Looking for the land that knows nothing of the sea

Have you read Homer’s epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey? I admit that I haven’t, and I don’t think I’m quite ready to tackle them. In spite of that, I have, however, for some time been familiar with the poem Ithaka which was reportedly inspired by the Odyssey. I first posted the poem back in 2010, and just last week posted a video with Sean Connery reading the poem. As the story goes, in the Odyssey the hero Odysseus is working to return to his home, Ithaka, after a decade away, fighting a long war. He is instructed to take an oar from his ship and to walk inland until he finds a “land that knows nothing of the sea,” a place where the oar would be mistaken for a winnowing fan. Winnowing? You can tell I’m not a farmer. I had to look that up too!

win·now
verb – gerund or present participle: winnowing
1. blow a current of air through (grain) in order to remove the chaff.

Anyways, after finding this place that knows nothing of the sea, Odysseus is told to offer a sacrifice to Poseidon, and upon doing so, his journeys would be over. Sounds simple, right?

I wonder if our friends who have swallowed the anchor and moved ashore have done this. My guess is that they haven’t. While I find it hard to believe that anyone in this day and age could mistake an oar for anything other than what it actually is, I bet I could find at least one or two things on our boat that would be unknown to a non-sailor!

We leave our oars in the dinghy. We do not take them up on top of the mountains that we climb!