“This Curious World” comes from an address Henry Thoreau gave at commencement when he graduated from Harvard in 1837. He was 20 years old. He said, “This curious world which we inhabit is more wonderful than convenient; more beautiful than it is useful; it is more to be admired and enjoyed than used.” I was his age when I first read that and have taken my bearings from it ever since.
“A Guide’s Guide” comes from A Guide’s Guide to Panthertown Valley, a trail map I created and first published in 1996. Hikers tell me the Guide has helped them to explore and enjoy the wild gathering of valleys, mountains and creeks in the Nantahala National Forest called Panthertown. I hope this blog Guide will do the same for readers and rivers.
It’s “A” Guide, not “The.”
“Exploring” comes from the Latin explorare, to cry out or wail. The root meaning of the word goes back to the cries prehistoric hunters made while chasing game and bringing it to bay—while the hounds themselves bayed with excitement. Demanding courage, skill, fitness, endurance, and knowledge of the wilderness, primitive hunting was the crying out, the exploring, of the whole man. It became wailing when the prey fought back and drew blood, or escaped.
For me, writing this blog is a kind of explorare of “Wild rivers, Woods, and Words.” Words are the wildest things of all.
—Case in point!
“Blog”—a yoking together of “web-log.” The word is not listed in my Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary, which I’ve been using since 1974 when I was a student at the University of Oregon. But “web” is there. If Daniel Webster had published a dictionary in 1974 BC, it would have been there too, since the word “web” can be traced back through Old English and German and Greek to their common Indo-European mother tongue, where linguists think it was pronounced *(h)uebh, and meant “weave,” the craft of interlacing threads or yarn into fabric.
This primal meaning of “web” is woven into my dictionary’s title, Webster. “Webster” once meant a person who weaves. Trace Daniel Webster’s line back far enough, you’ll probably find weavers.
The most famous “webster” in history was the wife of Ulysses, Penelope. During her husband’s 20-year absence fighting in the Trojan War and then attempting to sail his perilous way back home, recounted in Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey, Penelope was faced with the threat of having to choose a new husband from one of the insolent suitors who crowded into her Great Hall every day and helped themselves to the estate’s meat, bread, and wine. Assuming Ulysses was long dead, the suitors, “their knees growing weak” with desire whenever they saw Penelope, began to press her to marry one of them. Eventually, their clamors growing ever more insistent and threatening, “the thoughtful woman” told the suitors she would make the choice after she finished weaving a shroud for Ulysses’ elderly father, Laertes—weaving she then secretly unraveled at night after the suitors, stuffed and drunk, stumbled off to their own homes.
As time passed you’d think the suitors, 108 of them, would have noticed Penelope was a very slow weaver! Though young, they were “high born” men, not stupid or uneducated. But abandoned as they were to their appetites, puffed up with self-conceit, they could not think clearly. Their intemperance and their arrogant violation of the customs of hospitality so important in the ancient world wove the unsuspecting men into a fearful reckoning when Ulysses finally did return. Disguising himself, and cunningly weaving together a plan of battle, Ulysses took his vengeance on the suitors with arrow, spear, and sword. Spilled wine and blood flowed together on the Great Hall’s floor; the banquet table groaned under the weight of more than savory meats.
“Log” is the other part of “blog,” and it is deeply rooted in our language too. It is related to Old English licgan, to lie, as in some big, inert, stolid thing lying flat out on the ground. Push against the trunk of a tree that’s been felled, and in its heavy resistance you’ll feel the essence of . . . log.
If Penelope is a famous weaver, Jesus, in Matthew 7, shows his power as a holy teacher with his masterful use of the word “log.” In his Sermon on the Mount, he asks: “Why do you see the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not see the log that is in your own eye? Or how can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when there is the log in your own eye? You hypocrite! first take the log out of your own eye!” To take the heavy, ponderous “log” of evil out of your own eye will require heavy lifting indeed. To move that log, you are going to need help beyond mere mortal capability. Hence, he urges those who follow him: “Seek . . . ask . . . knock.”
In the centuries before Jesus, early mariners took advantage of a log’s immobile nature to help them find their way. Setting sail on dangerous seas of fluidity and change, they would drop a small log off the stern of their ship, with a measured line tied to it. The time required for the line to play out, as the ship sailed on, was the speed they were “logging,” noted in the ship’s “log book.” In a given day a ship would “log” a known distance of travel. A destination was so-many “logs” away.
In time, equally spaced knots were tied to the log line, the rate of travel being recorded in the captain’s log as “knots.” And the cumbersome log itself was replaced by a more easily handled triangular piece of wood that served the same purpose, called a “chip log.”
From sailing ships to jet planes, from a written log of speed and distance traveled to full-blown accounts of what took place during the course of almost any kind of trip at all, travelers of all kinds have been logging away ever since.
In 1999 the word “log” as a personal account or narration was pulled into the nanosecond-workings of computers and joined with “web” to designate sites called “blogs.” Today millions of bloggers via a planetary internet of lines and electrons record their thoughts, experiences, and discoveries on every conceivable topic and post them on the World Wide Web. To write this blog, I had to “Login” to Bluehost, then click “Log into” WordPress, which allowed me to “log on” to my personal site and set sail.
Now, having ventured out onto the Word Wild Web to explore the word “blog” itself, I’ll steer my little bark back to port and “log out.”
Rivers are wild. So are woods. Words are the wildest things of all.