AUGUST–35°46′ N, 135°28′ W

That afternoon, while I was at the helm, Mary came and stood on the bridge for a while. We hadn’t spoken much since the beginning of the voyage. It was another odd effect of life on the Kaisei: thanks to the rigorous rotating schedule, you could see surprisingly little of someone who wasn’t on your watch. Aside from meals–and even those were sometimes worth skipping for sleep–I might see the members of Alpha Watch only if I happened to be on deck taking pictures during their shift, or if there was a call for all hands to make sail. But Mary wasn’t assigned to a watch and tended to be in her cabin when she wasn’t visiting the on‑duty watch or observing some debris being brought on board. So a certain distance built up.

Maybe I just felt awkward around her.

I shifted the wheel a few spokes to port, keeping course. Mary took a deep breath of ocean air.

“Been doing so much reading,” she said. “Trying to synthesize everything and come up with the right approach.” She told me she had a tall stack of books about ocean debris in her cabin.

How late, I thought. How late to be looking for the right approach.

She sat down on the edge of the bridge, leaning against the railing.

“So what do you think, Andrew?”

“Of what?” I said.

“Of life out here.”

I considered the question. The sailing life is supposed to be the apotheosis of freedom and adventure, but it seemed notable to me mainly for its indignities, and for the endless tasks, both awkward and arcane, on which our safety depended. It was like owning a house, but more likely to get you killed. The idea that sailing was an expression of freedom, I suspected, was merely a tool for self‑soothing on the part of all the sailors and yachtsmen of the world. They had to justify why they bothered.

Mary was waiting for my answer, her eyes bright. I laughed. “Well, it’s certainly different, Mary,” I said.

She smiled and handed me a piece of chocolate. I thought of something she had told me back in California, advice for someone who had never been to sea. The trick, she’d said, is not to think of yourself as limited by the confines of your boat. You have to believe that you are limited only by the edges of what you can see from the boat. And the indignities of being at sea had let me realize the truth of this. The solution to every misery was to open your mind toward the horizon. To know that you were not on the ocean, but of it.