Pacific Ocean Quotes

It's a little place on the Pacific Ocean. You know what the Mexicans say about the Pacific? They say it has no memory. That's where I want to live the rest of my life. A warm place with no memory.

What colour are your eyes? Olly (O): blue Madeline (M): Be more specific please O: jesus. girls. ocean blue M: Atlantic or Pacific O: atlantic. What colour are yours? M: Chocolate brown. O: More specific please M: 75% cacao butter, dark chocolate brown O: hehe. nice

My gratitude to him is as boundless as the Pacific ocean.

When you fall in love with a work of art, you’d die to meet the artist. I am a student of the galleries of Pacific sunsets, full moon rises on the ocean, the clouds from an airplane, autumn forests in Raleigh, first fallen snows. And I’m dying to meet the artist.

Chase looked like a drowning man without a life preserver, and by the look in his eyes, he was going under for the third time. “I knew you would be like the waters of the South Pacific Ocean.” “I beg your pardon?” “I liken people to different bodies of water,” he quickly explained. “You what?” “Each ocean has a different personality,” he said to clarify. “The Pacific Ocean is warmer and inviting, but the color is muddied in places. The Arctic Ocean is cold and very uninviting, one might even say that it is not very appealing, but it’s full of life. Then there is the South Pacific Ocean, warm, inviting, and crystal clear. It has this purity to it. Why, the coloring of the water is some of the brightest blue I’ve ever seen in my entire life. There are even places that you can see thirty meters down.

Like a shot from a movie, the morning sun shone brilliantly around him like a god—his dark hair glinted warmly in the light, and his eyes gleamed bluer than the south Pacific Ocean. Taylor's mind went blank. And suddenly, she couldn't remember why the hell she ever had been angry with Jason Andrews. But then he spoke. "Sleeping in this morning, Ms. Donovan?" he drawled. Moment over.

Trying to figure out God is like trying to catch a fish in the Pacific Ocean with an inch of dental floss.

The metaphor is so obvious. Easter Island isolated in the Pacific Ocean — once the island got into trouble, there was no way they could get free. There was no other people from whom they could get help. In the same way that we on Planet Earth, if we ruin our own [world], we won't be able to get help.

Chuck skipped through the rest of the preamble to the actual examples Spaceguard had chronicled: “On March 23rd, 1989, an asteroid designated Asteroid 1989FC missed hitting the Earth by six hours. This little jewel packed the energy of roughly a thousand of the most powerful nuclear bombs, and the human race became aware of it shortly after its closest approach. Had this celestial baseball been only six hours later most of the population of the Earth would have been eliminated with zero warning.” “In October of 1990, an asteroid that would have been considered very small, struck the Pacific Ocean. This little fellow only packed the energy of a small atomic bomb, about the same as the one that flattened Hiroshima, and if it had arrived a few hours later or earlier it could have easily struck a city rather than making a relatively harmless splash into the center of the ocean. Remember, relatively here, is just a comparative term.”   

I'm so alive. As I stand facing the beauty of the never-ending Pacific Ocean, a late afternoon breeze blows down from the hills behind. As always, it is a beautiful day. The sun is making its final descent. The magic is about to begin. The skies are ready to burn with brilliance, as it turns from a soft blue to a bright orange. Looking towards the West, I stare in awe at the hypnotic power of the waves. A giant curl begins to take form, then breaks with a thundering clap as it crashes on the shore.

As night fell, Yamamoto, aboard the huge battleship Yamato, steamed eastward at full speed into the night. Far ahead the destroyers went to flank speed to search for the US carriers. Lookouts, with the best night-vision binoculars in the world, swept the night horizon where the very dark sky meets the black ocean. The faintest shape, the tiniest pinprick of light, would show there was something out there, like the superstructure of a ship over the horizon. There was nothing.

He bent down, scratched the black dirt into his fingers. He was beginning to warm to it; the words were beginning to flow. No one in front of him was moving. He said, "This is free ground. All the way from here to the Pacific Ocean. No man has to bow. No man born to royalty. Here we judge you by what you do, not by what your father was. Here you can be something. Here's a place to build a home. It isn't the land--there's always more land. It's the idea that we all have value, you and me, we're worth something more than the dirt. I never saw dirt I'd die for, but I'm not asking you to come join us and fight for dirt. What we're all fighting for, in the end, is each other.

Pater noster Our Father who art in heaven Stay there And we'll stay here on earth Which is sometimes so pretty With its mysteries of New York And its mysteries of Paris At least as good as that of the Trinity With its little canal at Ourcq Its great wall of China Its river at Morlaix Its candy canes With its Pacific Ocean And its two basins in the Tuileries With its good children and bad people With all the wonders of the world Which are here Simply on the earth Offered to everyone Strewn about Wondering at the wonder of themselves And daring not avow it As a naked pretty girl dares not show herself With the world's outrageous misfortunes Which are legion With legionaries With torturers With the masters of this world The masters with their priests their traitors and their troops With the seasons With the years With the pretty girls and with the old bastards With the straw of misery rotting in the steel of cannons.

No matter what heaven you believe in, your time on this earth will end. What I’m saying is that you should listen—really listen—to the slosh of the waves and the distant call of Pacific birds. You should feel a boy’s pulse against your cheek; you should fill your lungs with ocean air. While you can, I mean. You should do these things while you still can.

Colonel Matterson reading from wrinkled scripture of that long yellow hand: The flag is America. America is the plum. The peach. The watermelon. America is the gumdrop. The pumpkin seed. America is television. Now, the cross is Mexico. Mexico is the walnut. The hazelnut. The acorn. Mexico is the rainbow. The rainbow is wooden. Mexico is wooden. Now, the green sheep is Canada Canada is the fir tree. The wheat field. The calendar. The night is the Pacific Ocean.

I smelled of gin. Not just casually, as if I had taken four or five drinks of a winter morning to get out of bed on, but as if the Pacific Ocean was pure gin and I had nosedived off the boat deck. The gin was in my hair and eyebrows, on my chin and under my chin. It was on my shirt. I smelled like dead toads.

When they first kiss, there on the beach, they will kneel at the edge of the Pacific and say a prayer of thanks, sending all the stories of love inside them out in a fleet of bottles all across the oceans of the world.

And no one will remember us, who we were or what happened here. Sand will blow across Pacific Avenue and against the windows of the Moonstone, and new people will arrive and walk down the beach to the great ocean. They will be in love, or they will be lost, and they will have no words. And the waves will sound to them as they did to us the first time we heard them.

This is free ground. All the way from here to the Pacific Ocean. No man has to bow. No man born to royalty. Here we judge you by what you do, not by what your father was. Here you can be something. Here’s a place to build a home. It isn’t the land

The Internet was done so well that most people think of it as a natural resource like the Pacific Ocean, rather than something that was man-made. When was the last time a technology with a scale like that was so error-free? The Web, in comparison, is a joke. The Web was done by amateurs.

I wanna be your vacuum cleaner Breathing in your dust I wanna be your Ford Cortina I will never rust If you like your coffee hot Let me be your coffee pot You call the shots babe I just wanna be yours Secrets I have held in my heart Are harder to hide than I thought Maybe I just wanna be yours I wanna be yours, I wanna be yours Wanna be yours, wanna be yours, wanna be yours Let me be your 'leccy meter and I'll never run out And let me be the portable heater that you'll get cold without I wanna be your setting lotion (I wanna be) Hold your hair in deep devotion (How deep?) At least as deep as the Pacific Ocean I wanna be yours Read more: Arctic Monkeys - I Wanna Be Yours Lyrics | MetroLyrics

Take me to unexplored paradise & one of your best islands, I want to cross the pacific ocean and make a great memory. Let's go to the eastern coast of the Philippines where the waves meet the sky. You know where it is!

