In Making War With Nature, There Was

In Making War With Nature, There Was Risk Of Loss In Winning.

Travel By Canoe Is Not A Necessity, And Will Nevermore Be The Most Efficient Way To Get From One Region To Another, Or Even From One Lake To Another Anywhere. A Canoe Trip Has Become Simply A Rite Of Oneness With Certain Terrain, A Diversion Off The Field, An Art Performed Not Because It Is A Necessity But Because There Is Value In The Art Itself.

A Writer Has To Have Some Kind Of Compulsive Drive To Do His Work. If You Don't Have It, You'd Better Find Another Kind Of Work, Because It's The Only Compulsion That Will Drive You Through The Psychological Nightmares Of Writing.

When The Climbers In 1953 Planted Their Flags On The Highest Mountain, They Set Them In Snow Over The Skeletons Of Creatures That Had Lived In The Warm Clear Ocean That India, Moving North, Blanked Out. Possibly As Much As Twenty Thousand Feet Below The Seafloor, The Skeletal Remains Had Turned Into Rock. This One Fact Is A Treatise In Itself On The Movements Of The Surface Of The Earth. If By Some Fiat I Had To Restrict All This Writing To One Sentence, This Is The One I Would Choose: The Summit Of Mt. Everest Is Marine Limestone.

Rocks Are Records Of Events That Took Place At The Time They Formed. They Are Books. They Have A Different Vocabulary, A Different Alphabet, But You Learn How To Read Them.