Sure, when I'm in Hawaii and it's, like, a pole-caught opah - you know, a deepwater fish - I might eat sushi. I think it was about two years ago, I just realized that anybody who eats a lot of sushi right now is in denial. Russia dumped a whole nuclear reactor in the ocean, and so far it doesn't even seem as though that has had all that much effect, because the ocean has gone on for millions and millions and millions of years, and we're this little blip doing all this damage. The ocean is incredibly, miraculously able to handle a lot. Even after all this time, we continue to treat the ocean as our dumping ground, our toilet. But every so often, there'll be a European crew, like the Derbyshire - the biggest British ship ever lost at sea in about 1980 - and then you hear about it.ĭG: Okay, so not only are people and boats going down, but one of the things that freaked me out reading your book was that the boats' toxic cargoes sink, too. Most people are like, How come I've never heard of this? And the reason they've never heard of it is that most of the ships that are lost are, say, a Liberian ship with a Laotian crew, and it was a rust bucket to begin with, and it just cracked in half when a 70-foot wave hit it in the middle of the North Atlantic. And so, occasionally, I'm compelled to tell people this, and they never believe me. And in this book I learned that the earth's oceans swallow something like two large ships every week. Because they're so much bigger, and they're a force of nature as opposed to an animal that might eat you.ĭG: So I read this new book, and it's called The Wave. Waves are scarier than, say, great white sharks. But I'm just not going to let fear ever stop me from doing anything in the ocean. We join the conversation, midstream:ĭAVID GRANGER: So you really like the ocean.ĭG: I remember, shortly after I met you, that I heard that you swam in a race from one Hawaiian island to another. Esquire editor in chief David Granger spoke with her, editor to editor. And many of you will recall that she has often written for this magazine. Casey is an extremist - a former world-class swimmer and competitive cyclist - and she's also the editor in chief of O, the Oprah Magazine. There are a couple themes in her writing: Her books are about the ocean and they're about things that would scare sensible humans senseless.
Her first book was The Devil's Teeth, and it was about great white sharks. It's about massive ocean waves - the science behind both monsters of up to 1,700 feet that destroy supertankers and the kinds of 100-foot waves that surfers like Laird Hamilton get off on attempting to ride.
The Wave (Doubleday, $28) is Susan Casey's second book.
0 kommentar(er)
