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Two Years Before the Mast
by Richard Dana was
intended as a proto-muckraking exposé of
sailors' hard use by miserly owners and
abusive captains, and it did do some good to
that end, but now 180 years later it still
reads fresh and opens a window on a
relatively recent time when it took months
of death-defying travel to get from Boston
to California.
☜ This passage struck me because I too had
first-hand experience of a corposant (a neat
contraction of corpus sancti). It
was the tail end of the single most
memorable day of my life, while riding in
back of pickup truck being taken by
strangers to unknown fate, that I saw a ball
of neon yarn unfurl across the sky,
scrawling a trail of electric fire. I
expressed my amazement at what I'd seen to
our impromptu hostesses but Crystal brushed
it off, "Oh, that's just bawwl lightnin'."
No big deal.
This occured after an intense late summer
thunderstorm, a common occurence because of
the topography. So if you ever hope to see
it, you might do worse than to visit Lake Wallace.
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