![[The Waterbury clan (Ron far left, Grandfather Waterbury, far right) with the Model T Ford of Ron's first automotive adventure.]](img/pg15_1.jpg)
How sick I became of riding in cars. How ghastly to me appeared trains. But I loved the sea. I loved steamers and sailboats and surf and sailors. And I yearned and strained to the sea, always the sea, for it is a lovely, vicious lonely thing. In its limitless variety I had a sort of HOME. There were surprises waiting on the other shore. And I saw the sea with an imaginative eye and peopled it today with all its dead yesterday. I was very, very young when I knew its tropical sunrises, its northern fog....
Oh, the anguish, the depression, the tragedy of youth! When I was sixteen I began to write in a big account ledger I had pirated from the “Old Brick.” I had lots to write about and in Puget Sound, at sea, in Washington, DC, in Helena, in Guam, I scribbled away. I wrote in a vein of outraged despair, wrote of Life and dreams and emotions and adventure. Then when I was twenty–two I found them and considered them childish, adolescent, most unwise. Then when I was twenty–eight I knew how childish and adolescent I was at twenty–two. And now at thirty-two I have seen again what I wrote when I was sixteen. I was right when I was sixteen. I knew things. My opinions were those of today. And so I have advanced in a circle and arrived merely at a better understanding of what ailed me when I was in my teens, and know that it still ails me.
...I have all the world around me. My walls are 180 East Longitude and 90 North and 90 South Latitude. And no man can stand such a large room. Man’s mind is constructed to be bounded by the lines of a town or a county or a small sea so that he can think quietly and wonderfully on what may lie beyond it and yet feel secure of what lies within it....
For my plight, you see, is knowing what is over the horizon. And having no place this side of it....
Adventure is my guidon. And now with the Ocean of the Air taking away all the surprises which might remain and with Mankind too puny, too cowardly, to conquest the outer space, I am here, here with the Will to Go, with nowhere to go....
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