Gulf Travel Quotes

She watched the gap between ship and shore grow to a huge gulf. Perhaps this was a little like dying, the departed no longer visible to the others, yet both still existed, only in different worlds.

I have said that Texas is a state of mind, but I think it is more than that. It is a mystique closely approximating a religion. And this is true to the extent that people either passionately love Texas or passionately hate it and, as in other religions, few people dare to inspect it for fear of losing their bearings in mystery or paradox. But I think there will be little quarrel with my feeling that Texas is one thing. For all its enormous range of space, climate, and physical appearance, and for all the internal squabbles, contentions, and strivings, Texas has a tight cohesiveness perhaps stronger than any other section of America. Rich, poor, Panhandle, Gulf, city, country, Texas is the obsession, the proper study, and the passionate possession of all Texans.

On Friday noon, July twentieth, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travellers into the gulf below.

It’s traumatizing to think that a best friend could become just a friend. That’s because there is virtually no difference between an acquaintance and a friend. But the gulf between a friend and a best friend is enormous and profound. And if I look at it that way, I think I can see the value of a wedding. If you’re my best friend and the only way I get to have dinner with you is by traveling thousands of miles, selecting a chicken or fish option, and wearing a dress in the same shade of lavender as six other girls, I will do that.

While I meditate on the gulf towards which I travelled, and reflect on my youthful disobedience, for these things I weep, mine eye runneth down with water.

But the bridge that crosses the great gulf runs from God to us, never from us to God. We do not travel through the cross to find God; instead, God has traveled through the cross to find us. The significance of this distinction is great.

Crome smiles. “Do you really think I am so shortsighted?” he asks. “The Guild of Engineers plans further ahead than you suspect. London will never stop moving. Movement is life. When we have devoured the last wandering city and demolished the last static settlement we will begin digging. We will build great engines, powered by the heat of the earth’s core, and steer our planet from its orbit. We will devour Mars, Venus, and the asteroids. We shall devour the sun itself, and then sail on across the gulf of space. A million years from now our city will still be traveling, no longer hunting towns to eat, but whole new worlds!

The traveler from Europe edges into it like a tiny Jonah entering an inconceivably large whale, slipping past the straits of Belle Isle into the Gulf of St. Lawrence, where five Canadian provinces surround him, for the most part invisible. Then he goes up the St. Lawrence and the inhabited country comes into view, mainly a French-speaking country with its own cultural traditions. To enter the United States is a matter of crossing an ocean; to enter Canada is a matter of being silently swallowed by an alien continent.

THE ART OF DRAWING YOU In a bed by the Gulf of Corinth, a woman contemplates by firelight the profile of her sleeping lover. On the wall, his shadow flickers. The lover, who lies by her side, will leave. At dawn he will leave to war, to death. And his shadow, his traveling companion, will leave with him and with him will die. It is still dark. The woman takes coal out of the embers and draws on the wall the outline of his shadow. Those lines will not leave. They will not embrace her, and she knows it. But they will not leave.

You probably know that a raindrop falling into Lake Itasca in Minnesota will travel the length of the Mississippi and arrive at the Gulf of Mexico about ninety days later,” he said.

It little profits that an idle king, By this still hearth, among these barren crags, Matched with an aged wife, I mete and dole Unequal laws unto a savage race, That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me. I cannot rest from travel; I will drink life to the lees. All times I have enjoyed Greatly, have suffered greatly, both with those that loved me, and alone; on shore, and when Through scudding drifts the rainy Hyades Vexed the dim sea. I am become a name; For always roaming with a hungry heart Much have I seen and known---cities of men And manners, climates, councils, governments, Myself not least, but honored of them all--- And drunk delight of battle with my peers, Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy. I am part of all that I have met; Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough Gleams that untraveled world whose margin fades Forever and forever when I move. How dull it is to pause, to make an end. To rust unburnished, not to shine in use! As though to breathe were life! Life piled on life Were all too little, and of one to me Little remains; but every hour is saved From that eternal silence, something more, A bringer of new things; and vile it were For some three suns to store and hoard myself, And this gray spirit yearning in desire To follow knowledge like a sinking star, Beyond the utmost bound of human thought. This is my son, my own Telemachus, To whom I leave the scepter and the isle--- Well-loved of me, discerning to fulfill This labor, by slow prudence to make mild A rugged people, and through soft degrees Subdue them to the useful and the good. Most blameless is he, centered in the sphere Of common duties, decent not to fail In offices of tenderness, and pay Meet adoration to my household gods, When I am gone. He works his work, I mine. There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail; There gloom the dark, broad seas. My mariners, Souls that have toiled, and wrought, and thought with me--- That ever with a frolic welcome took The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed Free hearts, free foreheads---you and I are old; Old age hath yet his honor and his toil. Death closes all; but something ere the end, Some work of noble note, may yet be done, Not unbecoming men that strove with gods. The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks; The long day wanes; the slow moon climbs; the deep Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends. 'Tis not too late to seek a newer world. Push off, and sitting well in order smite the sounding furrows; for my purpose holds To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths Of all the western stars, until I die. It may be that the gulfs will wash us down; It may be that we shall touch the Happy Isles, And see the great Achilles, whom we knew. Though much is taken, much abides; and though We are not now that strength which in old days Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are--- One equal temper of heroic hearts, Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