The great packing machine ground on remorselessly, without thinking of green fields; and the men and women and children who were part of it never saw any green thing, not even a flower. Four or five miles to the east of them lay the blue waters of Lake Michigan; but for all the good it did them it might have been as far away as the Pacific Ocean. They had only Sundays, and then they were too tired to walk. They were tied to the great packing machine, and tied to it for life.

The Pacific is my home ocean; I knew it first, grew up on its shore, collected marine animals along the coast. I know its moods, its color, its nature.

ALL HE COULD SEE, IN EVERY DIRECTION, WAS WATER. It was June 23, 1943. Somewhere on the endless expanse of the Pacific Ocean, Army Air Forces bombardier and Olympic runner Louie Zamperini lay across a small raft, drifting westward. Slumped alongside him was a sergeant, one of his plane’s gunners. On a separate raft, tethered to the first, lay another crewman, a gash zigzagging across his forehead. Their bodies, burned by the sun and stained yellow from the raft dye, had winnowed down to skeletons. Sharks glided in lazy loops around them, dragging their backs along the rafts, waiting.

Cat," said Peterkin, turning his head a little on one side, "I love you.

To the west, the Pacific Ocean, which revulses me, for its vastness cannot be fitted into any box.

Clearly it's not all that pacific on the Pacific Ocean

Just as the sea is an open and ever flowing reality, so should our oceanic identity transcend all forms of insularity, to become one that is openly searching, inventive, and welcoming.

So you see, if you become aware of the fact that you are all of your own body, and that the beating of your heart is not just something that happens to you, but something you're doing, then you become aware also in the same moment and at the same time that you're not only beating your heart, but that you are shining the sun. Why? Because the process of your bodily existence and its rhythms is a process, an energy system which is continuous with the shining of the sun, just like the East River, here, is a continuous energy system, and all the waves in it are activities of the whole East River, and that's continuous with the Atlantic Ocean, and that's all one energy system and finally the Atlantic ocean gets around to being the Pacific Ocean and the Indian Ocean, etc., and so all the waters of the Earth are a continuous energy system. It isn't just that the East River is part of it. You can't draw any line and say 'Look, this is where the East River ends and the rest of it begins,' as if you can in the parts of an automobile, where you can say 'This is definitely part of the generator,here, and over here is a spark plug.' There's not that kind of isolation between the elements of nature.

I bring you the dance. I bring you the idea that is going to revolutionise our entire epoch. Where have I discovered it? By the Pacific Ocean, but the waving pine-forests of Sierra Nevada. I have seen the ideal figure of youthful American dancing over the top of the Rockies. The supreme poet of our country is Walt Whitman. I have discovered the dance that is worthy of the poem of Walt Whitman. I am indeed the spiritual daughter of Walt Whitman. For the children of America I will create a new dance that will express America. I bring to your theatre the vital soul that it lacks, the soul of the dancer. For you know...that the birth of the theatre was the dance, that the first actor was the dancer. He danced and sang. That was the birth of the tragedy, and until the dancer in all his spontaneous great art returns to the theatre, your theatre will not live in its true expression!

All Hell is smaller than one pebble of your earthly world: but it is smaller than one atom of this world, the Real World. Look at yon butterfly. If it swallowed all Hell, Hell would not be big enough to do it any harm or to have any taste' 'It seems big enough when you're in it, Sir.' 'And yet all loneliness, angers, hatreds, envies, and itchings that it contains, if rolled into one single experience and put into the scale against the least moment of the joy that is felt by the least in Heaven, would have no weight that could be registered at all. Bad cannot succeed even in being bad as truly as good is good. If all Hell's miseries together entered the consciousness of yon wee yellow bird on the bough there, they would be swallowed up without trace, as if one drop of ink had been dropped into that Great Ocean to which your terrestrial Pacific is only a molecule' 'I see,' said I at last. 'She couldn't fit into Hell.

The real reason that the world’s landfills weren’t overflowing with plastic, he found, was because most of it ends up in an ocean-fill. After a few years of sampling the North Pacific gyre, Moore

There are a number of things a woman can tell about a man who is roughly twenty-nine years old, sitting in the cab of a pickup truck at 3:37 in the afternoon on a weekday, facing the Pacific, writing furiously on the back of pink invoice slips. Such a man may or may not be employed, but regardless, there is mystery there. If this man is with a dog, then that's good, because it means he's capable of forming relationships. But if the dog is a male dog, that's probably a bad sign, because it means the guy is likely a dog, too. A girl dog is much better, but if the guy is over thirty, any kind of dog is a bad sign regardless, because it means he's stopped trusting humans altogether. In general, if nothing else, guys my age with dogs are going to be work. Then there's stubble: stubble indicates a possible drinker, but if he's driving a van or a pickup truck, he hasn't hit bottom yet, so watch out, honey. A guy writing something on a clipboard while facing the ocean at 3:37 P.M. may be writing poetry, or he may be writing a letter begging someone for forgiveness. But if he's writing real words, not just a job estimate or something business-y, then more likely than not this guy has something emotional going on, which could mean he has a soul.

I wish I could tell you about the South Pacific. The way it actually was. The endless ocean. The infinite specks of coral we called islands. Coconut palms nodding gracefully toward the ocean. Reefs upon which waves broke into spray, and inner lagoons, lovely beyond description. I wish I could tell you about the sweating jungle, the full moon rising behind the volcanoes, and the waiting. The waiting. The timeless, repetitive waiting.

On Friday the 13th of April 2029, an asteroid large enough to fill the Rose Bowl as though it were an egg cup, will fly so close to Earth, that it will dip below the altitude of our communication satellites. We did not name this asteroid Bambi. Instead, it's named Apophis, after the Egyptian god of darkness and death. If the trajectory of Apophis at close approach passes within a narrow range of altitudes called the 'keyhole,' the precise influence of Earth's gravity on its orbit will guarantee that seven years later in 2036, on its next time around, the asteroid will hit Earth directly, slamming in the Pacific Ocean between California and Hawaii. The tsunami it creates will wipe out the entire west coast of North America, bury Hawaii, and devastate all the land masses of the Pacific Rim. If Apophis misses the keyhole in 2029, then, of course, we have nothing to worry about in 2036.

Gliding across an imaginary line that splits the Pacific Ocean from the north to the south polar caps, the sunrise acquired a new label, June 23. Behind that line, June 22 had just dawned. This murky international convention, amid world chaos, still stood. For the globe still turned as always in the light of the sun, ninety million miles away in black space, and the tiny dwellers on the globe still had to agree, as they went about their mutual butcheries, on a way to tell the time.

Yui concluded that memories were like objects, like the soccer ball that was found on the coast of Alaska a year after the tsunami, 3,000 miles away, on the other side of the Pacific Ocean. Sooner or later, they always floated back to the surface.

Reminiscing in the drizzle of Portland, I notice the ring that’s landed on your finger, a massive insect of glitter, a chandelier shining at the end of a long tunnel. Thirteen years ago, you hid the hurt in your voice under a blanket and said there’s two kinds of women—those you write poems about and those you don’t. It’s true. I never brought you a bouquet of sonnets, or served you haiku in bed. My idea of courtship was tapping Jane’s Addiction lyrics in Morse code on your window at three A.M., whiskey doing push-ups on my breath. But I worked within the confines of my character, cast as the bad boy in your life, the Magellan of your dark side. We don’t have a past so much as a bunch of electricity and liquor, power never put to good use. What we had together makes it sound like a virus, as if we caught one another like colds, and desire was merely a symptom that could be treated with soup and lots of sex. Gliding beside you now, I feel like the Benjamin Franklin of monogamy, as if I invented it, but I’m still not immune to your waterfall scent, still haven’t developed antibodies for your smile. I don’t know how long regret existed before humans stuck a word on it. I don’t know how many paper towels it would take to wipe up the Pacific Ocean, or why the light of a candle being blown out travels faster than the luminescence of one that’s just been lit, but I do know that all our huffing and puffing into each other’s ears—as if the brain was a trick birthday candle—didn’t make the silence any easier to navigate. I’m sorry all the kisses I scrawled on your neck were written in disappearing ink. Sometimes I thought of you so hard one of your legs would pop out of my ear hole, and when I was sleeping, you’d press your face against the porthole of my submarine. I’m sorry this poem has taken thirteen years to reach you. I wish that just once, instead of skidding off the shoulder blade’s precipice and joyriding over flesh, we’d put our hands away like chocolate to be saved for later, and deciphered the calligraphy of each other’s eyelashes, translated a paragraph from the volumes of what couldn’t be said.

