The Sound of Water

From a recent river client of mine (I won't call him a passenger, for obvious reasons), to our entire crew:

Dear Group:

I thought I would pass along the an excerpt from Mark Twain's Life on the Mississippi (Chap. 9), which I recently ran across and may strike a chord will our stalwart oarsmen and oarswomen, as well as with those others who who believe you have risen above the level of "passenger":

The face of the water, in time, became a wonderful book -- a book that was a dead language to the uneducated passenger, but which told its mind to me without reserve, delivering its most cherished secrets as clearly as if it uttered them with a voice. And it was not a book to be read once and thrown aside, for it had a new story to tell every day. Throughout the long twelve hundred miles there was never a page that was void of interest, never one that you could leave unread without loss, never one that you would want to skip, thinking you could find higher enjoyment in some other thing. There never was so wonderful a book written by man; never one whose interest was so absorbing, so unflagging, so sparklingly renewed with every re-perusal. The passenger who could not read it was charmed with a peculiar sort of faint dimple on the surface (on the rare occasions when he did not overlook it altogether); but to the pilot that was an italicized passage ....

Hope all is well. 

Platt