Having fun has always been high on my mother’s agenda. She has as much fun as possible, but what she means by this phrase cannot be understood without making an adjustment, an allowance for the great gulf across which this phrase must travel before it reaches us. It comes from another world, which, like the stars that originally sent out the light we see hesitating in the sky above us these nights, may be or is already gone.

The river was nowhere and everywhere, for he could not decide which of a hundred green lagoons offered the most pleasant and least speedy path to the Gulf. So he traveled them all, and so did we. He divided and rejoined, he twisted and turned, he meandered in awesome jungles, he all but ran in circles, he dallied with lovely groves, he got lost and was glad of it, and so were we. For the last word in procrastination, go travel with a river reluctant to lose his freedom in the sea.

An unphilosophical but nonetheless effective help to putting death in its place is to run over the list of those who have clung long to life. What did they gain over the untimely dead? In truth, the distance we have to travel is small: and we drag it out with such labor, in such poor company, in such a feeble body. No great thing, then. Look behind you at the huge gulf of time, and another infinity ahead. In this perspective what is the difference between an infant of three days and a Nestor of three generations?

All invitations must proceed from heaven perhaps; perhaps it is futile for men to initiate their own unity, they do but widen the gulfs between them by the attempt. So at all events thought old Mr. Graysford and young Mr. Sorley, the devoted missionaries who lived out beyond the slaughterhouses, always travelled third on the railways, and never came to the club. In our Father's house are many mansions, they taught, and there alone will the incompatible multitudes of mankind be welcomed and soothed. Not one shall be turned away by the servants on that verandah, be he black or white, not one shall be kept standing who approaches with a loving heart. And why should the divine hospitality cease here? Consider, with all reverence, the monkeys. May there not be a mansion for the monkeys also? Old Mr. Graysford said No, but young Mr. Sorley, who was advanced, said Yes; he saw no reason why monkeys should not have their collateral share of bliss, and he had sympathetic discussions about them with his Hindu friends. And the jackals? Jackals were indeed less to Mr. Sorley's mind but he admitted that the mercy of God, being infinite, may well embrace all mammals. And the wasps? He became uneasy during the descent to wasps, and was apt to change the conversation. And oranges, cactuses, crystals and mud? and the bacteria inside Mr. Sorley? No, no, this is going too far. We must exclude someone from our gathering, or we shall be left with nothing.