When it comes to climate, countries are just not sovereign. They are at the mercy of actions taken by people on the other side of the planet. The Republic of Kiribati, an island nation in the Pacific Ocean, could reduce its greenhouse gas emissions to zero and nevertheless be submerged under the rising waves if other countries don’t follow suit.

Yesterday afternoon I went with Rose and Gillette down to the beach. At Land’s End I had my first view of the Pacific Ocean.

Mom said we should all live near the Pacific Ocean at least once in our lives, so we kept going all the way to San Francisco.

I USED to cross the United States in my automobile every summer, trying to make it to the Pacific Ocean. But, for various reasons, I would always get stuck somewhere—usually in Las Vegas.

The Milky Way swooped diagonally across the heavens, reminding me of my utter insignificance, and at the same time my complete interconnection with everything. I was just a tiny speck of consciousness, and yet I was consciousness itself.

In World War II, 35,933 AAF planes were lost in combat and accidents. The surprise of the attrition rate is that only a fraction of the ill-fated planes were lost in combat. In 1943 in the Pacific Ocean Areas theater in which Phil’s crew served, for every plane lost in combat, some six planes were lost in accidents. Over time, combat took a greater toll, but combat losses never overtook noncombat losses.

I’ve always judged places and times by how lonely they felt. The entire Midwest, for example, strikes me as horrifically lonely, Indiana more so than Wisconsin and Wisconsin more so than Ohio or Illinois. Coasts are dependably less lonely than inland areas while the warmer latitudes are noticeably less lonely than the colder ones. Hardware stores feel lonely while bookstores do not. Mornings are lonelier than afternoons, while the hours before dawn can be devastating. Vienna is lonelier than Paris or London, while Los Angeles is lonelier than San Francisco or Boston. The Atlantic Ocean is lonelier than the Pacific while the Caribbean is not lonely at all...

Reader, do you remember that ridiculous movie Volcano, the one with Tommy Lee Jones? Do you remember how they stopped eruption in the middle of downtown Los Angeles? They diverted it with cement roadblocks and pointed fire hoses at it, and rerouted the lava to the ocean, and everything was fine? Sweet reader, that is not how lava works. Anyone can tell you that. Here is the truth: I keep waiting for my anger to go dormant, but it won’t. I keep waiting for someone to reroute my anger into the ocean, but no one can. My heart is closer to Dante’s Peak of Dante’s Peak. My anger dissolves grandmas in acid lakes and razes quaint Pacific Northwest towns with ash and asphyxiates jet engines with its grit. Lava keeps leaking down my slopes. You should have listened to the scientist. You should have evacuated earlier.

Shadow could not decide whether he was looking at a moon the size of a dollar, a foot above his head, or whether he was looking at a moon the size of the Pacific Ocean, many thousands of miles away. Nor whether there was any difference between the two ideas. Perhaps it was all a matter of the way you looked at it.

The United States was a great power less because of its ideas than because, with direct access to the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, it was “the most favored state in the world from the point of view of location.

I wanna be your vacuum cleaner Breathing in your dust I wanna be your Ford Cortina I will never rust If you like your coffee hot Let me be your coffee pot You call the shots babe I just wanna be yours Secrets I have held in my heart Are harder to hide than I thought Maybe I just wanna be yours I wanna be yours,I wanna be yours Wanna be yours, wanna be yours, wanna be yours Let me be your 'leccy meter and I'll never run out And let me be the portable heater that you'll get cold without I wanna be your setting lotion (I wanna be) Hold your hair in deep devotion (How deep?) At least as deep as the Pacific Ocean I wanna be yours

Why had he committed this terrible sin? Everything in the world was insignificant compared to what he had lost. Everything in the world is insignificant compared to the truth and purity of one small man – even the empire stretching from the Black Sea to the Pacific Ocean, even science itself. Then he realized that it still wasn't too late. He still had the strength to lift up his head, to remain his mother's son. And he wasn't going to try to console himself or justify what he had done. He wanted this mean, cowardly act to stand all his life as a reproach; day and night it would be something to bring him back to himself. No, no, no! He didn't want to strive to be a hero – and then preen himself over his courage. Every hour, every day, year in, year out, he must struggle to be a man, struggle for his right to be pure and kind. He must do this with humility. And if it came to it, he mustn't be afraid even of death; even then he must remain a man. 'Well then, we'll see,' he said to himself. 'Maybe I do have enough strength. Your strength, Mother...

This country goes three thousand miles west, now. It goes ’way out beyond Kansas, and beyond the Great American Desert, over mountains bigger than these mountains, and down to the Pacific Ocean. It’s the biggest country in the world, and it was farmers who took all that country and made it America, son. Don’t you ever forget that.

What in water did Bloom, waterlover, drawer of water, watercarrier, returning to the range, admire? Its universality: its democratic equality and constancy to its nature in seeking its own level: its vastness in the ocean of Mercator's projection: its unplumbed profundity in the Sundam trench of the Pacific exceeding 8000 fathoms: the restlessness of its waves and surface particles visiting in turn all points of its seaboard: the independence of its units: the variability of states of sea: its hydrostatic quiescence in calm: its hydrokinetic turgidity in neap and spring tides: its subsidence after devastation: its sterility in the circumpolar icecaps, arctic and antarctic: its climatic and commercial significance: its preponderance of 3 to 1 over the dry land of the globe: its indisputable hegemony extending in square leagues over all the region below the subequatorial tropic of Capricorn: the multisecular stability of its primeval basin: its luteofulvous bed: its capacity to dissolve and hold in solution all soluble substances including millions of tons of the most precious metals: its slow erosions of peninsulas and islands, its persistent formation of homothetic islands, peninsulas and downwardtending promontories: its alluvial deposits: its weight and volume and density: its imperturbability in lagoons and highland tarns: its gradation of colours in the torrid and temperate and frigid zones: its vehicular ramifications in continental lakecontained streams and confluent oceanflowing rivers with their tributaries and transoceanic currents, gulfstream, north and south equatorial courses: its violence in seaquakes, waterspouts, Artesian wells, eruptions, torrents, eddies, freshets, spates, groundswells, watersheds, waterpartings, geysers, cataracts, whirlpools, maelstroms, inundations, deluges, cloudbursts: its vast circumterrestrial ahorizontal curve: its secrecy in springs and latent humidity, revealed by rhabdomantic or hygrometric instruments and exemplified by the well by the hole in the wall at Ashtown gate, saturation of air, distillation of dew: the simplicity of its composition, two constituent parts of hydrogen with one constituent part of oxygen: its healing virtues: its buoyancy in the waters of the Dead Sea: its persevering penetrativeness in runnels, gullies, inadequate dams, leaks on shipboard: its properties for cleansing, quenching thirst and fire, nourishing vegetation: its infallibility as paradigm and paragon: its metamorphoses as vapour, mist, cloud, rain, sleet, snow, hail: its strength in rigid hydrants: its variety of forms in loughs and bays and gulfs and bights and guts and lagoons and atolls and archipelagos and sounds and fjords and minches and tidal estuaries and arms of sea: its solidity in glaciers, icebergs, icefloes: its docility in working hydraulic millwheels, turbines, dynamos, electric power stations, bleachworks, tanneries, scutchmills: its utility in canals, rivers, if navigable, floating and graving docks: its potentiality derivable from harnessed tides or watercourses falling from level to level: its submarine fauna and flora (anacoustic, photophobe), numerically, if not literally, the inhabitants of the globe: its ubiquity as constituting 90 percent of the human body: the noxiousness of its effluvia in lacustrine marshes, pestilential fens, faded flowerwater, stagnant pools in the waning moon.

