The two missing kids from Florida

I keep looking at the news hoping to see that they found the two boys in Florida lost at sea. It's not clear to me what the story is. Were they going to the Bahamas? Did their parents allow them to take the 19 foot boat out on the ocean or not? They were last seen buying $110 worth of fuel. Would they need that much if they weren't going to the Bahamas? For a while, I had the impression that they told their parents they were going fishing and told their friends they were going to the Bahamas but I don't know if this is true. The family had vacationed there and the kid knew he'd need a passport if he was going there.

I know there are worse things happening in the world. The kids were relatively rich, apparently. One attended the weirdly named Jupiter Christian School. It's not every day you see a Christian school named after a Roman god. It sounds like their mothers are continuing to insist that they had plenty of experience boating and knew what they were doing.

They were in a 19 foot boat. It was hard for me to picture, but I had a couple of full-size American cars that were about 18 feet long. Their boat was a bit longer than a 1970 Buick, and that's not big enough. 

I had a great uncle who was half-Indian. He was born in the 1880s. He died before I was born. But he grew up among the Indians and had an uncanny ability to find his way through the woods even at night in total darkness. He amazed people by walking a dangerous trail along the side of a cliff at night in almost total darkness. And HE was afraid to go into the woods by himself. It's dangerous. You can get killed out there.

That's what I think about when I see people who think they're attuned to nature walking off into the wilderness. And now we have people in Florida claiming that sending children out on the ocean in a small boat is part of their "culture". No, it's not. They haven't been there long enough to develop a genuine culture. If they had, they wouldn't do things like this.