Once there were three tribes. The Optimists, whose patron saints were Drake and Sagan, believed in a universe crawling with gentle intelligence—spiritual brethren vaster and more enlightened than we, a great galactic siblinghood into whose ranks we would someday ascend. Surely, said the Optimists, space travel implies enlightenment, for it requires the control of great destructive energies. Any race which can't rise above its own brutal instincts will wipe itself out long before it learns to bridge the interstellar gulf. Across from the Optimists sat the Pessimists, who genuflected before graven images of Saint Fermi and a host of lesser lightweights. The Pessimists envisioned a lonely universe full of dead rocks and prokaryotic slime. The odds are just too low, they insisted. Too many rogues, too much radiation, too much eccentricity in too many orbits. It is a surpassing miracle that even one Earth exists; to hope for many is to abandon reason and embrace religious mania. After all, the universe is fourteen billion years old: if the galaxy were alive with intelligence, wouldn't it be here by now? Equidistant to the other two tribes sat the Historians. They didn't have too many thoughts on the probable prevalence of intelligent, spacefaring extraterrestrials— but if there are any, they said, they're not just going to be smart. They're going to be mean. It might seem almost too obvious a conclusion. What is Human history, if not an ongoing succession of greater technologies grinding lesser ones beneath their boots? But the subject wasn't merely Human history, or the unfair advantage that tools gave to any given side; the oppressed snatch up advanced weaponry as readily as the oppressor, given half a chance. No, the real issue was how those tools got there in the first place. The real issue was what tools are for. To the Historians, tools existed for only one reason: to force the universe into unnatural shapes. They treated nature as an enemy, they were by definition a rebellion against the way things were. Technology is a stunted thing in benign environments, it never thrived in any culture gripped by belief in natural harmony. Why invent fusion reactors if your climate is comfortable, if your food is abundant? Why build fortresses if you have no enemies? Why force change upon a world which poses no threat? Human civilization had a lot of branches, not so long ago. Even into the twenty-first century, a few isolated tribes had barely developed stone tools. Some settled down with agriculture. Others weren't content until they had ended nature itself, still others until they'd built cities in space. We all rested eventually, though. Each new technology trampled lesser ones, climbed to some complacent asymptote, and stopped—until my own mother packed herself away like a larva in honeycomb, softened by machinery, robbed of incentive by her own contentment. But history never said that everyone had to stop where we did. It only suggested that those who had stopped no longer struggled for existence. There could be other, more hellish worlds where the best Human technology would crumble, where the environment was still the enemy, where the only survivors were those who fought back with sharper tools and stronger empires. The threats contained in those environments would not be simple ones. Harsh weather and natural disasters either kill you or they don't, and once conquered—or adapted to— they lose their relevance. No, the only environmental factors that continued to matter were those that fought back, that countered new strategies with newer ones, that forced their enemies to scale ever-greater heights just to stay alive. Ultimately, the only enemy that mattered was an intelligent one. And if the best toys do end up in the hands of those who've never forgotten that life itself is an act of war against intelligent opponents, what does that say about a race whose machines travel between the stars?

Run everything on a generator,” Haskel said. “Got to keep it a certain temperature for the stuff I carry. Not too cold. Not too hot. There’s shit in here, weather got wrong, it’d go off and blow our asses all the way to Mineola. Maybe out in the goddamned Gulf.” “I don’t like to travel that far unless I got plane tickets and a steward in my lap,” Leonard said. Haskel cut an eye toward Leonard. “You mean stewardess, don’t you?” “I don’t think so,” Leonard said, and let Haskel churn that one over.

I’ve heard that when you’re in a life-or-death situation, like a car accident or a gunfight, all your senses shoot up to almost superhuman level, everything slows down, and you’re hyper-aware of what’s happening around you. As the shuttle careens toward the earth, the exact opposite is true for me. Everything silences, even the screams and shouts from the people on the other side of the metal door, the crashes that I pray aren’t bodies, the hissing of rockets, Elder’s cursing, my pounding heartbeat. I feel nothing—not the seat belt biting into my flesh, not my clenching jaw, nothing. My whole body is numb. Scent and taste disappear. The only thing about my body that works is my eyes,and they are filled with the image before them. The ground seems to leap up at us as we hurtle toward it. Through the blurry image of the world below us, I see the outline of land—a continent. And at once, my heart lurches with the desire to know this world, to make it our home. My eyes drink up the image of the planet—and my stomach sinks with the knowledge that this is a coastline I’ve never seen before. I could spin a globe of Earth around and still be able to recognize the way Spain and Portugal reach into the Atlantic, the curve of the Gulf of Mexico, the pointy end of India. But this continent—it dips and curves in ways I don’t recognize, swirls into an unknown sea, creating peninsulas in shapes I do not know, scattering out islands in a pattern I cannot connect. And it’s not until I see this that I realize: this world may one day become our home,but it will never be the home I left behind.

They [mountains] are portions of the heart of the earth that have escaped from the dungeon down below, and rushed up and out. For the heart of the earth is a great wallowing mass, not of blood, as in the hearts of men and animals, but of glowing hot melted metals and stones. And as our hearts keep us alive, so that great lump of heat keeps the earth alive: it is a huge power of buried sunlight—that is what it is. Now think: out of that caldron, where all the bubbles would be as big as the Alps if it could get room for its boiling, certain bubbles have bubbled out and escaped—up and away, and there they stand in the cool, cold sky—mountains. Think of the change, and you will no more wonder that there should be something awful about the very look of a mountain: from the darkness—for where the light has nothing to shine upon, it is much the same as darkness—from the heat, from the endless tumult of boiling unrest—up, with a sudden heavenward shoot, into the wind, and the cold, and the starshine, and a cloak of snow that lies like ermine above the blue-green mail of the glaciers; and the great sun, their grandfather, up there in the sky; and their little old cold aunt, the moon, that comes wandering about the house at night; and everlasting stillness, except for the wind that turns the rocks and caverns into a roaring organ for the young archangels that are studying how to let out the pent-up praises of their hearts, and the molten music of the streams, rushing ever from the bosoms of the glaciers fresh-born. Think too of the change in their own substance—no longer molten and soft, heaving and glowing, but hard and shining and cold. Think of the creatures scampering over and burrowing in it, and the birds building their nests upon it, and the trees growing out of its sides, like hair to clothe it, and the lovely grass in the valleys, and the gracious flowers even at the very edge of its armour of ice, like the rich embroidery of the garment below, and the rivers galloping down the valleys in a tumult of white and green! And along with all these, think of the terrible precipices down which the traveller may fall and be lost, and the frightful gulfs of blue air cracked in the glaciers, and the dark profound lakes, covered like little arctic oceans with floating lumps of ice. All this outside the mountain! But the inside, who shall tell what lies there? Caverns of awfullest solitude, their walls miles thick, sparkling with ores of gold or silver, copper or iron, tin or mercury, studded perhaps with precious stones—perhaps a brook, with eyeless fish in it, running, running ceaseless, cold and babbling, through banks crusted with carbuncles and golden topazes, or over a gravel of which some of the stones are rubies and emeralds, perhaps diamonds and sapphires—who can tell?—and whoever can't tell is free to think—all waiting to flash, waiting for millions of ages—ever since the earth flew off from the sun, a great blot of fire, and began to cool. Then there are caverns full of water, numbing cold, fiercely hot—hotter than any boiling water. From some of these the water cannot get out, and from others it runs in channels as the blood in the body: little veins bring it down from the ice above into the great caverns of the mountain's heart, whence the arteries let it out again, gushing in pipes and clefts and ducts of all shapes and kinds, through and through its bulk, until it springs newborn to the light, and rushes down the mountain side in torrents, and down the valleys in rivers—down, down, rejoicing, to the mighty lungs of the world, that is the sea, where it is tossed in storms and cyclones, heaved up in billows, twisted in waterspouts, dashed to mist upon rocks, beaten by millions of tails, and breathed by millions of gills, whence at last, melted into vapour by the sun, it is lifted up pure into the air, and borne by the servant winds back to the mountain tops and the snow, the solid ice, and the molten stream.

For decades, Amtrak ran a long-distance train from Los Angeles to Jacksonville called the Sunset Limited. In August 2005, Hurricane Katrina washed out the tracks from New Orleans to Florida. The service was never restored, and the Gulf Coast has been without rail travel for nearly a decade now.

Long before the white man came to Louisiana, the Indians traveled from the Gulf of Mexico, through the Mississippi Sound, Rigolets Pass, Lake Borgne, and Lake Pontchartrain into Bayou St. John, which the Choctaws called Bayouk Choupic or Shupik (Bayou Mudfish). Five and a half miles after entering the bayou, they got out of their bark canoes and carried them over a time-worn trail to the Michisipy (Great River). The Choctaws called Bayou St. John “Choupithatcha” or “Soupitcatcha,” combination of the Choctaw “supik” (mudfish) and “hacha” (river).

It was only when he was in his sixties that he set about turning his youthful walk across Europe into a book. The first volume of the consequent work, A Time of Gifts, was published in 1977 and instantly recognised as a classic. This second volume, Between the Woods and the Water, appeared in 1986, and by then Leigh Fermor was seventy-one years old. So half a century separates the experience from the book, and the author is looking back at himself across a great gulf of experience and of history. The Second World War has changed Europe forever since Paddy hoisted his rucksack at the Hook of Holland, and his alter ego too has been weathered by a lifetime of travel and accomplishment. It really is almost as though Between the Woods and the Water is the work of two separate writers, coming to the task from opposite directions, but blending their talents in a display of intergenerational collaboration. And it is a triumph of this book that we, the readers, understand them both. We know what goes through both their minds, because the artistry of its author makes the boyish enthusiasm of the young man as immediate as the tempered experience of the old.