Katherine’s theory is that everyone looking to make a new life migrates west, across America to the Pacific Ocean. Once there, the cheapest city where they can live is Portland. This gives us the most cracked of the crackpots. The misfits among misfits. “We just accumulate more and more strange people,” she says. “All we are are the fugitives and refugees.

History teaches us many things. Most importantly, the things that made us who and what we are.

Thus mysterious divine Pacific zones the world's whole bulk about; makes all coasts one Bay to it; seems heart-beating heart of earth.

After months of rumors, inference, and horrible miscalculations, the impossible had happened. The U.S. Pacific fleet lay twisted anad burning at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean in Honolulu. Had he been wrong about Japan not taking an offensive right now? God, he had thousands of men and women to think of, and he feared in his heart that it might not turn out the way he had seen it. He felt doomed, almost paralyzed by his gross miscalculation. He determined, however, that he would not let the word out about Pearl Harbor until he could meet with his American strategists and Philippine President Manuel Quezon.

By 2005, Moore was referring to the gyrating Pacific dump as 10 million square miles—nearly the size of Africa. It wasn’t the only one: the planet has six other major tropical oceanic gyres, all of them swirling with ugly debris. It was as if plastic exploded upon the world from a tiny seed after World War II and, like the Big Bang, was still expanding. Even if all production suddenly ceased, an astounding amount of the astoundingly durable stuff was already out there. Plastic debris, Moore believed, was now the most common surface feature of the world’s oceans. How long would it last? Were there any benign, less-immortal substitutes that civilization could convert to, lest the world be

Every night, around midnight GMT, the Sun sets on the Cayman Islands, and doesn’t rise over the British Indian Ocean Territory until after 1:00 a.m. For that hour, the little Pitcairn Islands in the South Pacific are the only British territory in the Sun. The Pitcairn Islands have a population of a few dozen people, the descendants of the mutineers from the HMS Bounty. The islands became notorious in 2004 when a third of the adult male population, including the mayor, were convicted of child sexual abuse. As awful as the islands may be, they remain part of the British Empire, and unless they’re kicked out, the two-century-long British daylight will continue.

It is easy to forget that you live in the sky - not beneath it, but within it. Our atmosphere is an enormous ocean, and you inhabit it. This ocean is made up of the gases of air rather than liquid water, but it is as much of an ocean as the Atlantic or the Pacific. You may think of yourself as living on the ground, but all that means is that you are a creature of the ocean bed. You still inhabit the atmosphere like a sea creature does the water.

Whilst I viewed those mountains, I felt a secret pleasure in finding myself so near the head of the--heretofore conceived--boundless Missouri. But when I reflected on the difficulties which this snowy barrier would most probably throw in my way to the Pacific Ocean, and the sufferings and hardships of myself and the party in them, it in some measure counterbalanced the joy I had felt in the first moments in which I gazed on them. But, as I have always held it little short of criminality to anticipate evils, I will allow it to be a good, comfortable road until I am compelled to believe otherwise. (William Clark)

So much anger in here. So much hate. So much to take out on someone. This time it's going to count. She's adrift in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, three hundred kilometers from land. She's alone. She has nothing to eat. It doesn't matter. None of it matters. She's alive; that alone gives her the upper hand.

There comes a time in the life of a sailor when he no longer belongs ashore. It's then that he surrenders to the Pacific, where no land blocks the eye, where sky and ocean mirror each other until above and below have lost their meaning, and the Milky Way looks like the spume of a breaking wave and the globe itself rolls like a boat in the midst of the sinking and heaving surf of that starry sky, and even the sun is nothing but a tiny glowing dot of phosphorescence on the sea of the night.

I suppose—I was on a long flight across the Pacific, staring idly out the window at moonlit ocean, when it occurred to me with a certain uncomfortable forcefulness that I didn’t know the first thing about the only planet I was ever going to live on.

No matter what heaven you believe in, your time on this Earth will end. What I'm saying is that you should listen--really listen--to the slosh of the waves and the distant call of Pacific birds. You should feel a boy's pulse against your cheek; you should fill your lungs with ocean air. While you can, I mean. You should do these things while you still can.

Mist’s first passion, long before her love for cuisine took flight. She still thought fondly of evenings in front of her easel, the Pacific Ocean’s surf in the background, the glow of the moon across its surface. Those enchanted times, after hours working on the deck of an ocean side restaurant, had formed the bridge between her love of painting and her love of cooking. She would blend mustard and grape seed oil during the afternoon and mustard-hued oil paint at night, satisfied at the end of the day with the balance the two art forms created in her life. “Mist, dear, are you out there?” Mist followed the voice, moving into the kitchen, where she found Betty sliding a spatula between a sheet of wax paper and several rows of glazed

Major mutations or changes took place among the descendants of Japheth. This is obvious because of their white skin. In other words, they were black at one time but their skin changed to white. This phenomenon can be understood in view of the total world population. Over two-thirds of the population of the world consists of colored people. That is a ratio of 2-1. Two out of Noah's three sons remained black. We know this to be true because many of the people throughout Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the islands in the Pacific Ocean are yellow, brown or, black.

Nonsense! Nonsense!” snorted Tasbrough. “That couldn’t happen here in America, not possibly! We’re a country of freemen.” “The answer to that,” suggested Doremus Jessup, “if Mr. Falck will forgive me, is ‘the hell it can’t!’ Why, there’s no country in the world that can get more hysterical—yes, or more obsequious!—than America. Look how Huey Long became absolute monarch over Louisiana, and how the Right Honorable Mr. Senator Berzelius Windrip owns his State. Listen to Bishop Prang and Father Coughlin on the radio—divine oracles, to millions. Remember how casually most Americans have accepted Tammany grafting and Chicago gangs and the crookedness of so many of President Harding’s appointees? Could Hitler’s bunch, or Windrip’s, be worse? Remember the Kuklux Klan? Remember our war hysteria, when we called sauerkraut ‘Liberty cabbage’ and somebody actually proposed calling German measles ‘Liberty measles’? And wartime censorship of honest papers? Bad as Russia! Remember our kissing the—well, the feet of Billy Sunday, the million-dollar evangelist, and of Aimée McPherson, who swam from the Pacific Ocean clear into the Arizona desert and got away with it? Remember Voliva and Mother Eddy?. . .Remember our Red scares and our Catholic scares, when all well-informed people knew that the O.G.P.U. were hiding out in Oskaloosa, and the Republicans campaigning against Al Smith told the Carolina mountaineers that if Al won the Pope would illegitimatize their children? Remember Tom Heflin and Tom Dixon? Remember when the hick legislators in certain states, in obedience to William Jennings Bryan, who learned his biology from his pious old grandma, set up shop as scientific experts and made the whole world laugh itself sick by forbidding the teaching of evolution?. . .Remember the Kentucky night-riders? Remember how trainloads of people have gone to enjoy lynchings? Not happen here? Prohibition—shooting down people just because they might be transporting liquor—no, that couldn’t happen in America! Why, where in all history has there ever been a people so ripe for a dictatorship as ours! We’re ready to start on a Children’s Crusade—only of adults—right now, and the Right Reverend Abbots Windrip and Prang are all ready to lead it!” “Well, what if they are?

The wide-ranging birds that visit islands of the ocean in migration may also have a good deal to do with the distribution of plants, and perhaps even of some insects and minute land shells. From a ball of mud taken from a bird's plumage, Charles Darwin raised 82 separate plants, belonging to 5 distinct species! Many plant seeds have hooks or prickles, ideal for attachment to feathers. Such birds as the Pacific golden plover, which annually flies from the mainland of Alaska to the Hawaiian Islands and even beyond, probably figure in many riddles of plant distribution.

The sea is a body in a thousand ways that don't add up, because adding is too stable a transaction for that flux, but the waves come in in a roar and then ebb, almost silent but for the fain suck of sand and snap of bubbles, over and over, a heartbeat rhythm, the sea always this body turned inside out and opened to the sky, the body always a sea folded in on itself, a nautical chart folded into a paper cup.

In the wee small hours, California Highway One north of Half Moon Bay is about as desolate as it gets. The narrow, twisting road was etched from sheer cliff faces that towered above me on the right and dropped away a hundred feet to the Pacific Ocean on my left. A soggy wool blanket of San Francisco's famous fog hung a few feet above the roadway, obscuring the stars and dribbling tiny spots of mist on my windshield. My headlights bored through the gap between road and fog, drilling an endless tunnel through the darkness. So far as I could tell, there were only two other cars on the entire planet that night—actually, one car and a produce truck. They'd flashed by, one after the other, heading south just past Moss Beach. Their headlights glared in my eyes and made the road seem even narrower, but half an hour later, I was wishing for more signs of life just to help keep my drooping eyelids from slamming shut altogether. It was the wrong thing to wish for. She appeared suddenly out of the fog on the opposite side of the road. Only, she wasn't in a car. This gal was smack dab in the middle of the southbound lane and running for all she was worth. She wore a white dress and no coat, and that was about all I had time to take in before she was gone and I was alone in the endless tunnel again.

The Pacific is about a foot and a half higher along its western edge—a consequence of the centrifugal force created by the Earth’s spin. Just as when you pull on a tub of water the water tends to flow toward the other end, as if reluctant to come with you, so the eastward spin of Earth piles water up against the ocean’s western margins.

The Pacific is my home ocean; I knew it first, grew up on its shore, collected marine animals along the coast. I know its moods, its color, its nature. It was very far inland that I caught the first smell of the Pacific. When one has been long at sea, the smell of land reaches far out to greet one. And the same it true when one has been long inland.

he P.C.H. [Pacific Coast Highway] being one of them; the melancholiness of the ocean; the melancholiness of everything else. And the feeling of being like, this is a fragment of a holographic reality that a higher consciousness made.

If you clenched your right hand in a fist, that would be my San Francisco, knocking on the Golden Gate. Your little finger would be sunny downtown on the bay, and your thumb would be our Ocean Beach out on the blue Pacific. They called it the Sunset...It sat on the very edge of the continent, with fog so dense and silver you hardly ever saw a sunset in the Sunset...

Long before Christopher Columbus, the celebrated Chinese navigator Zheng He travelled through the south and westward maritime routes in the Indian Ocean and established relations with more than thirty countries in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.

no river in North America except the Mississippi is more powerful than the Columbia; it carries a quarter-million cubic feet of water per second to the ocean, ten times the flow of the Colorado, twice the discharge of the Nile into the Mediterranean.

What does Africa — what does the West stand for? Is not our own interior white on the chart? black though it may prove, like the coast, when discovered. Is it the source of the Nile, or the Niger, or the Mississippi, or a Northwest Passage around this continent, that we would find? Are these the problems which most concern mankind? Is Franklin the only man who is lost, that his wife should be so earnest to find him? Does Mr. Grinnell know where he himself is? Be rather the Mungo Park,the Lewis and Clark and Frobisher,of your own streams and oceans; explore your own higher latitudes — with shiploads of preserved meats to support you, if they be necessary; and pile the empty cans sky-high for a sign. Were preserved meats invented to preserve meat merely? Nay, be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought. Every man is the lord of a realm beside which the earthly empire of the Czar is but a petty state, a hummock left by the ice. Yet some can be patriotic who have no self-respect, and sacrifice the greater to the less. They love the soil which makes their graves, but have no sympathy with the spirit which may still animate their clay. Patriotism is a maggot in their heads.What was the meaning of that South-Sea Exploring Expedition,with all its parade and expense, but an indirect recognition of the fact that there are continents and seas in the moral world to which every man is an isthmus or an inlet, yet unexplored by him, but that it is easier to sail many thousand miles through cold and storm and cannibals, in a government ship, with five hundred men and boys to assist one, than it is to explore the private sea, the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean of one's being alone.

Archaic humans like Homo erectus “spread like many other mammals in the Old World,” Pääbo told me. “They never came to Madagascar, never to Australia. Neither did Neanderthals. It’s only fully modern humans who start this thing of venturing out on the ocean where you don’t see land. Part of that is technology, of course; you have to have ships to do it. But there is also, I like to think or say, some madness there. You know? How many people must have sailed out and vanished on the Pacific before you found Easter Island? I mean, it’s ridiculous. And why do you do that? Is it for the glory? For immortality? For curiosity? And now we go to Mars. We never stop.

Death is only a launching into the region of the strange Untried; it is but the first salutation to the possibilities of the immense Remote, the Wild, the Watery, the Unshored; therefore, to the death-longing eyes of men, who still have left in them some interior compunctions against suicide, does the all-contributed and all-receptive ocean alluringly spread forth his whole plan of unimaginable, taking terrors, and wonderful, new-life adventures; and from the hearts of infinite Pacific's, the thousand mermaids sing to them--"Come hither, broken-hearted; here is another life without the guilt of intermediate death; here are wonders supernatural, without dying for them. Come hither! bury thyself in a life which, to your now equally abhorred and abhorring, landed world, is more oblivious than death. Come hither! put up thy gravestone, too, within the churchyard, and come hither, till we marry thee!" Hearkening to these voices, East and West, by early sun rise, and by fall of eve, the blacksmith's soul responded, Aye I come! And so Perth went a-whaling.

What marvelous things happen when men and women walk with faith in obedience to that which is required of them! I recall reading the story of Commander William Robert Anderson, the naval officer who took the submarine Nautilus beneath the polar ice from the Pacific Ocean to the Atlantic Ocean, a daring and dangerous feat. It recounted a number of other exploits of similar danger and concluded with a statement that the commander carried in his wallet a tattered card that had on it these words: “I believe God will always make a way where there is no way.” I too believe that God will always make a way where there is no way. I believe that if we will walk in obedience to the commandments of God, if we will follow the counsel of the priesthood, he will open a way even where there appears to be no way.

The first vehicle was an unmanned two-ton, hundred-thousand-dollar steel-caged contraption named ANGUS (for Acoustically Navigated Geophysical Underwater System), which had powerful strobe lights, a collection of thermometers, and, most critically, high-definition cameras. Late

This regiment was formed last fall, back in Maine. There were a thousand of us then. There’s not three hundred of us now.” He glanced up briefly. “But what is left is choice.” He was embarrassed. He spoke very slowly, staring at the ground. “Some of us volunteered to fight for Union. Some came in mainly because we were bored at home and this looked like it might be fun. Some came because we were ashamed not to. Many of us came … because it was the right thing to do. All of us have seen men die. Most of us never saw a black man back home. We think on that, too. But freedom … is not just a word.” He looked up into the sky, over silent faces. “This is a different kind of army. If you look at history you’ll see men fight for pay, or women, or some other kind of loot. They fight for land, or because a king makes them, or just because they like killing. But we’re here for something new. I don’t … this hasn’t happened much in the history of the world. We’re an army going out to set other men free.” He bent down, scratched the black dirt into his fingers. He was beginning to warm to it; the words were beginning to flow. No one in front of him was moving. He said, “This is free ground. All the way from here to the Pacific Ocean. No man has to bow. No man born to royalty. Here we judge you by what you do, not by what your father was. Here you can be something. Here’s a place to build a home. It isn’t the land—there’s always more land. It’s the idea that we all have value, you and me, we’re worth something more than the dirt. I never saw dirt I’d die for, but I’m not asking you to come join us and fight for dirt. What we’re all fighting for, in the end, is each other.

God, San Francisco was such a thief. A lady of the night, a sorceress with her hands out. Every time, all my years as a child, that we crossed the bridge, we had to pay to get in, pay to get out, pay for every little thing. Oakland was free, San Francisco was not. Pay me, pay me. Pay for the Pacific Ocean and the beach. I am expensive, the city always said, so pay me for my wonderful dark treats like the Steinhart Aquarium, with its dark wide hall lit up by tank after tank of bright gold green blue sharks dolphins whales stinger fish, cold-eyed still-as-a-corpse fish that didn't blink or budge when we tapped the thick glass with our fingernails. Pay, the voice said, to whomever took us on Saturday to the Fleischacker Zoo ... the hand of San Francisco reaches out to grab your stupid little nickels and dimes. Pay. Even as I stood in front of the Fat Lady, whose cackling gap-toothed twelve-feet-high, three-feet-wide body made me laugh for a solid hour, even as I collapsed in tears driven out of my eyes by laughter, I understood that the other name for San Francisco wasn't Frisco; it was pay you dumb jerks from Oakland pay.

You see the impact of humans on Earth’s environment every day. We are trashing the place: There is plastic along our highways, the smell of a landfill, the carbonic acid (formed when carbon dioxide is dissolved in water) bleaching of coral reefs, the desertification of enormous areas of China and Africa (readily seen in satellite images), and a huge patch of plastic garbage in the Pacific Ocean. All of these are direct evidence of our effect on our world. We are killing off species at the rate of about one per day. It is estimated that humans are driving species to extinction at least a thousand times faster than the otherwise natural rate. Many people naïvely (and some, perhaps, deceptively) argue that loss of species is not that important. After all, we can see in the fossil record that about 99 percent of all the different kinds of living things that have ever lived here are gone forever, and we’re doing just fine today. What’s the big deal if we, as part of the ecosystem, kill off a great many more species of living things? We’ll just kill what we don’t need or notice. The problem with that idea is that although we can, in a sense, know what will become or what became of an individual species, we cannot be sure of what will happen to that species’ native ecosystem. We cannot predict the behavior of the whole, complex, connected system. We cannot know what will go wrong or right. However, we can be absolutely certain that by reducing or destroying biodiversity, our world will be less able to adapt. Our farms will be less productive, our water less clean, and our landscape more barren. We will have fewer genetic resources to draw on for medicines, for industrial processes, for future crops. Biodiversity is a result of the process of evolution, and it is also a safety net that helps keep that process going. In order to pass our own genes into the future and enable our offspring to live long and prosper, we must reverse the current trend and preserve as much biodiversity as possible. If we don’t, we will sooner or later join the fossil record of extinction.

I've been ordered to take you men with me. I've been told that if you don't come I can shoot you. Well, you know I won't do that. Not Maine men. I won't shoot any man who doesn't want this fight. Maybe someone else will, but I won't. So that's that." He paused again. There was nothing on their faces to lead him. "Here's the situation. I've been ordered to take you along, and that's what I'm going to do. Under guard if necessary. But you can have your rifles if you want them. The whole Reb army is up the road a ways waiting for us and this is no time for an argument like this. I tell you this: we sure can use you. We're down below half strength and we need you, no doubt of that. But whether you fight or not is up to you. Whether you come along, well, you're coming." Tom had come up with Chamberlain's horse. Over the heads of the prisoners Chamberlain could see the regiment falling into line out in the flaming road. He took a deep breath. "Well, I don't want to preach to you. You know who we are and what we're doing here. But if you're going to fight alongside us there's a few things I want you to know." He bowed his head, not looking at eyes. He folded his hands together. "This regiment was formed last fall, back in Maine. There were a thousand of us then. There's not three hundred of us now." He glanced up briefly. "But what is left is choice." He was embarrassed. He spoke very slowly, staring at the ground. "Some of us volunteered to fight for Union. Some came in mainly because we were bored at home and this looked like it might be fun. Some came because we were ashamed not to. Many of us came...because it was the right thing to do. All of us have seen men die. Most of us never saw a black man back home. We think on that, too. Freedom...is not just a word." He looked into the sky, over silent faces. "This is a different kind of army. If you look at history you'll see men fight for pay, or women, or some other kind of loot. They fight for land, or because a king makes them, or just because they like killing. But we're here for something new. I don't...this hasn't happened much in the history of the world. We're an army going out to set other men free." He bent down, scratched the black dirt into his fingers. He was beginning to warm to it; the words were beginning to flow. No one in front of him was moving. He said, "This is free ground. All the way to the Pacific Ocean. No man has to bow. No man born to royalty. Here we judge you by what you do, not by what your father was. Here you can be something. Here's a place to build a home. It isn't the land- there's always more land. It's the idea that we all have value, you and me, we're worth something more than the dirt. I never saw dirt I'd die for, but I'm not asking you to come join us and fight for dirt. What we're all fighting for, in the end, is each other.

Every bit of water falling on all of France, channeled into one drainpipe—that’s similar to what goes into the Columbia, or at least a shallow part of it. The river’s source is a glacial drip 2,619 feet above sea level in the foothills of the Canadian Purcells; by its midway point in a high desert, the Columbia has a depth several hundred feet below the ocean plane.

The South China Sea functions as the throat of the Western Pacific and Indian oceans—the mass of connective economic tissue where global sea routes coalesce. Here is the heart of Eurasia’s navigable rimland, punctuated by the Malacca, Sunda, Lombok, and Makassar straits. More than half of the world’s annual merchant fleet tonnage passes through these choke points, and a third of all maritime traffic worldwide.2

Ah, yes, the "unalienable rights." Each year someone quotes that magnificent poetry. Life? What "right" to life has a man who is drowning in the Pacific? The ocean will not hearken to his cries. What "right" to life has a man who must die if he is to save his children? If he chooses to save his own life, does he do so as a matter of "right"? If two men are starving and cannibalism is the only alternative to death, which man's right is "unalienable"? And is it "right"? As to liberty, the heroes who signed the great document pledged themselves to buy liberty with their lives. Liberty is never unalienable; it must be redeemed regularly with the blood of patriots or it always vanishes. Of all the so-called natural human rights that have ever been invented, liberty is least likely to be cheap and is never free of cost. The third "right"? - the "pursuit of happiness"? It is indeed unalienable but it is not a right; it is simply a universal condition which tyrants cannot take away nor patriots restore. Cast me into a dungeon, burn me at the stake, crown me king of kings, I can "pursue happiness" as long as my brain lives - but neither gods nor saints, wise men nor subtle drugs, can insure that I will catch it.

If you believe that astronauts have been to the moon and that the world is not flat, then you probably believe the satellite photos showing the Greenland ice sheet in full-on meltdown. Much of Manhattan and the Eastern Shore of Maryland may join the Atlantic Ocean in our lifetimes. Entire Pacific island nations will disappear. Hurricanes will bring untold destruction. Rising sea levels and crippling droughts will decimate crops and cause widespread famine. People will go hungry, and people will die.

Every morning a great wall of fog descends upon the city of San Francisco. It begins far out at sea. It forms over the Farallons, covering the sea lions on their rocks, and then it sweeps onto Ocean Beach, filling the long green bowl of Golden Gate Park. The fog obscures the early morning joggers and the lone practitioners of tai chi. It mists up the windows of the Glass Pavilion. It creeps over the entire city, over the monuments and movie theaters, over the Panhandle dope dens and the flophouses in the Tenderloin. The fog covers the pastel Victorian mansions in Pacific Heights and shrouds the rainbow-colored houses in the Haight. It walks up and down the twisting streets of Chinatown; it boards the cable cars, making their clanging bells sound like buoys; it climbs to the top of Coit Tower until you can’t see it anymore; it moves in on the Mission, where the mariachi players are still asleep; and it bothers the tourists. The fog of San Francisco, that cold, identity-cleansing mist that rolls over the city every day, explains better than anything else why that city is what it is.

Algren’s book opens with one of the best historical descriptions of American white trash ever written.* He traces the Linkhorn ancestry back to the first wave of bonded servants to arrive on these shores. These were the dregs of society from all over the British Isles—misfits, criminals, debtors, social bankrupts of every type and description—all of them willing to sign oppressive work contracts with future employers in exchange for ocean passage to the New World. Once here, they endured a form of slavery for a year or two—during which they were fed and sheltered by the boss—and when their time of bondage ended, they were turned loose to make their own way. In theory and in the context of history the setup was mutually advantageous. Any man desperate enough to sell himself into bondage in the first place had pretty well shot his wad in the old country, so a chance for a foothold on a new continent was not to be taken lightly. After a period of hard labor and wretchedness he would then be free to seize whatever he might in a land of seemingly infinite natural wealth. Thousands of bonded servants came over, but by the time they earned their freedom the coastal strip was already settled. The unclaimed land was west, across the Alleghenies. So they drifted into the new states—Kentucky and Tennessee; their sons drifted on to Missouri, Arkansas and Oklahoma. Drifting became a habit; with dead roots in the Old World and none in the New, the Linkhorns were not of a mind to dig in and cultivate things. Bondage too became a habit, but it was only the temporary kind. They were not pioneers, but sleazy rearguard camp followers of the original westward movement. By the time the Linkhorns arrived anywhere the land was already taken—so they worked for a while and moved on. Their world was a violent, boozing limbo between the pits of despair and the Big Rock Candy Mountain. They kept drifting west, chasing jobs, rumors, homestead grabs or the luck of some front-running kin. They lived off the surface of the land, like army worms, stripping it of whatever they could before moving on. It was a day-to-day existence, and there was always more land to the west. Some stayed behind and their lineal descendants are still there—in the Carolinas, Kentucky, West Virginia and Tennessee. There were dropouts along the way: hillbillies, Okies, Arkies—they’re all the same people. Texas is a living monument to the breed. So is southern California. Algren called them “fierce craving boys” with “a feeling of having been cheated.” Freebooters, armed and drunk—a legion of gamblers, brawlers and whorehoppers. Blowing into town in a junk Model-A with bald tires, no muffler and one headlight … looking for quick work, with no questions asked and preferably no tax deductions. Just get the cash, fill up at a cut-rate gas station and hit the road, with a pint on the seat and Eddy Arnold on the radio moaning good back-country tunes about home sweet home, that Bluegrass sweetheart still waitin, and roses on Mama’s grave. Algren left the Linkhorns in Texas, but anyone who drives the Western highways knows they didn’t stay there either. They kept moving until one day in the late 1930s they stood on the spine of a scrub-oak California hill and looked down on the Pacific Ocean—the end of the road.

California during the 1940s had Hollywood and the bright lights of Los Angeles, but on the other coast was Florida, land of sunshine and glamour, Miami and Miami Beach. If you weren't already near California's Pacific Coast you headed for Florida during the winter. One of the things which made Miami such a mix of glitter and sunshine was the plethora of movie stars who flocked there to play, rubbing shoulders with tycoons and gangsters. Sometimes it was hard to tell the difference between the latter two. Miami and everything that surrounded it hadn't happened by accident. Carl Fisher had set out to make Miami Beach a playground destination during the 1930s and had succeeded far beyond his dreams. The promenade behind the Roney Plaza Hotel was a block-long lovers' lane of palm trees and promise that began rather than ended in the blue waters of the Atlantic. Florida was more than simply Miami and Miami Beach, however. When George Merrick opened the Biltmore Hotel in Coral Gables papers across the country couldn't wait to gush about the growing aura of Florida. They tore down Collins Bridge in the Gables and replaced it with the beautiful Venetian Causeway. You could plop down a fiver if you had one and take your best girl — or the girl you wanted to score with — for a gondola ride there before the depression, or so I'd been told. You see, I'd never actually been to Florida before the war, much less Miami. I was a newspaper reporter from Chicago before the war and had never even seen the ocean until I was flying over the Pacific for the Air Corp. There wasn't much time for admiring the waves when Japanese Zeroes were trying to shoot you out of the sky and bury you at the bottom of that deep blue sea. It was because of my friend Pete that I knew so much about Miami. Florida was his home, so when we both got leave in '42 I followed him to the warm waters of Miami to see what all the fuss was about. It would be easy to say that I skipped Chicago for Miami after the war ended because Pete and I were such good pals and I'd had such a great time there on leave. But in truth I decided to stay on in Miami because of Veronica Lake. I'd better explain that. Veronica Lake never knew she was the reason I came back with Pete to Miami after the war. But she had been there in '42 while Pete and I were enjoying the sand, sun, and the sweet kisses of more than a few love-starved girls desperate to remember what it felt like to have a man's arm around them — not to mention a few other sensations. Lake had been there promoting war bonds on Florida's first radio station, WQAM. It was a big outdoor event and Pete and I were among those listening with relish to Lake's sultry voice as she urged everyone to pitch-in for our boys overseas. We were in those dark early days of the war at the time, and the outcome was very much in question. Lake's appearance at the event was a morale booster for civilians and servicemen alike. She was standing behind a microphone that sat on a table draped in the American flag. I'd never seen a Hollywood star up-close and though I liked the movies as much as any other guy, I had always attributed most of what I saw on-screen to smoke and mirrors. I doubted I'd be impressed seeing a star off-screen. A girl was a girl, after all, and there were loads of real dolls in Miami, as I'd already discovered. Boy, was I wrong." - Where Flamingos Fly

I am a bomb but I mean you no harm. That I still am here to tell this, is a miracle: I was deployed on May 15, 1957, but I didn’t go off because a British nuclear engineer, a young father, developed qualms after seeing pictures of native children marveling at the mushrooms in the sky, and sabotaged me. I could see why during that short drop before I hit the atoll: the island looks like god’s knuckles in a bathtub, the ocean is beautifully translucent, corals glow underwater, a dead city of bones, allowing a glimpse into a white netherworld. I met the water and fell a few feet into a chromatic cemetery. The longer I lie here, listening to my still functioning electronic innards, the more afraid I grow of detonating after all this time. I don’t share your gods, but I pray I shall die a silent death.

Do you remember our conversation? Do you remember the places we went and the things we saw? The bindery was our access, the point in space that contains all other points, and that night you were a boy unbound, a tiny astronaut, taking your first leap into an infinite and unknowable universe. For the first time you could see the voices of the things you'd been hearing for so long, all that clamorous matter vying for your attention. With your supernatural ears, you were able to perceive, with absolute clarity, the sinuous shapes and contours of the sounds that matter makes as it moves through space and time and mind. Some of these sounds were so beautiful they made you laugh out loud and clap your hands with delight, and others were so sad they made tears run down your face. And, oh, the visions we had! Container ships glittering on a moonlit night off the coast of Alaska. Pyramids of sulfur, rising yellow in the mist. The plundered moon and all its craters; globes and stars and asteroids; a jet black crow with a diamond tiara; a flock of rubber duckies, spinning through the Pacific gyres. At the sound of a footstep, a young girl freezes, and Andromeda sparkles in the firmament. Fires rage as the redwoods burn; and in the deep ocean, a pilot whale carries her dead baby on her nose, while sea turtles weep briny tears onto nets of plastic.

There are Californians who waiver in their allegiance to the climate of California. Sometimes the climate of San Francisco has made me cross. Sometimes I have thought that the winds in summer were too cold, that the fogs in summer were too thick. But whenever I have crossed the continent—when I have emerged from New York at ninety-five degrees, and entered Chicago at one hundred degrees—when I have been breathing the dust of alkali deserts and the fiery air of sagebrush plains—these are the times when I have always been buoyed up by the anticipation of inhaling the salt air of San Francisco Bay. If ever a summer wanderer is glad to get back to his native land, it is I, returning to my native fog. Like the prodigal youth who returned to his home and filled himself with husks, so I always yearn in summer to return to mine, and fill myself up with fog. Not a thin, insignificant mist, but a fog—a thick fog—one of those rich pea-soup August fogs that blow in from the Pacific Ocean over San Francisco. When I leave the heated capitals of other lands and get back to California uncooked, I always offer up a thank-offering to Santa Niebla, Our Lady of the Fogs. Out near the Presidio, where Don Joaquin de Arillaga, the old comandante, revisits the glimpses of the moon, clad in rusty armor, with his Spanish spindle-shanks thrust into tall leathern boots—there some day I shall erect a chapel to Santa Niebla. And I have vowed to her as an ex-voto a silver fog-horn, which horn will be wound by the winds of the broad Pacific, and will ceaselessly sound through the centuries the litany of Our Lady of the Fogs. Every Californian has good reason to be loyal to his native land. If even the Swiss villagers, born in the high Alps, long to return to their birthplace, how much more does the exiled Californian yearn to return to the land which bore him. There are other, richer, and more populous lands, but to the Californian born, California is the only place in which to live. And to the returning Californian, particularly if he be native-born, the love of his birthplace is only intensified by visits to other lands. Why do men so love their native soil? It is perhaps a phase of human love for the mother. For we are compact of the soil. Out of the crumbling granite eroded from the ribs of California’s Sierras by California’s mountain streams—out of earth washed into California’s great valleys by her mighty rivers—out of this the sons of California are made, brain, and muscle, and bone. Why then should they not love their mother, even as the mountaineers of Montenegro, of Switzerland, of Savoy, lover their mountain birth-place? Why should not exiled Californians yearn to return? And we sons of California always do return; we are always brought back by the potent charm of our native land—back to the soil which gave us birth—and at the last back to Earth, the great mother, from whom we sprung, and on whose bosom we repose our tired bodies when our work is done.

Wait till Buzz takes charge of us. A real Fascist dictatorship!" "Nonsense! Nonsense!" snorted Tasbrough. "That couldn't happen here in America, not possibly! We're a country of freemen." "The answer to that," suggested Doremus Jessup, "if Mr. Falck will forgive me, is 'the hell it can't!' Why, there's no country in the world that can get more hysterical—yes, or more obsequious!—than America. Look how Huey Long became absolute monarch over Louisiana, and how the Right Honorable Mr. Senator Berzelius Windrip owns his State. Listen to Bishop Prang and Father Coughlin on the radio—divine oracles, to millions. Remember how casually most Americans have accepted Tammany grafting and Chicago gangs and the crookedness of so many of President Harding's appointees? Could Hitler's bunch, or Windrip's, be worse? Remember the Kuklux Klan? Remember our war hysteria, when we called sauerkraut 'Liberty cabbage' and somebody actually proposed calling German measles 'Liberty measles'? And wartime censorship of honest papers? Bad as Russia! Remember our kissing the—well, the feet of Billy Sunday, the million-dollar evangelist, and of Aimée McPherson, who swam from the Pacific Ocean clear into the Arizona desert and got away with it? Remember Voliva and Mother Eddy?... Remember our Red scares and our Catholic scares, when all well-informed people knew that the O.G.P.U. were hiding out in Oskaloosa, and the Republicans campaigning against Al Smith told the Carolina mountaineers that if Al won the Pope would illegitimatize their children? Remember Tom Heflin and Tom Dixon? Remember when the hick legislators in certain states, in obedience to William Jennings Bryan, who learned his biology from his pious old grandma, set up shop as scientific experts and made the whole world laugh itself sick by forbidding the teaching of evolution?... Remember the Kentucky night-riders? Remember how trainloads of people have gone to enjoy lynchings? Not happen here? Prohibition—shooting down people just because they might be transporting liquor—no, that couldn't happen in America! Why, where in all history has there ever been a people so ripe for a dictatorship as ours!

Greenery Juniper, Oracle Oak and Hop Tree, California Buckeye, and Elderberry. Pacific Dogwood and the pale green Eucalyptus, Quaking Aspen and Flannelbush. raw, sprouting, lush green love green with envy green with youth green with early spring olive, emerald, avocado, greenlight ready, set, GO! greenhouse, greenbelts, ocean kelp, cucumber, lizard, lime and forest green, spruce, teal, and putting green. green-eyed, verdant, grassy, immature green and leafy green half-formed tender, pleasant, alluring temperate freshly sawed vigorous not ripe yet promising greenbriar, greenbug, green dragon greenshanks running along the ocean's edge greenlings swimming greenlets singing greengage plums green thumbs greenhorns and greenflies- how on earth amid sage swells kelly hillsides and swirls of firs did I ever find that green of hers? holly, drake, and brewster green, pistachio, shamrock, serpentine terre verde, Brunswick, tourmaline, lotus, jade, and spinach green: start to finish lowlands to highs no field, no forest, no leaf, no blade can catch the light or trap the shade; no earthly tones will ever rise to match the green enchantment of her eyes.

He peered up at the house. “I know you’re finished in there, Blake. May as well come out.” I breathed a silent sigh. Blake strolled onto the deck wearing low-slung skater shorts and flip-flops. Being shirtless must’ve been mandatory in California. I kind of wished they’d get dressed so I could focus properly when I told them about the prophecy. Blake joined us beside the pool. “So . . . ,” said Blake, rocking back on his heels. “Lover’s quarrel over?” “We’re not lovers,” Kaidan and I said together. “What’s stopping you?” Blake smiled. “What’s stopping you and Ginger?” Kaidan asked. “An ocean, man. Fu—” He glanced at me. “Uh . . . eff you.” “Eff me?” Kaidan asked, grinning. “No, eff you, mate.” Blake put a fist over his mouth when he caught what must have been a seething look on my face, and he laughed, punching Kaidan in the arm. “Told you, man! She’s pissed about the cursing thing! Ginger was right.” I shook my head. I wouldn’t look at them. I was too humiliated to deny it. “Girl, all you have to do is say the word, and Mr. Lusty McLust a Lot here will be happy to whisper some dirty nothings in your ear.” Kaidan half grinned, sexuality rolling off him as wild as the Pacific below us. I took a shaky breath. “I don’t appreciate when people are fake with me.” I pointed this statement at Kaidan. Okay, calling him a fake was overboard, especially if he was just being respectful. But my feelings were bruised and battered. If Kai wasn’t going to forgive me or be willing to talk, I couldn’t hang around and deal with his bad attitude. It hurt too much, and the unfairness frustrated me to no end. “If you guys will sit down and shut up for a minute, I’ll tell you what I came here to say, and then I’m out of here. You two can find someone else to make fun of.” They both wiped the smiles from their faces. I pulled a padded lawn chair over and sat. They moved a couple of chairs closer, giving me their attention. 

In early 2016, Amazon was given a license by the Federal Maritime Commission to implement ocean freight services as an Ocean Transportation Intermediary. So, Amazon can now ship others’ goods. This new service, dubbed Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA), won’t do much directly for individual consumers. But it will allow Amazon’s Chinese partners to more easily and cost-effectively get their products across the Pacific in containers. Want to bet how long it will take Amazon to dominate the oceanic transport business? 67 The market to ship stuff (mostly) across the Pacific is a $ 350 billion business, but a low-margin one. Shippers charge $ 1,300 to ship a forty-foot container holding up to 10,000 units of product (13 cents per unit, or just under $ 10 to deliver a flatscreen TV). It’s a down-and-dirty business, unless you’re Amazon. The biggest component of that cost comes from labor: unloading and loading the ships and the paperwork. Amazon can deploy hardware (robotics) and software to reduce these costs. Combined with the company’s fledgling aircraft fleet, this could prove another huge business for Amazon. 68 Between drones, 757/ 767s, tractor trailers, trans-Pacific shipping, and retired military generals (no joke) who oversaw the world’s most complex logistics operations (try supplying submarines and aircraft carriers that don’t surface or dock more than once every six months), Amazon is building the most robust logistics infrastructure in history. If you’re like me, this can only leave you in awe: I can’t even make sure I have Gatorade in the fridge when I need it.