FISHING IN THE HUDSON'S GORGE 365 



impossible to realize that my city was only an hour 

 away by plane and a day by steaming. The sea 

 stretched unbroken to the horizon just as it had 

 done week after week, and month after month in 

 the Atlantic and in the Pacific, and our senses and 

 our minds insisted that we were still thousands of 

 miles from anywhere. 



A recently conceived plan only added to this 

 conviction of distance. Our homeward-bound pen- 

 nant with its one hundred and eighty feet of 

 length, for the hundred and eighty days we should 

 have been away, was furled, ready to be broken out, 

 but no thought of packing had entered our minds. 

 We were all still in woollen shirts, khaki shorts and 

 sneakers which had been our entire garb for half 

 a year. The odious stiff collars and shirts, the 

 silly colored strings of neckties, the funereal dinner 

 jackets, together with all the other uncomfortable 

 and unlovely portions of civilized attire were still 

 packed away, snuggled among moth balls in the 

 hold. My plan was that our last station — Number 

 One Hundred and Thirteen — should be here in 

 the depths of this royal gorge of the Hudson River, 

 within reach of what was once by far the greatest 

 waterfall in the world, and today a scant hundred 

 miles from our city of New York. 



I was about to grope beneath half a mile of 

 water for vague hints of whatever life the fingers 

 of my dangling nets might bring up, and so it 

 seems not unreasonable to look back through past 

 ages to the time when this gorge roared with the 

 thundering stream of the Hudson, and to attempt 