Most earlier egyptologists, however, had assumed that such celebrated sites as Aswan, Edfu and Hierakonpolis, Memphis, Buto and Bubastis had once been ancient cities. Yet Memphis of the ‘White Walls’ – the Memphis of the Greek and Roman travellers and of nineteenth-century imagination – was sustained by markets and a monetary economy, and the Old Kingdom had been very far removed from such classical or modern concepts of urban life. The fundamental nature of that most ancient state was agricultural. The gulf between Memphis and its provinces was not nearly as great as one might at first imagine. Even the royal residence was set beside canals and at the edge of farmland. And, certainly, the life style of the court as it is depicted in its courtiers’ myriad tomb chapels is always shown as country life and never as taking place within the confines of some kind of city.

My lover’s alluring propensities took on a vivacity I had difficulty conceding. His passion magnified a thousand-fold within my consciousness as I closed my eyes to this wanton dexterity. I desired him, and he wanted me. Under this euphoric ecstasy, I relinquished my person to his coveted demands.               My Apollo, my Phoebus, who never failed to brighten my person and radiate my soul, had coiled me into his solicitous web of ardent devotion. My coverings fell away with every inhalation of his loving elixir. My lover had exposed my nakedness to the gazing eyes of the unseen voyeur and stalker. They alone were granted dispensation to witness the audacity between my lover and me.               Our fiery gazes never left or strayed from each other. Bewitched by his blueish-green eyes, my soul was bare to him. His oral stimulation had fostered me to arch my back in a balletic pose as his hands supported the small of my back. Watched through the submerged glass, we felt like Poseidon’s pleasure slaves, performing solely for his gratification. I was awed by our agility and reminded of a supple aquatic dance performance I had witnessed during my extensive travels. My former ballet training surged through me as I saw myself swirling and pirouetting across the room, and Andy’s thickness gyrated within the core of my being. The ecstasy and the agony of my dance pedagogy had transformed into the art of intercourse. The grace of movement and the beauty of love had merged into a seraphic epiphany – a unity of the Godhead within and without.               At the precise moment of our orgasmic exultations, I finally grasped my chaperone’s universal knowledge: that the divine and I are but one and the same. It was then I comprehended my guardian’s god-like comportment. Andy knew his birth-right, and he wore his divinity with pride and honour. All of that I saw in him as it came gushing to the forefront. He was indeed a Phoebus Apollo, a sun god beheld in a darkened chamber. There and then, I made a secret covenant to myself, like an apostle to the Son of God - I would follow in his footsteps.               My Valet’s sanctity swirled within me, flooding my kernel with beatific sows of celestial grace. Overjoyed by his tokens of affection, I too released my passion into his garnering gulf. Streams of my succulent splendour oozed from his enticing lips. It was only when we shared the final droplets of my luscious deposits that he liberated his engorgement from my sopping honeycomb. I supped at his dripping remains before sharing my fill with him, so we could both partake in this sexual liturgy of heavenly Eucharist.               We did not relinquish our performance after the lights and music had disappeared, but remained entwined in darkness, savouring the inseparable devotion that had once been the domain of Apollo and his beloved Hyacinth.

At that moment Britain had reached the critical stage of negotiations, begun more than two years previously, with the Ottoman Empire, aimed at resolving the longstanding issues between the two governments over a whole range of matters, including those in the Persian Gulf. These issues included defining British and Ottoman territories and spheres of influence along the entire length of the Gulf, customs duties and terms for the completion of the long-projected Baghdad railway. One of the issues that had been provisionally resolved between the two sides was the question of Najd, which was to be recognised as an Ottoman province and to include Hasa. So Ibn Saud’s sudden seizure of Hasa and the renewal of arguments from British Officials in the Gulf and India, including both Cox and the Viceroy, for reaching some kind of agreement with Ibn Saud, were greeted in London with dismay. Sir Edward Grey, one of the longest-serving but least-travelled Foreign Secretaries in British history, had little knowledge of the world beyond Whitehall. He spoke no foreign languages and had never travelled further than France. One highly respected contemporary described him as so ignorant of the lands beyond Europe that ‘he hardly knew the Persian Gulf from the Red Sea and Europe’.11 At

