Rest assured that this gull asks only two questions of any living thing: First, “Am I hungry?” (Answer: yes.) Second, “Can I get away with it?” (Answer: I’ll try.) —WILLIAM LEON DAWSON, BIRDS OF CALIFORNIA, 1923 — : 1507-1509
Steller’s sea lions, of which there were only a handful here, were meaty-looking big boys that you wouldn’t want to mess with, though the sharks occasionally did. A Steller’s bull was holding court near the Tit; his size, I thought, would daunt even a Sister. — : 2401-2403
Teahupoo, with its timeless power, brought to mind the age-old philosophical quest to distinguish between beauty and its twisted cousin, the sublime: for the merely pretty to graduate to the sublime, terror was required in the mix. “The Alps fill the mind with a kind of agreeable horror,” wrote one seventeenth-century thinker, summing up the concept. And while humans were capable of creating the lovely, the dramatic, the sad, or the inspiring, only nature could produce the sublime. It was a concept both comforting and disturbing: there are many things out there more powerful than we are. No one was more aware of this than the men who’d ridden Teahupoo on this day (except, perhaps, the ones who had fallen on it). — 61: 883-888