When I stopped and reflected, I told myself that eventually I would have to put the sea behind me, knowing it would be like losing the only woman I had ever completely loved. That is what had brought me to the sea in the beginning, and the time was coming for me to return to shore and the life that goes on there.

That brooding which comes into a sailor's eyes, it's no mystery. It's the love of the sea and the price her love demands. When he is with her, there is no other woman, no other temptation, only the undulating blue. At night she holds him in her arms, rocks him gently to sleep; unless she is angry, then she rages tempestuously and throws him from bed. At times he curses her; at other times he whispers sweet nothings to her.

He wants to stop moving, to enjoy life, to put down roots, but roots belong in the earth, and he is a man who has known fair winds and following seas. His favorite haunts, his old friends, his best memories, the beautiful scenes are spread across four oceans. Lonely and moody he sits by himself, even then moving. To try to hold him in one place is to try to hold water in your hands.

The land calls to him, and he answers the call. For a brief period, he rages like a satyr and resists the pull of the tide, but eventually he is swept back to the sea like the little crabs scurrying on the shorelines who try to bury themselves in the sand only to be swept back too by the waves.

At home once again, he looks out over the water. Melville said that meditation and the sea are wedded together forever.

One midnight, sailing from Australia to the Philippines, as the ship passed near Bali, the Southern Cross rose in the sky, and for a moment I knew why I was on this earth. As the winds whipped through my hair, and the smell of the clear salty air mixed with the unseen but felt motion of the ship sailing northward, I became dizzy with an exuberance. I was immortal because I was insignificant.