Good morning, all!
After spending the backend of the week in New York attending the very excellent NR Christmas party, I returned home to several inches of snow and ice. The journey from Milwaukee was . . . dynamic, at times requiring pseudo-seamanship as the physics of road travel gave way to the yawing parabolas more natural to ships of the line than Camrys. With far more luck than skill, I tacked and jibed around the snouts and rumps of Nissan Altimas and Ford F-150 Ecoboost trucks that had involuntarily abandoned the tributaries of pavement and capsized along the apron — suffering grievous hull damage from the dividing reefs of Wisconsin’s highway system.
Amidst the gelid chaos lit by strobing red and blue lights of squad cars — formerly occupied by tired officers with slushy boots helping the beached citizenry — the scenes had me thinking of a chapter in Mark Twain’s history and accounts of the Mississippi River. He recounts the skill of the pilots who guided masses of Americans up and down that “fickle” artery of the American continent.
Twain starts:
BUT I am wandering from what I was intending to do, that is, make plainer than perhaps appears in the previous chapters, some of the peculiar requirements of the science of piloting. First of all, there is one faculty which a pilot must incessantly cultivate until he has brought it to absolute perfection. Nothing short of perfection will do. That faculty is memory. He cannot stop with merely thinking a thing is so and so; he must know it; for this is eminently one of the ‘exact’ sciences. With what scorn a pilot was looked upon, in the old times, if he ever ventured to deal in that feeble phrase ‘I think,’ instead of the vigorous one ‘I know!’
You can read the rest here.
I needed GPS navigation to make sense of Manhattan’s numbered grid; these men took elephantine vessels through perilous waters by memory. And so, the boat pilots’ intelligence, craft, and manful competence are even more admirable to me now than when I first read Twain’s accounts. Humility and gratitude: two fine things for a snowglobe day spent in the luxury of a centrally heated home.
May your weekend be swell.
Here’s Aretha Franklin saying a little prayer for you:
