It is spring in New Mexico. So the central fact of physical existence is not sunlight -- as newbies might suppose -- but rather, horizontal gravity. Try leaving a building supply store with a 4' X 8' sheet of something! If you walk exactly into the wind, you might make it. But if you get 5 degrees off, you will "broach to," in nautical lingo. Then your load will fly horizontally into somebody's car.
On such a day recently celltower workers chose to climb the mast, all the way up to the crow's nest. I decided to park on the other side of the parking lot.
Imagine what it was like to be on the lookout for land in the crow's nest of a clipper ship, especially when the ship was heeled over at a 45 degree angle, and the length of the mast amplified the pitching and rolling of the ship.
I am usually careful to park my camper's bow straight into the wind, to reduce the side-buffeting, and to ensure the side entry door is slammed shut by the wind, instead of slammed open and damaged.
But one day I was parked exactly the wrong way. So I felt nervous all afternoon. But actually that was good: it helped me appreciate, more, the book I was reading. (Two Years Before the Mast, by Richard Henry Dana.)
I especially enjoyed reading about his return (1836) from the coast of Spanish California to Boston, via Cape Horn. Many analogies popped into my mind between his perilous effort to "round the cape" and the world's current struggle with the Corona virus.
But let's consider only one comparison. His shipmates were not sure they would get around the Horn. (The foolish captain had decided to try it at the bottom of the antipodal winter.) After all, longitude was not so easy to determine in those days if you were having chronometer problems. Even the latitude was difficult to determine with day after day of clouds and squalls.
How they yearned for some view of land and the first evidence that they were around the Horn. So too is our world looking forward to some data that the worst of the corona virus is behind us. What will be our equivalent of spotting land or an island?
My guess is that it will be higher gasoline prices. In fact even before the worst is over, financial speculators will probably start bidding up the price of gasoline.
On such a day recently celltower workers chose to climb the mast, all the way up to the crow's nest. I decided to park on the other side of the parking lot.
Imagine what it was like to be on the lookout for land in the crow's nest of a clipper ship, especially when the ship was heeled over at a 45 degree angle, and the length of the mast amplified the pitching and rolling of the ship.
I am usually careful to park my camper's bow straight into the wind, to reduce the side-buffeting, and to ensure the side entry door is slammed shut by the wind, instead of slammed open and damaged.
But one day I was parked exactly the wrong way. So I felt nervous all afternoon. But actually that was good: it helped me appreciate, more, the book I was reading. (Two Years Before the Mast, by Richard Henry Dana.)
I especially enjoyed reading about his return (1836) from the coast of Spanish California to Boston, via Cape Horn. Many analogies popped into my mind between his perilous effort to "round the cape" and the world's current struggle with the Corona virus.
But let's consider only one comparison. His shipmates were not sure they would get around the Horn. (The foolish captain had decided to try it at the bottom of the antipodal winter.) After all, longitude was not so easy to determine in those days if you were having chronometer problems. Even the latitude was difficult to determine with day after day of clouds and squalls.
How they yearned for some view of land and the first evidence that they were around the Horn. So too is our world looking forward to some data that the worst of the corona virus is behind us. What will be our equivalent of spotting land or an island?
My guess is that it will be higher gasoline prices. In fact even before the worst is over, financial speculators will probably start bidding up the price of gasoline.
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| From lookandlearn.com |
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