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Updated: May 16, 2025
"Where the dull thunder and the tossing spray warned us from sunken reefs, we heard the harsh challenges of gulls; where the pallid surf twisted in yellow coils of spume above the bar, the singing sands murmured of treachery and secrets of lost souls agasp in the throes of silent undertows.
Though he was in this situation not more than one minute, yet it seemed to him to be an hour of torture, so intense was the agony experienced; and yet it was beyond a doubt his salvation in the end, for he had by chance struck one of those violent undertows that prevail in all these fresh water inland seas, which defy all philosophical calculation, and which bore him with the speed of an arrow for two hundred rods far away from the spot where he had a second time sunk below the surface, until, as he once more rose to the surface, he found himself so far away from the boat that he could not possibly be recognized.
They delighted to set their faces to the open and breast steadily out to sea, rejoicing in the conquest of the waves. But he always watched over her with solicitous care, for there are currents, and cross-currents, and treacherous undertows round those coasts, and the wary swimmer is the wiser man.
He spoke first of the weird tricks of the Alaskan waters, and of strange forces deep down under the surface which he had never had explained to him, and of how he had lost a cask once upon a time, and a week later had run upon it well upon its way to Japan. He emphasized the hide-and-seek playfulness of the undertows and the treachery of them. Then he came bluntly to the point of the matter.
You see how easy and flowing it is; how unvexed by ruggednesses, clumsinesses, broken meters; how simple and so far as you or I can make out unstudied; how clear, how limpid, how understandable, how unconfused by cross-currents, eddies, undertows; how seemingly unadorned, yet is all adornment, like the lily-of-the-valley; and how compressed, how compact, without a complacency-signal hung out anywhere to call attention to it.
They are the cyclones and tornadoes, lightning flashes and cloud-bursts, tide-rips and tidal waves, undertows and waterspouts, great whirls and sucks and eddies, earthquakes and volcanoes, surfs that thunder on rock-ribbed coasts and seas that leap aboard the largest crafts that float, crushing humans to pulp or licking them off into the sea and to death and these insensate monsters do not know that tiny sensitive creature, all nerves and weaknesses, whom men call Jack London, and who himself thinks he is all right and quite a superior being.
When the dogwood blossom, everywhere, breaks into white foam upon the soft billows of woodland green, and the sap stirs then the old and crabbed bitterness of life stands aside for the coming of Love. If one be young and free, one feels, admittedly or subconsciously, the deep tides that sing to sentiment and the undertows that pull to passion.
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