious delight I felt in the river’s beauty, before I ever ceased to be a passenger and became a pilot who saw only facts.Yet I would not trade the knowledge for the beauty; a doctor, I think, sees a beautiful woman’s blush and thinks only of her illness, and gains something no less valuable than what he has lost.