Foreword
The sea was there, deep cobalt, immense, rising like a great saucer to the blue horizon, where it was impossible to see a defining line between water and sky.
It staggered me, stopped my breath, stopped all of me dead on the deck when I first saw it.
I was seven years old on a troopship heading to the Philippine Islands. We had left San Francisco some ten days earlier but I had not seen the ocean yet. I had chicken pox when we left, and my mother and the captain had smuggled me into the ship in the dark, wrapped in a blanket, and kept me in a small cabin without a porthole, down inside the boat so that I could not infect the rest of the crew or the soldiers on board. I stayed there until I was past the infectious stage.
But I had smelled it, the sea, and heard it against the side of the ship at night over the sound of the engine, the
swish-roar
of it down the steel sides and through the propellers at the stern and I knew it was there.
But I had not seen it until just now, when my mother had come down inside the boat to get me, breathlessly telling me that a plane full of people was going to crash near the ship and that I should come to watch.
I did not know how to get out, but I scrambled after her up ladders and through the hatches and down an alleyway until she opened a heavy metal hatch door and we stepped out on the deck, and I stopped dead.
For a second or two the sun off the water and the striking color were so brilliant that they seemed to burn through my eyes into my brain and I didn’t truly see anything.
Then my eyes adjusted and it was there before me, blue, grandly blue and huge, filling me with a thrilling joy that completely took me over.
The plane crashed and broke in half near the ship, and the sharks that had been following the troopship moved to the women and children in the water, many of whom were bleeding into the water from injuries. The attack was fast, ripping, savage. Some of the people were killed and many others left with terrible wounds that I would see later when they came aboard the ship from the lifeboats. I was horrified and have written of the horror in another book, but it affected me in a way that I did not fully comprehend then, and did not know until later.
Terrible as it was, I found the attack not frightening but somehow natural, a part of what I was seeing for the first time.
I had heard the sailors talking about sharks. I knew that they attacked things, killed and ate, and were an eternal part of the sea. I marveled at their sleek beauty as they left the ship and moved into the crash area; gray and streamlined, they fit the blue of the water and the bright sun.
Screams and the sounds of people dying filled the air. But even so, I found myself looking out across the expanse of water on the other side of the ship, away from the sinking plane and struggling people.
The water moved up to the sky, beckoning. It pulled me in a way that I knew was important, even at the age of seven, a way that was profoundly vital and would never leave me.
We were on the slow ship for several weeks as we took the survivors back to Hawaii and then sailed on to Okinawa and the Philippines. I spent uncounted hours sitting at the bow looking at the water and the sky, studying each wave, different from the last, seeing how it caught the light, the air, the wind; watching the patterns, the sweep of it all, and letting it take me.
The sea.
1
The First Sail
I was discharged from the army after nearly four years, most of it spent at Fort Bliss, Texas, in May of 1962. I hated every second of my time in the army and although I was still very young, I did not think I could salvage the time I had just wasted, or that I could save my ruined life. I know how ridiculous that sounds now, but the feeling was real then. I remember sitting in my old truck in El Paso, Texas, thinking that I was done, had no future, and the thought popped in out of nowhere that if I didn’t see water soon I would
The sea was there, deep cobalt, immense, rising like a great saucer to the blue horizon, where it was impossible to see a defining line between water and sky.
It staggered me, stopped my breath, stopped all of me dead on the deck when I first saw it.
I was seven years old on a troopship heading to the Philippine Islands. We had left San Francisco some ten days earlier but I had not seen the ocean yet. I had chicken pox when we left, and my mother and the captain had smuggled me into the ship in the dark, wrapped in a blanket, and kept me in a small cabin without a porthole, down inside the boat so that I could not infect the rest of the crew or the soldiers on board. I stayed there until I was past the infectious stage.
But I had smelled it, the sea, and heard it against the side of the ship at night over the sound of the engine, the
swish-roar
of it down the steel sides and through the propellers at the stern and I knew it was there.
But I had not seen it until just now, when my mother had come down inside the boat to get me, breathlessly telling me that a plane full of people was going to crash near the ship and that I should come to watch.
I did not know how to get out, but I scrambled after her up ladders and through the hatches and down an alleyway until she opened a heavy metal hatch door and we stepped out on the deck, and I stopped dead.
For a second or two the sun off the water and the striking color were so brilliant that they seemed to burn through my eyes into my brain and I didn’t truly see anything.
Then my eyes adjusted and it was there before me, blue, grandly blue and huge, filling me with a thrilling joy that completely took me over.
The plane crashed and broke in half near the ship, and the sharks that had been following the troopship moved to the women and children in the water, many of whom were bleeding into the water from injuries. The attack was fast, ripping, savage. Some of the people were killed and many others left with terrible wounds that I would see later when they came aboard the ship from the lifeboats. I was horrified and have written of the horror in another book, but it affected me in a way that I did not fully comprehend then, and did not know until later.
Terrible as it was, I found the attack not frightening but somehow natural, a part of what I was seeing for the first time.
I had heard the sailors talking about sharks. I knew that they attacked things, killed and ate, and were an eternal part of the sea. I marveled at their sleek beauty as they left the ship and moved into the crash area; gray and streamlined, they fit the blue of the water and the bright sun.
Screams and the sounds of people dying filled the air. But even so, I found myself looking out across the expanse of water on the other side of the ship, away from the sinking plane and struggling people.
The water moved up to the sky, beckoning. It pulled me in a way that I knew was important, even at the age of seven, a way that was profoundly vital and would never leave me.
We were on the slow ship for several weeks as we took the survivors back to Hawaii and then sailed on to Okinawa and the Philippines. I spent uncounted hours sitting at the bow looking at the water and the sky, studying each wave, different from the last, seeing how it caught the light, the air, the wind; watching the patterns, the sweep of it all, and letting it take me.
The sea.
1
The First Sail
I was discharged from the army after nearly four years, most of it spent at Fort Bliss, Texas, in May of 1962. I hated every second of my time in the army and although I was still very young, I did not think I could salvage the time I had just wasted, or that I could save my ruined life. I know how ridiculous that sounds now, but the feeling was real then. I remember sitting in my old truck in El Paso, Texas, thinking that I was done, had no future, and the thought popped in out of nowhere that if I didn’t see water soon I would
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