The perception from the outside is very different — I realize this. Visually, and according to my resumé, I am something I am not. There’s a good hearty look to me. I’m stocky and strong. I can chop wood with an axe. I can tie knots while throwing up, hooked to a heaving boat on high seas. My outdoor skills were imposed on me by my father and my four brothers, who insisted I put in hours on the family lobster boat all the way through high school. They made me learn to sail on the weekends. They viewed all my outdoor abilities as essential life skills, not hobbies or passions. Being on a glassy, windless sea on a sunny day is lovely, but that is not a typical day on the North Atlantic.

The bus speeds along. The mid-November sun greases the thick clouds on the horizon. Dense, bulging clouds that make me pat my back fat as the orange and red blubber clouds sizzle in the glorious evening sky. My father appreciates natural beauty in the way a working man does, loving it but hardly ever mentioning it. It’s a setting for hard work, not something to gawk at.

My brothers and I grew up on the North Mountain, deep in the tangled woods, in a log house with a big stone fireplace, a wood stove, solar panels, and a spring-fed well. There was electricity, but when the power went out, as it did in every snowstorm, we were self-sufficient. My father and my uncles built the log house together, before I was born. My uncles all live in log homes as well. My father is a fisherman, so when he isn’t working on the water or at the wharf in Lupin Cove, he doesn’t even want to look at the Bay of Fundy. We are distantly related to Joshua Slocum, who was born in Mount Hanley, just west of where I’m from, near Seabury Gorge. When other girls were reading Anne of Green Gables he made me read Slocum’s 1900 memoir Sailing Alone Around the World about his solo circumnavigation of the globe on his trusty sloop, the Spray. It was the original adventure book unless you count The Odyssey.

My father was very proud of how all his children learned how to haul lobster traps and use a chainsaw. That we could tie knots and stack wood. We could wildcraft medicinal plants and shuck scallops. I was happiest sitting by the fire with my mother with a piece of warm brown bread slathered in butter and strawberry jam, but I could never let my father and brothers know. The teasing would never end. My adaptation was to force myself to do everything as well as they did before retreating to the house and hearth. Only my mother understood what I was up to. She heaved a lot of sighs over the teen years and said I would eventually have to figure out both who and how I wanted to be in this world. My brothers all live near my parents. I was the only one who left.