It’s been nearly 110 degrees for a week as I write this. The humidity is under ten percent, thank goodness. It hasn’t rained since April and it won’t rain again until October. There is water in the two lakes that lie a few miles west and a few miles east, but the one our drinking water comes from was dry six months ago.

Welcome to the foothills of the California Sierras.

I saw a rattlesnake go by yesterday, carrying a canteen. He was having a heck of a time keeping it up, since he doesn’t have hips and he doesn’t have shoulders.

No problem. When February comes, it will look like the green hills of Ireland again. But it won’t last.

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I grew up in Oklahoma, fifteen hundred miles from salt water, and fell in love with the ocean, though I had never seen it. That’s what comes from too much reading, and from having a beloved grandfather who lived in Florida, had a boat, and had joined the Coast Guard auxiliary.

I went to Michigan for college, found my wife, and married her. That gave me another maritime connection. Her father had crewed on a Great Lakes racing schooner when he was a young man,  a decade before I was born.

My draft number was 41 and they were drafting Marines, so I joined the Navy, but it wasn’t a happy time. Given a choice during boot camp, I chose to be a dental technician; it meant I would never have to man a gun. I spent my naval career on dry land, working at a hospital. I never regretted it. I loved the ocean, but not at the price of pulling a trigger.

I spent a year in Chicago, then came back to California, and settled in to write. I tried to find a place to rent on the coast, but I could only afford inland housing. And here I am.

Everyone has dreams. Most of mine have come true, but we still have to make choices. Choosing one dream often means abandoning another. Most of us have another life, the life we would have lived if things had gone differently. We may not regret our choices, but the things we might have been stay with us.

I wanted to build a sailboat and sail around the world. Not an unusual dream, of course. If you gave me the chance to go back and do that instead of what I have done, I wouldn’t consider it for a second. But still . . .

Because of that dream, I have spent a lifetime studying small boat construction, naval architecture, and maritime history. My second MA thesis was on shipbuilding during the nineteenth century.

Fortunately, I am an author. I can write a novel and call it Raven’s Run (see Serial). In it I can set off in the yawl Wahini, heading for Marseilles, and who knows, maybe a mermaid will fall into my lap along the way.

When I was a child, my family took only one vacation. We drove a hundred miles south to see the reconstructed fort at Fort Gibson, Oklahoma. We left at seven in the morning, right after milking, and got back by five in the afternoon.

That’s how it is on a dairy farm. I left Oklahoma for Michigan when I went to college, but that wasn’t a vacation. That was an escape. By the time I got married, I was ready to do some traveling.

Travel was cheap in the U.S. in the seventies. Gas was seventeen cents a gallon and the old car usually ran. We slept in a pup tent and cooked on a camp stove. We crisscrossed the western two-thirds of America and visited nearly every National Park. Eventually however, as I continued doing more writing than selling, the car got old and times got lean. Then I started teaching and a few years later, with a mostly healed up bank account, we toured the Atlantic states. That trip gave me the start on a new novel (see 55. Voices in the Wall and Serial for February and March of 2016).

By 1987 we had saved enough money to tour Europe. Perhaps tour is not the right word. In those days you could get cheap air fares if you paid months in advance. Eurail passes cost quite a bit, but they took care of all your travel costs once you were in Europe. That left just food and lodging.

We were following the advice of Rick Steves but planned to outdo him on cheapness. We bought a tent and a pair of rucksacks. A set of clothing on our backs and another pair of jeans and shirt in the backpack, and we were ready to go.

We were 30 years old that year and planning to travel like teenagers – minus the hitchhiking. We had very little money, but we had lots of time. Seventy days, in fact. Being a school teacher is a real pain sometimes, but it gives you summers off.

As we waited for our flight out of San Francisco that spring, the gate attendant announced that they were overbooked, and offered a pass for future flights to anyone who would volunteer to wait for a later departure. We volunteered, and then watched our flight leave without us. It was logical; the pass was worth almost as much as we had paid months earlier, and it would only mean a short delay. Still, after waiting a lifetime to see Europe, it hurt to see our plane go on without us.

It felt good when it returned twenty minutes later. They had had engine trouble, but the problem was quickly resolved. Meanwhile, we found out that the flight had not actually been overbooked. It was a computer error. We took off about forty minutes later, on the same plane, with passes in our pockets to cover a future plane flight. All the way to Europe in 1987, we planned for our second trip in 1988. more tomorrow