From the New Haven (CT) Register, May 27, 1983:
“It was a question of solitude. George "Corky" Clark went looking for it in the mountains of Europe. He rode a 72-foot schooner from Tahiti and lived off the land for three months in the New Zealand wilderness. With Captain James Cook's diary in hand, he sailed from Fiji. The New York native spent five years camping, hunting and hiking from one exotic outpost to another, but he didn't find what he was looking for until he climbed a mountain in Ridgefield, Connecticut.”
Capt. Corky Clark has lived a life worth writing about. A USCG Master Captain with 50 years on the water, a founder of an adventure travel company, and a lifelong student of the natural world, Cork brings the same restless curiosity to the page that he's brought to every ocean, canyon, and coastline he's crossed.
Stories From a Wandering Mind is exactly that — a collection of tales drawn from decades of experience and a lifetime of reading, exploring, and paying close attention. One post finds Cork paddling deep into the Florida Everglades on a desperate search for two lost Japanese students. The next takes you to the deck of a WWII battleship, or to the last great gathering of free Plains Indians, or to the bottom of the sea where a Tudor longbowman's bones tell the story of a shor notable life.
History, geology, archaeology, and raw adventure sit comfortably side by side here. Cork writes about Napoleon's defeat at Trafalgar and a granite boulder in a Colorado canyon with equal enthusiasm, because to him they're part of the same story — the story of this planet, and of the brief, remarkable moment we get to inhabit it.What ties every post together is a voice: warm, witty, plainspoken, and deeply informed. Whether he's recounting a midnight boat delivery in Palm Beach or tracing the rise and fall of Port Royal — the wickedest city that ever sank into the sea — Cork writes the way a great storyteller talks: like he's been waiting all day to tell you this, and he thinks you're really going to like it.
There's always another story.
