A River of an Ocean

A while ago I mentioned Simon Winchester's book, Atlantic.

Celebrating the magnificent diversity of this colossal body of sea water, Winchester pens these stirring words:

"[T]he Atlantic Ocean [is] a sinuous snakelike river of an ocean, stretching thousands of miles from the Stygian fogs of the north to the Roaring Forties in the south, riven with deeps in its western chasms, dangerous with shallows in eastern plains, a place of cod and flying fish, of basking sharks and blue-finned tuna, of gyres of Sargasso weed and gyres of unborn hurricanes, a placed of icebergs and tides, whirlpools and sandbanks, submarine canyons and deep-sea black smokers and ridges and seamounts, of capes and rises and fracture zones, of currents hot, cold, torrential, and languorous, of underwater volcanoes and earthquakes, of stromatolites and cyanobacteria and horseshoe crabs, of seabird colonies, of penguins and polar bears and manta rays, of giant squid and jellyfish and their slow-and-steady southern majesties, the great and glorious wandering albatrosses."

Such it is!

Our latest Ocracoke Newsletter is the curious story of Vera/Charlie Williams. You can read it here: http://www.villagecraftsmen.com/news052114.htm.