Thoughts at a Café Table Between the Kazan and the Iron Gates Progress has now placed the whole of this landscape underwater. A traveller sitting at my old table on the quay at Orsova would have to peer at the scenery through a thick brass-hinged disc of glass; this would frame a prospect of murk and slime [...] Moving a couple of miles downstream, he would fumble his way on to the waterlogged island and among the drowned Turkish houses; or, upstream, flounder among the weeds and rubble choking Count Széchenyi's road and peer across the dark gulf at the vestiges of Trajan on the other side; and all round him, above and below, the dark abyss would yawn and the narrows where currents once rushed and cataracts shuddered from bank to bank and echoes zigzagged along the vertiginous clefts would be sunk in diluvian since. [...] He could toil many days up these cheerless soundings, for Rumania and Yugoslavia have built one of the world's biggest ferro-concrete dams and hydro-electric power plants across the Iron Gates. This has turned a hundred and thirty miles of the Danube into a vast pond which has swollen and blurred the course of the river beyond recognition. It has abolished cayons, turned beetling crags into mild hills and ascended the beautiful Cerna valley almost to the Baths of Hercules. Many thousands of the inhabitabnts of Orşova and the riparian hamlets had to be uprooted and transplanted elsewhere. The islanders of Ada Kaleh have been moved to another islet downstream and their old home has vanished under the still surface as though it has never been. Let us hope that the power generated by the dam has spread well-being on either bank and lit up Rumanian and Yugoslav towns brighter than ever before because, in everything but economics, the damage is irreparrable. [... M]yths, lost voices, history and hearsay have all been put to rout, leaving nothing but this valley of shadow. Goethe's advice, 'Bewahre Dich vor Räuber und Ritter und Gespenstergeschichten',* has been taken literally, and everything has fled. _____________ * Beware of the robber, the cavalier, and ghost stories.

Similar stories exist in other fields. For example, military analysts can identify which blip on a radar screen is an enemy missile and which one is a plane from their own fleet even though they are traveling at the same speed, flying at the same altitude, and look identical on radar in nearly every respect. During the Gulf War, Lieutenant Commander Michael Riley saved an entire battleship when he ordered a missile shot down—despite the fact that it looked exactly like the battleship’s own planes on radar. He made the right call, but even his superior officers couldn’t explain how he did it.

Away deep in the aim to study himself in the school of the land his ancestors' gravestones flowered, Rip planned to burn his oil on the journey for growth by the hike, the thumb, the hitch, the rod, the freight, the rail, and he x'd New York on a map and pencilled his way to and into and through and under and up and between and over and across states and capitals and counties and cities and towns and villages and valleys and plains and plateaus and prairies and mountains and hills and rivers and roadways and railways and waterways and deserts and islands and reservations and titanic parks and shores and, ocean across to ocean and great lakes down to gulfs, Rip beheld the west and the east and the north and the south of the Brobdingnagian and, God and Christ and Man, it was a pretty damn good grand big fat rash crass cold hot pure mighty lovely ugly hushed dark lonely loud lusty bitchy tender crazy cruel gentle raw sore dear deep history-proud precious place to see, and he sure would, he thought, make the try to see it and smell it and walk and ride and stop and talk and listen in it and go on in it and try to find and feel and hold and know the beliefs in it and the temper and the talents in it and the omens and joys and hopes and frights and lies and laughs and truths and griefs and glows and gifts and glories and glooms and wastes and profits and the pulse and pitch and the music and the magic and the dreams and facts and the action and the score and the scope and span of the mind and the heart and spine and logic and ego and spirit in the soul and the goal of it.

Unruly Scots were also packed off to Barbados in the early days, and the numbers of the original Redlegs or, as they are alternately styled, the Mean Whites, were steadily augmented by the deportation of convicts from England to the West Indies, who lived here in the same loathsome circumstances as the slaves, and when their sentences had expired, often settled here. It is significant of the gulf that yawns between them and the other white islanders that even in this colony where a white complexion is considered to be of inestimable and intrinsic merit, they seldom rise in the world, or play, as the Negroes do, a rôle in island politics. These pale, Nordic people, standing barefoot in the dust with loads of sugar-cane on their heads and gazing listlessly as the trim limousines go bowling past, are pathetic and moving figures, and their aspect has none of the cheerfulness of the inhabitants of the Saints or of the pleasant solidity of the whites of the Guadeloupean hinterland. They look like poor devils and nothing else.

