Imagine what it must have felt like to be on that ship, on tumultuous, fathomless waters, for days--months--on end, without ever really knowing what lay beyond the next wave. What sort of courage, and what sort of awe, did it take to be able to experience and live that way?
I was born here, and have probably spent more than 90% of my life on these lands. The "Great White North"-- or the "New World" as it was then referred to in the times I now refer to. And even though I have easy access, relatively, to all the greatness and beauty that is right here, stretching from ocean to ocean, I have yet to experience it myself.
Instead, I daydream about other lands. About hopping on a plane, no less, to get there. There is hardly any treachery to be risked, no more precocious, shaky, hand-built ships to board and voyage upon. Instead, ironically, all that treachery is no longer on realms out of grasp. It's all now deeply entrenched within me.
And when I think what it took to be, in those days, stuck in a place--even if it was a vehicle--that you could not really escape from, lest chance your entire life, even as you were doing while remaining where you were, imagine the wonder of distant lands, and never really knowing what they were, and how far they stretched. That was a heroism that couldn't ever be replicated.
For, today we have all this technology that gives us a huge summation of all the information we have striven for, since then, to know. A Google search is now our voyage on oceans. The limits of the 'unknown' have been stretched and exploited. And we are still not satisfied.
It's hardly any wonder we cast our eyes to the sky. We look to both inanimate and animate, and seek for meaning. Inspiration even.
All I want to do now, though, is turn my ship around, and retrace those waves that will never again exist. To pull back the stones I have cast into a million ripples, to retrace the steps that have turned my whole ship into the sea of chaos and retie the two severed ends of rope that has lost me my anchor.
