Before you knew it, you would arrive at your destination, and le voilà, enlightenment, or éclaircissement, as the French Acadians say, when you reached the bench of wisdom! Every age had an awakening, my father said, with people like him called to be its prophets, ushering in the awakening.

On a clear day you could stand at the edge of the cliff and see all the way down the bay toward Maine, which was four exhilarating hours away by boat as the crow flies or a long, boring two-day drive by car, as my father explained.

The bench at the edge of the crumbling cliff my father had made from driftwood cast to a silvery white by the elements. He encouraged us to sit on the bench and look for water nymphs and selkies. He insisted people had been spotting them in the bay for generations. They swam in with the tide, he proclaimed, as though he were a marine biologist with a peculiar specialization.

My mother’s rule was we were allowed to sit on the bench only if an adult was with us. My father said my mother was too protective, she’d ruin us. Driftwood was cured by the salty bay and the wood was endowed with a strength which milled lumber did not possess. The full baptism and sculpting by the breakers and rocky beach made the wood enduring and rugged, he told us. The bench would protect us. Humans could only hope for the same combination of splendour and toughness. My father wore a long leather necklace with a tiny piece of driftwood dangling near his heart. His talisman, he called it.

I remember how excited I was when the house was finally ready — if you could call it a house. I was too young then to know my father wasn’t much of a carpenter. It was tall, almost rectangular. My father, or Ocean, as he insisted everyone, including his children, call him, named it the tree house even though it was not near any tree, but in the centre, the heart of the field. He described the building as a salute to the trees. He believed the names of people and of objects and buildings should reflect their true nature.

My father loved talking about his quests on all sides of the continent. The high North had called him and he had journeyed to Whitehorse and onward to Utqiaġvik, which was surrounded on three sides by the Arctic Ocean. The sirens of the south then sang to him, and he journeyed to the southernmost point on the Tierra del Fuego archipelago. My father stood with his toes in the water at the end of the world where the South Pacific and the South Atlantic swirled together, where the water met the earth. Here he took his spirit name. The ocean waves had called to the eternal flow inside of him. My mother told me this story when I was a teenager, one of the few times my father’s name came up.