It is late January, 1958, and I’m standing on the top rung of the companionway ladder inside a hatch that opens into the cockpit of the schooner that is my home. She had been built fifty-five years before I was born, and is one of the very last 19th-century boats still capable of surviving the deepwater of the world. We are hundreds of miles from San Francisco and the west coast, headed toward the Marquesas Islands, having just endured a whole gale with winds approaching hurricane force. My father has been on deck for the better part of thirty-six hours, taking catnaps in a wooden chair lashed to ringbolts next to the cockpit, ever on the watch for the slightest mistake by whoever’s at the wheel and for any change in wind and water. I know he won’t make any mistakes. This perfect faith and the wonder of what I am seeing disallow the fear I might have had were I a bit older and capable of cynicism. My eyes tear a bit from the cold wind, still strong enough to keep the sheets taut even with the fores’l and mains’l reefed. My first brother stands next to me; unusually, we are not allowed on deck, so we make ourselves as comfortable as possible and look around us. It is morning. The sun is bright in a pale blue sky. High clouds driven by the wind scud across my vision. The horizon is clear and so distant no measure occurs to me. Surrounding us is an ocean without the boundary of land or even islands – nothing impedes its power as we ride swells towering over us one moment and the next lifting us high in the water and cold salty air, over and over until the motion is almost hypnotic – my brother and I raise and lower our heads in time to it, bringing a smile to the old man’s face. Once we noticed a albatross gliding across twenty-foot waves, their tops blown into spindrift. For hours I watch all this, my kid mind in a meditative state that I had learned when only a couple of years old by staring at bodies of water. And I was...moved... emotionally in a manner that I could not articulate to anyone, not even to myself.
...
The memory remained, unfaded and unaltered by time or me. It didn't come to mind that often, and when it did it never occurred to me to try and figure out what that elusive feeling was. Until a month ago, forty-eight years after the fact. I was riding my bicycle through my neighborhood, the streets safe enough that I could indulge in a bit of contemplation without worrying about being mown down by an SUV or delivery truck, when for no apparent reason the memory came to me, and I immediately understood what my ten year-old self had sensed. It was this:
During that instant in my mortal life I had not only seen the primeval world, the world as it was before the coming of humans – I had been there.
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