By Stu Whitley
Bio
This is third in a five-part series.
It is inevitable that the pressures of the past that are felt by the present have to be contained in some sort of manageable context. Life must be worth living.Gazing upward to the crumbling decks of
those forlorn leviathans from my canoe on the Yukon River, I wondered
about the men who worked those paddlewheel steamers. Back-breaking work
it must have been to feed those enormous furnaces. Even the ship’s
wheel needed to be six feet across to achieve the mechanical advantage
necessary to turn the fat twin rudders under the paddlewheel. It must
have required Herculean