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By Root 228 0

trees cluttered the horizon. The air smelled of wet leaves. And when the months of summer’s swampy heat arrived, we craved a breeze blown off the sea. So we piled into the family station wagon and lumbered out to the beach. First past the cornfields and chicken farms, then through the sandy stands of short pines and the tiny getting-to-the-beach towns with clapboard houses and small wooden churches. We spent a week lying on towels spread over sand too hot for the bottoms of our feet and diving through dingy waves. On the other side of the break, I floated on my back with my toes to the sky and at night I would fall asleep feeling the rise and fall of the sea inside me. I took shells home to arrange along the windowsill to remind myself of where the land stops and the water begins.

Perhaps this pull to the sea is in my genes. My grandfather was a captain in Britain’s Royal Navy and served during World War II. As a young officer, he kept a scrupulous journal that documented the activities of the ship and included hand-drawn diagrams of ports, riggings, and engine parts. Later in his career, he wrote a manual about piloting the waters off Ireland’s rocky coast. Maybe deep in my cells lies a need to know these things: how to navigate rocky shores, how to name the parts of a ship, how to feel comfortable with the sea.

But once in Alaska, I felt adrift and confused. I was a stranger in a place where days were quartered by the tides, where the year was marked by seasons of fish. I was marooned by words I didn’t know: beam, bilge, pitch, draft. People spoke about the surface of the sea with common words made foreign: lumpy, messy, calm as glass. There were so many words to learn—no fewer than three dozen to describe sea ice, including pancake, rind, fast, and brash—and countless more to describe boat types and parts. John learned new terms quickly and used them easily, confidently. For me, learning each word became a small act of appropriation, and I felt my mouth form around these foreign sounds tentatively. “Skiff,” I said to myself many times before I used it aloud. These small, open boats are as ubiquitous as cars in coastal Alaska. Skiff, skiff. The sound traveled backward from the front of my mouth, between the tip of my tongue and the space behind my top front teeth to the round hill of my tongue. Then back out to my lips, where the sound of “iff” dammed up between my lower lip and front teeth.

For years, Alaska had been the territory of my dreams and aspirations. And once I arrived, I wanted nothing else than to feel at home here. But, having grown up in East Coast suburbs where dead ends were referred to as cul-de-sacs and where my main skills were playing Chopin nocturnes and getting good grades in school, nothing I had known before seemed useful here. I was surrounded by people who boasted local know-how and carried around the knowledge of fish, tides, boats, and weather as ballast. This was how people navigated this place, and how they possessed it. And from the moment I arrived, gaining this knowledge seemed the only way to feel like I belonged.

But becoming comfortable with the feel of new words in my mouth was not enough. I had to learn their meaning, and the patterns in fish and weather, the behavior of the sea, which governs life here. I learned that on sunny summer days a strong wind would pick up across the bay. This day breeze was created when warm air rose up from the land and sucked in cold air lurking above the sea to fill its place. It could lift the surface of the bay two or three feet and aggravate tiderips, but would predictably lie down in the late evening when the temperature dropped and fishing boats returned to the harbor. I learned the cycles of the tides and studied the seasons of fish—when to expect herring, halibut, hooligan, or salmon. I needed to know the difference between a seiner and a longliner, between reds, pinks, silvers, and kings. I needed to know the feel of a following sea and the risk of wind against tide.

I learned too that to live by the sea was to be pummeled by constant change.