Here, as the river slows and broadens, a series of sun-kissed moments and rainy everyday travel, a time of small triumphs and tiny disasters, an odyssey of years.
They are a series of tiny disasters mixed in with growth, belly laughs, tantrums, exploration, interruptions, snot, whining, and squeaky chatter.
"It's like William Tell shooting an apple off his son's head," said Mr. Reed, the chief financial officer, "because the margin between success and disaster is tiny, it works best if the one who is aiming has a personal stake in the outcome".
As the news conference began to fall apart on Wednesday, and before he was whisked away from reporters by police for several hours of questioning, Mr. Burkhardt was asked if his tiny railroad's giant disaster would be its financial ruin.
Daimler is already losing money on two small cars it is building, the tiny Smart (a major disaster) and the Class A (a disappointment).
While the scope of yesterday's spill is clearly a tiny fraction of the Kalamazoo disaster, it's still not clear what kind and how much oil made its way into Lake Michigan from the refinery.
In six decades of film industry machinations, making everything from finely-honed art-movies to clodhopping, cast-of-thousands epics, De Laurentiis has experienced his fair share of triumphs and disasters; yet the tiny, tough-nosed operator has outlasted and outlived all his competitors, and could be on the threshold of his biggest hit yet.
Along similar lines, despite a widespread understanding that disasters undermine a significant proportion of international development spending, funding for reducing the risk of disasters is a tiny fraction of total development spending.
The disaster occured on the tiny island of Krakatau, a desolate 5-mile-long protuberance with no inhabitants.
The hope is that these could navigate disaster zones - moving through tiny crevices to locate survivors.
