The Flying Wire

In 1991, a Frenchman named Gerard d’Aboville rowed across the Pacific Ocean. Alone. With no support crews. Or weather routing. Or Mission Control at Houston Space Flight Center to monitor his vehicle through the Tracking Data Relay Satellite system. It was an incredible accomplishment: one that prompts astonishment, disbelief, and two distinctly different reactions. People who Get It say, “Wow!”. People who Don’t Get It say, “Why!”

Both of these reactions are quite reasonable. But the gulf between them is vast. In an effort to bridge it, I offer this quotation from d’Aboville himself, in an interview with Paul Theroux:

“Only an animal does useful things. An animal gets food, finds a place to sleep, tries to keep comfortable. But I wanted to do something that was not useful, not like an animal at all. Something only a human being would do.”

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 25th, 2010 at 5:08 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.