When I was very young, just three or four, I lived for a short while in a trailer made of freshly sawn rough pine with my grandmother, when she worked at a cook camp for a road-building crew in northern Minnesota. There came a time at the end of each day when all her work was done and we would sit on her bunk, wrapped in a blanket, and count the mice that came out in droves after dark. I would drink a half cup of evaporated milk mixed with water (which I never learned to like) and would often eat a narrow slice of apple pie with sugar sprinkled on the crust (which I learned to love).

Grandmother would sip a cup of tea and when I had drunk my milk and eaten my pie and wiped the sticky off my fingers she would tuck the blanket tight around us, take a deep breath, put her mouth near my ear, and in a whisper that was almost a song, tell the stories.

No. The Stories.

She was from the Old Country. Norway. And in Norway she said you are either of the land or of the sea and much, perhaps all of her knowledge, all that she heard or was told in her stories, from her childhood, was of the sea.

Not silly fairy tales, these, my grandmother didn’t read me nursery rhymes; she told unforgettable stories of the sea, so real I could smell the salt and hear the creaking of rope and wood and picture North Sea waves so huge they raged far overhead and turned longboats into warping wooden sleds as they raced down the roaring-boiling face of water.

Grandmother wove her sea stories into my thoughts each night in the cook camp until I went to sleep dreaming the tastes and smells of salt herring and dried cod so deeply that the rich stink-taste was there the next morning when I awakened.

She brought the sea that was in me, out of me.

Forever.

Locked.

So that when I was seven years old and crossed the Pacific Ocean with my mother in an old troop ship to be with my father in the Philippine Islands and came on deck to see the ocean, to see-smell-feel the open sea out around me like an intense deep-blue bowl, I was immediately, completely, overwhelmingly taken by it. I felt it calling, as if it were of me, in me, and I think it was very directly a kind of love, though I didn’t think of such things then, just felt them. For several held breaths I didn’t – couldn’t – think of anything. Just that blue bowl going up into the sky.

I felt like I had come home.