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The Gulf Stream: Encounters With the Blue God
In writing about life in and around the gulf stream, this book draws on folklore, science, technology and poetry to describe three years spent drifting around the great river within the sea. He has also written "Oil and Water".
- GenresHistory
Hardcover
First published February 1, 1989
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
March 20, 2016
I really enjoyed this writer, and although he lost me by the end, going from descriptive, awed poetry to sere historical recitation, there was much that was interesting and mind opening. The Blue God is the Gulf Stream, and it really was a powerful force in the European settling of the Americas. The idea of currents like conveyor belts seems like the tectonic movement of the continents. Motion, we are always in motion even when we feel, falsely, that we are still.
To take the metes and bounds of the Gulf Stream and the ocean waters of our planet, we must stand back. We must hitch a ride on a rocket, sit in a spaceship. Then we can see the oceans as they are, a domination of blue under the ermine scarves of the air… we sit in our high station, and the globe moves below. Motion around its axis, motion of the axis itself. Hundreds of miles above the amazon basin, we wait for the Andes to come under. Forest, peaks, stationary to all who lives among them, roll eastward toward the night. They appear to creep, yet they tear along, there on the equator, at more than a thousand miles an hour. They appear to go end over end in their equatorial circuit, while at the poles, the ice spins in place.
Together with the atmosphere-and they are always together, two fluids play in the spin of the earth-the oceans moisturize and moderate…a short while ago, I came home from the North Atlantic on that fine edge of exhilaration and exhaustion. I lay in our meadow in the afternoon, looking out at the hills across the Deerfield River. They moved. They became the swells I just left. I still had my sea legs; perhaps I also had my sea sight. I heard the wind flowing across the slop, bellying doen in the hay. Thoughts kited up before it. Air is in me, around me. It is my life.
No one has ever seen the whole Atlantic. Knowledge must come by proxy, from instruments and submersibles. With the lens of imagination, I tried to see what I could not. I conjured up the Atlantic basin, snaking across the equator, its artificial dividing line. In the north its deeps pinch out in large fjords, but at shallower depths it connects directly with the Arctic Ocean. With that addition, the Atlantic becomes the longest of oceans, a might strait from pole to pole- and beyond. There are few truly oceanic islands in the strait, most of them volcanic cones like Iceland and the Azores, and most of those associated with the Mid Atlantic Ridge.
To take the metes and bounds of the Gulf Stream and the ocean waters of our planet, we must stand back. We must hitch a ride on a rocket, sit in a spaceship. Then we can see the oceans as they are, a domination of blue under the ermine scarves of the air… we sit in our high station, and the globe moves below. Motion around its axis, motion of the axis itself. Hundreds of miles above the amazon basin, we wait for the Andes to come under. Forest, peaks, stationary to all who lives among them, roll eastward toward the night. They appear to creep, yet they tear along, there on the equator, at more than a thousand miles an hour. They appear to go end over end in their equatorial circuit, while at the poles, the ice spins in place.
Together with the atmosphere-and they are always together, two fluids play in the spin of the earth-the oceans moisturize and moderate…a short while ago, I came home from the North Atlantic on that fine edge of exhilaration and exhaustion. I lay in our meadow in the afternoon, looking out at the hills across the Deerfield River. They moved. They became the swells I just left. I still had my sea legs; perhaps I also had my sea sight. I heard the wind flowing across the slop, bellying doen in the hay. Thoughts kited up before it. Air is in me, around me. It is my life.
No one has ever seen the whole Atlantic. Knowledge must come by proxy, from instruments and submersibles. With the lens of imagination, I tried to see what I could not. I conjured up the Atlantic basin, snaking across the equator, its artificial dividing line. In the north its deeps pinch out in large fjords, but at shallower depths it connects directly with the Arctic Ocean. With that addition, the Atlantic becomes the longest of oceans, a might strait from pole to pole- and beyond. There are few truly oceanic islands in the strait, most of them volcanic cones like Iceland and the Azores, and most of those associated with the Mid Atlantic Ridge.
June 12, 2007
ben franklin is the bomb.
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