It took Samuel Clemens two years to earn his license as a steamboat pilot, and during that time his mentor--Horace Bixby--drove him relentlessly to master the perilous task of steering a big boat through the turbulent waters of the Mississippi.
When Sam was overcome with exasperation one day and despaired of ever navigating the twists and turns of the river after dark, Bixby taught him the important lesson that he could steer at night in the same way “that you follow a hall at home in the dark. . . . because you know the shape of it.”
Like writing, piloting was an imaginative act. You observed the river closely, and then used those observations to create another river in your imagination. “Steer by the shape that’s in your head,” commanded Bixby, “and never mind the one that’s before your eyes.”
With his background as a printer, young Sam found it easier to understand the river if he thought of it as a book that he was both reading and composing in his head. “The face of the water, in time, became a wonderful book,” he recalls in Life on the Mississippi. “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.”
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