"You can feel the seas coming up through the boat through your feet" Tiggie Peluso, Cape Cod fisherman

When I first found myself washed up on the shore of Cape Cod I didn't know the difference between the Chatham Bars, the Peaked Hill Bars and the Main St. Bar. But if you're the least bit curious about this arm shaped pieced of land that stretches its upraised fist at the ocean at the same time that it holds the history of our country in it, over time, even if you're not a fisherman, you learn. And what you learn, what I have been learning, is astounding, at times horrifying, and humbling.

I admit that I've been fascinated, maybe even infatuated, for many years by people who befriend oceans and skies and unknown territories - surfers, sailors, the early aviators and explorers. People who leave the safety of homelands, or just their couches and set out in what look to me like dubious forms of transportation, or just on foot, in search of freedom. In college on the west coast, two of my best friends were crazy surfers, one of them a Hawaiian who knew about big waves. We would regularly drive for forty-five minutes on a cloudy day, just so they could catch one wave. I learned to appreciate the intensity of the way they looked at the water, the patience, the intimacy, the courage and fortitude. I began to understand the poetry of it. They weren't just party animals, smoking the weed and looking for the wild thing, there was something palpable in what they were doing, something big, something I loved.

I grew up around the ocean and have lived most of my whole life just about within sight of either the Pacific or the Atlantic. When I was a toddler, fearless and ignorant of danger, my parents have told me that they were afraid to blink because I loved the water so much that I was always in it, around it, or under it. I don't know exactly how old I was, but I remember the first time a wave took me under and wouldn't let go. I was shocked, outraged, terrified that my friend the ocean, who I played tag with for hours sometimes, was now threatening my life. Even then I understood as I struggled to come up to that glittering, light filled surface, that I was utterly overpowered by this unknown entity. It was on that day that I learned respect for it.

My love affair with all things water has continued, but I never take it for granted now, and I rarely turn my back on a wave. I have learned that they tend to comes in sets, of three, just like trouble, and that the biggest one is usually the last.

This past fall I lost a dear friend to the ocean. It has finally broken my heart, just like it's broken the hearts of women and men for as long as we've inhabited the planet, probably. Just like kids every where are born knowing the game of peek-a-boo, and hide and seek, through out time people everywhere who have lived near the sea know the tragic story of loss. Like that first tangle with the ocean as a child that gave me knowledge, my friend's drowning at night in a stormy winter sea, with forty-five foot waves and the subsequent stranding of his daughter and best friend for twelve days out there, has given me a much more personal relationship to all the stories of the whalers, the early settlers and today's fishermen and women, that I have been so fascinated by since I took up residence here thirteen years ago.

I am what's known as a "wash-a-shore" here on Cape Cod and I always will be, because I wasn't born here. It's meant to be a slightly derogatory term, but better to be a wash-a-shore than a washed-to-sea, I guess. Even on lonely, wintery nights like this one, when I'm not totally sure, I think of my friend's daughter Amanda and how having witnessed her beloved father's tragic death at sea she is clinging emphatically to life. She is a reminder to me of "this one precious life". I pick up my pen and try to make it count somehow, the best I can.