INLANDER BY THE SEA
BOHN, WILLIAM E.
The Home Front Inlander by the Sea By William E. Bohn DOWN IN DELAWARE we have our own Atlantic City. It has a Biblical name, Rehoboth—though there is nothing Biblical about it except the...
...I compared this wild and wide and practically unexplored ocean with the completely tamed and systematized expanses of my boyhood...
...among them, doubtless, creatures as strange as any which have been brought to our wondering gaze...
...Those who go out to sea will forever be challenged by mighty and mysterious forces...
...But this does not by any means, tend to reduce man's view of his own importance or his faith in his own will...
...It has a Biblical name, Rehoboth—though there is nothing Biblical about it except the fact that time is divided into night and day, with the moon to mark the one and the sun that other...
...But I have a fixed belief that they can never conquer them, master them, make them tame and common and ordinary and harmless...
...Their words keep coming back—"the sounding sea," "the hollow sea," "the dark sea...
...In the long look across the ridges of the past, what is most conspicuous is that the nations which stand out are the ones which knew what they believed and were willing to stand up for iheir belief...
...Perhaps, in the end, men will understand alt the strange forms of life...
...It happened that the friends with whom we lived and Boated and walked did not take a daily paper...
...But I truly better* that they will nevejr completely conquer the Watery wastes...
...Last weekend I was down there by the sounding sea thinking all the thoughts that roll in with the waves...
...It is probably not just because the Athenians wrote so supremely of marine experiences...
...But every time I go through a new one, I am struck by the thought that much of the bottom of the sea is actually unknown...
...Our tragic situation, viewed in the perspective of the endless succession of civilizations, seems less fatal than it Usually does to our near-sighted eyes...
...Strange as it may seem, in the presence of the wide-stretching sea and sky the last hot headlines faded out of memory...
...When we motored into Rehoboth, a wild storm was lashing across the sky...
...The world of the water and the sand and the rimming pine forests was more than usually a universe by itself...
...There must be countless beings there below which have not been weighed and measured, described and classified...
...The scudding foam was tossed so high that sea and sky could hardly be distinguished...
...I am told that there are on land a few spots which have not yet been explored—in South America, in Africa, in the recesses of Asia...
...But I could not wait...
...I WAS GLAD THAT I WENT BEYOftD the dunes and onto the beach on that wild afternoon...
...The others, practically bred within sound of the surf, could wait...
...The ocean is the only unplotted waste which we shall ever know...
...There by that troubled tide—as always by the sea, whether in calm or storm—I found] myself thinking of the Greeks...
...So one's mind, being symbolically stimulated, tends to look forward and back...
...They can sail over them...
...We had no more interest in current events than Thoreau walking along the shore of Cape Cod...
...Sea and sky stretch away and away...
...And when we look back, the men we see first arc, most likely, Plato, Aristotle or Achilles...
...On land the mingled surf and the sand were being carried far up over houses and roadways...
...In fact, the surface of the waters lashed to fury is so different from the safe and calm world of my boyhood, that is always held a special charm...
...Any native of the inland plain yearns for the ocean or for the mountains—perhaps, as in my case, for both...
...The Iliad and the Anabasis seem as near as yesterday's newspaper...
...WE SHALL...
...Despite all scoffing and warning, I had to hurry down to the beach...
...It was the sort of watery world out of which it would have seemed normal to see strange monsters writhe forth...
...But very few of us will ever get near these far places...
...For three days we were shut away from Congress and conferences of Foreign Ministers...
...These meditations naturally led in the direction of Toynbee and successive rise and fall of nations...
...It must be, rather, because by the water one has far horizons...
...A certain stoicism—• if not hope—may be attained in the perspective of millennia...
...Books on oceanography I have always lapped up as children devour the funnies or romantic maidens the best-sellers...
...IN TIME, widen our knowledge...
...The sight and sound of the deep had wrought a change in us...
...They can evetl, irf submarines and diving bells, penetrate deep into them...
...They, can fish up the inmates of them...
...But for me, who had not even seen or heard the ocean-sea until well past my twentieth year, the storm had no terrors...
...My boyhood was spent where there was no water wider or more dangerous than the brook which crossed the meadow...
Vol. 32 • June 1949 • No. 23
