For me, it was a beautiful life we led, with enough of everything – that is until it all changed. There was work for money that some of us did. Plenty of work for enough money. Then there was work that everyone did, such as hunting, fishing, growing, gathering and preparing food. This is the work I looked forward to whenever I was ashore. It was working with the family, being with the family, being with Ela and our sons that kept this sailor sparked. But there are times when, in order to be better prepared for adversity, we need to upend satisfaction and unearth what lives beneath.

Sometimes I felt my life to be a self-indulgent one. I had been brought up in a certain way to be the keeper, the guardian for a future time of certain knowledge, histories, genealogies, stories. Though unaware of it at the time, I’d been trained as an orator. Held by the ear. When my mother sent me away from home, though it was never said, everyone knew that it was with the intention I should return and take my place among my own people. But for now I was still a young man in that regard. There were many years when I didn’t have to think about this at all. There was Paa. Between Paa and me there were men and women of my parents’ generation who, in the meantime, were the keepers of stories.

Ela.

I discovered that intrusion myself, that trespasser, that assailant. It was larger than a walnut and equally as hard.

The most unforgettable moments of my adult life are the times I came ashore in Honolulu, and after a cold-water sluicing and the discarding of dungarees and shirt for a pair of shorts, I could be alone for a few moments with Ela. I could come behind her, put my face in her bundled salt, smoke and nut-oil hair, and reaching forward, cup my barnacled hands under the heavy hand-sized moons.

Just that.

It was joy. It was love. It was home. These were moments more tender, more aching, more memorable than any to follow then or later.

During one of those occasions, my fingers came across that walnut, that bulb, which felt to me as though it should be on a dish or in a garden. I didn’t mention it right away.

‘What is it?’ I asked, the next day.

‘What is what?’

I put her fingers on the spot.

‘It’s nothing,’ she said, lifting and poking. ‘No, it doesn’t hurt at all.’

‘That’s all right then. Is it?’

‘Nothing of anything considering this wonderful life I have,’ she said.