Sublime

Mokhtar had grown up in San Francisco, surrounded by water—oceans and bays and rivers, estuaries and lakes. He’d spent years in Yemen, a country with a twelve-hundred-mile coast. He’d gone to middle school on Treasure Island, an actual island. But he’d never been on a boat. He’d always wanted to, but the ferries and yachts and sailboats he’d seen t

the Hercules’s lifeboats. Our American mole had reported that the ship they used is much faster than we were led to believe. He should call me soon to tell me how it went, but

Yet a sailor's life is at best, but a mixture of a little good with much evil, and a little pleasure with much pain. The beautiful is linked with the revolting, the sublime with the commonplace, and the solemn with the ludicrous.

My purpose in going to Walden Pond was not to live cheaply nor to live dearly there, but to transact some private business with the fewest obstacles; to be hindered from accomplishing which for want of a little common sense, a little enterprise and business talent, appeared not so sad as foolish.

In March 1978, Waterman embarked on his most astonishing expedition, a solo ascent of Mt. Hunter’s southeast spur, an unclimbed route that had previously defeated three teams of elite mountaineers.

Call me Ishmael.