The people of the Kumuhonua and Pa‘ao genealogies probably left at a later date. Their genealogies continue on through Lua Nu‘u and his descendants up until the twelve sons of Kinilau-a-Mano (Jacob). The story of a Jonah-like character, Naula-a-Maihea, is the last of the Hawaiian legends which correspond to the Hebrew. However, there is a large gap in the legends between the Kāne-Apua (Moses) story which occurred around 1450 B.C. and the story of Naula-a-Maihea (Jonah) which occurred around 760 B.C. The absence of any of the great Biblical events that occurred during this 650-year period in any of the Polynesian legends is glaring. Why were great events of Hebrew history like the story of Joshua and the walls of Jericho, Samson and Delilah, and David and Goliath missing? Why was there only the story of Jonah which occurred long after these events? The answer to this problem could be that these Proto-Polynesians (whether they were actually a part of Israel or were a people of the area who adopted the Hebrew genealogies and legends) probably left the Middle East shortly after the time of Moses. They then traveled to their next stop in Irihia (India). Sea trade had been flourishing between the Middle East and India for over a thousand years. Vessels would sail down the Tigris and Euphrates rivers to the Persian Gulf and from there sail along the coast of the Arabian Sea to the Indus River and other trading ports of India. The unusual story of Jonah would surely be told by Ninevite traders (Nineveh was the city Jonah went to) and could have been picked up by the Proto-Polynesian seamen of Irihia.

Communities were linked by seven networks of trails over which the Cherokee traveled to trade goods with the Iroquois, Chickasaw, Catawba, and other tribes as far away as the Gulf of Mexico.

Give Me Some Iron and I'll Give You an Ice Age

From above—though it would be decades, yet, before satellites and space travel would show the world this way—the Colorado River’s watershed looks like a ragged, many-veined leaf, its stem planted firmly in the Gulf of California. In a wetter climate it might be invisible, hidden by the canopies of trees and overhanging banks of flowers and ferns. But here, in the American Southwest, the river carves and folds the landscape around it as if water holds a weight not measured in ounces. Its headwaters begin in the Wind River Range of Wyoming, a jumbled stretch of the Rocky Mountains, where cold rivulets of snowmelt wake beneath ice each spring to surge into a thunderous rush and pour into the Green River. Jotter and her companions had floated a placid stretch of the Green, 120 miles through the red rock of Utah, where the river loops and doubles back like a dawdling tourist in no hurry to reach the next vista. Earlier that day, they had reached the confluence where the Green joined another tributary known, until not long before, as the Grand. It, too, draws its headwaters from Rocky Mountains west of the Continental Divide. The Grand was shorter than the Green, but it had won the affections of a Colorado congressman named Edward Taylor. In 1921 he successfully lobbied to rename the smaller tributary after its main channel: the Colorado River. “The Grand is the father and the Green the mother, and Colorado wants the name to follow the father,” Taylor said in his persuasive speech to the U.S. House of Representatives, adding as further evidence that the Grand was a much more treacherous river than the Green, killing anyone who tried to raft it.

In the fourteenth century, Arabs like IB had headed for the Sultanate of Delhi, drawn by its immense wealth. In the twentieth, however, the demographic tide had turned: the Gulf is now as much Indian as Arab.

It’s traumatizing to think that a best friend could become just a friend. That’s because there is virtually no difference between an acquaintance and a friend. But the gulf between a friend and a best friend is enormous and profound. And if I look at it that way, I think I can see the value of a wedding. If you’re my best friend and the only way I get to have dinner with you is by traveling thousands of miles, selecting a chicken or fish option, and wearing a dress in the same shade of lavender as six other girls, I will do that. I won't love it. But I love you.

And something else: it came to me like a postcard or a paining on a cavern wall. When I heard of your stroke, I thought about living in the world without you and I felt the air grow still and the light change. Then I saw him for the first time and understood at last. I saw your sea monster, kindly and serene, mythic and loving, rise out of the Gulf Stream and swim casually toward the shores of Jacksonville, toward his old friend and traveler. I hope that when he comes, you will be ready with all your bags packed. I hope for you that this last voyage through dreams and seas is the best of all.