small wonder that men
hold boats in the secret place
cradle to the grave

Men who ache allover for tidiness and compactness in their lives often find relief for their pain in the cabin of a thirty-foot sailboat at anchor in a sheltered cove.

Here the sprawling panoply of The Home is compressed in orderly miniature and liquid delirium, suspended between the bottom of the sea and the top of the sky, ready to move on in the morning by the miracle of canvas and the witchcraft of rope.

It is small wonder that men hold boats in the secret place of their mind, almost from the cradle to the grave.

From the essay The Sea and the Wind that Blows by E. B. White and published in The Ford Times, June 1963 and re-published in The Essays of EB White by EB White (Harper and Row, New York, 1977).