This guy took a pin and stuck it in the map south of Hawaii. He said that a carrier group, that is an aircraft carrier with the attendant cruisers, destroyers, supply ships and submarines took up less room than that pin point.

I was impressed. I did NOT point out that I, me, alone, took up even less room and would be harder to find than an aircraft carrier, but I thought it.

I remember because there were times I remembered that thought, when it seemed as if I could be found a lot more easily than those ships and regretted my smugness.

I started to think that the best situation would be to try to find a spot on the carrier to hide. I think my rich uncle didn’t really have much of an interest in seeing I wasn’t found, I was expendable, but did have an interest in protecting that carrier and my best option would have been to hide behind its’ skirts. But it was too late.

Unless you’ve crossed a major portion of the world at a speed that can be visualized directly by the human mind (on foot, on horseback, or on a ship), it is really impossible to get an emotional, instinctive grasp of just how big this planet really is, and how small we and all our works are.

We have such pride in our pathetic little tools, our radar and our satellites, our radios and our procedures and regulations, that it is difficult to understand how futile they are when facing the abyss.

Personally, I’m amazed disappearances like this one don’t happen a lot more often.