Madness, Sanity, Sailing

Another passage from Maté, in his review of the Aleutka 26:

"I think we have gone mad. We rave about our unquenchable thirst for peace and tranquility, and sail for days to reach secluded coves, and yet the anchor barely hits the bottom before we are off in a dinghy with the outboard screaming and the hull slap, slapping the water, as we race up and down the shoreline "discovering nature". Madness. What can you discover with everything a blur and on top of that with your eyes rattling and your ears thundering and your nose filled with the smoke of half-burned gas and oil? To discover anything at all your have to watch and listen and to do that you have to move very slowly. You have to move slowly to see how a hawk spreads its pinfeathers as it circles over the trees, or how the rock crab moves among the crabgrass as it hunts, and you have to listen carefully to hear the wild goose cackle as it leads its young, and the oyster catcher cry "whee, whee, whee" as it's organge beak flashes among the rocks. And to see and understand it all deeply, you have to think-- think about the flooding of the tide, the ebbing of your years. To rob yourself of these joys is to rob yourself of understanding the world around you, and if you don't care about the world around you then you don't belong in it. Go away."