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Mid Atlantic, voyaging home, nothing but water and wave on the horizon, I’m thinking of all those who made this trip before.

Science has so far ruled out sapient life springing up in the Americas. Seems we’re all either Asian or African, so no matter when or how all New World groups can technically be called arrivals. As arrivals we might all be thought colonizers.

How’s that for a notion?

My thought, however, falls somewhat nearer in time. When the French (no denying it was them) first penetrated our region in depth and number enough to be recorded, they traveled essentially the same as the existing population. Basic. Foot and canoe. Limited travel was also leveling. Everyone working on the same terms.

Took a while, of course, for native and European interests to sort out. The French (sometimes called an inexplicable group) decided after prolonged invasion to give up the entire affair.

From our region down to New Orleans (French, isn’t it?) and west, they sold out with the thought a wasteland full of furs wasn’t worth the bother. We might say that was a poor call.

The means by which early expansion was carried out by French, English, Dutch, Spanish, Russian and Portuguese invaders was relatively crude. Their ships managed the transit and trade, but it wasn’t easy.

A common seaman had to (as the saying goes) know the ropes; ropes in their many thousands that made the ship work. So it was that early incursions into the Americas was relatively slow and limited in number.

What changed? Maybe the question should be what did we change?

A mere two hundred years ago (only eight generations) small wooden sailing ships began turning into larger and larger vessels with metal hulls and wind power gradually gave way to steam. Not that long ago, is it?

The mining of ore and coal had to increase and improve, as did production of iron and steel.

If not impressed, you should be.

One metal-hulled vessel replaced a flock of wood sail ships, and with steam was able to “sail” without wind.

I think of my grandmother, Helen. We called her Busha. Was she even five feet tall? How did she manage to leave from behind the lines in Central Europe during WWI and make it to the US with my one-year-old dad in tow?

Of course she did not do it alone. She traveled with others by rail and ship, all relatively new and recently improved methods of travel. In other words, the journey of an individual wasn’t isolated. It was part of something larger. Interesting, if we pause to reflect.

Think, a scant generation later soldiers in WWII looked at the same mid-Atlantic waters. What did they think, feel and experience?

Even if lucky enough to be put in an ocean liner, it would have been converted for wartime use by soldiers not passengers. Picture yourself going up from below deck for some air and to escape the stench of sick. Cool air hitting the face, the recruit looked out on a gray horizon of nothing. What a feeling that had to be. What did it foretell of the future? Would they be among those who’d make the trip back home?

Awful as they felt their time to be, it was less arduous in torture and duration than that of earlier travelers by steam or sail.

My thoughts of the past are simply that, empty imaginings. But no matter how ill considered or far off my thoughts might go, I have only to sit at luncheon table with chatty strangers to think I’m not too off.

Imagine a voice going on-on about refurbished Notre Dame and how nice it was to see the place tidied up for the appreciation of the “We’re not religious.”

To some, then, the fire was a good prompt for removal of hundreds of years of candle smoke.

I admit. I’d not thought of that. I’m more of the mind that sanitizing an experience is like holding Lenin’s preserved hand. Cleaning and preserving can come at the cost of having a living experience.

To me it’s like believing a video of a campfire is real enough to provide warmth.

My mental quibbles, however, seemed rather silly and meaningless when another sitter at the table asked. “Did they fix the electrics in the cathedral?”

I was stunned. What a wondrous wonderful question to ask of someone who has as much chance to know as I have of telling you the maintenance schedule for a nuclear submarine.

Why even ask, except that in the lazy comfort of a cruise ship dining room hearing one’s voice pretend to say something important and reasonable. After all, wouldn’t it only be a serious and important person who’d ask about Notre Dame’s wiring? Well, wouldn’t it?

You or I might think the value of the question should count, but that concern counts as none at the lunch gathering where expertise on Egypt rides on having sat a camel outside (couldn’t very well be otherwise) the pyramids in 2015.

The fact is, I put bluntly, that empty heads eat lunch too. So there. In any case, I’m more than happy to soon be missing out on these lunch-time adventures into impromptu silliness and pomp, as in pompous.

Shoot me, or in this case throw me overboard, if ever I get too pumped up with fluff. I may not be the friendliest or most jovial of folk, but overselling is something I try to avoid, as with plague.

I wonder. Was it the stern words of a teaching nun, one of many Sister Mary Alice Stormtroopers who pulled my ear, made a lasting impression saying “Empty barrels make the most noise.”

For some reason (who knows) I didn’t want to be an empty barrel, not, I must admit, that I knew in any detail what a barrel was. Barrels were not everyday items even in my day.

But somehow I knew and to this day stand comfortably on the thought that if I am an empty barrel I should try not to show it.