“0230 hours,” the log-keeper wrote one August night by the kerosene lamplight of the anchor watch. “Thick fog on water, can’t see much of anything. Very quiet, temperature 48º F. No sound but tide moving up the beach. Pauly just sounded. 15 feet. We’re cool. Oars laid out side by side on thwarts, everybody but me and P. sleeping on top of them, mainsail put up as tent over. Couple of guys snoring.

“We’re watching the Big Dipper. Mister Lange calls it Arctos or something. We can see it spinning around the north star. But it’s us who are spinning. If we sit still and kind of go out of focus, we can feel it. Weird. Like the last part of the poem we read this morning, ‘Ulysses.’ About 20 minutes to go before we wake up Tom and Beale.

“Somewhere out in the water something is breathing. Something very big. Maybe a porpoise or a whale, or a seal, or a SEA MONSTER!”

Many years ago now, I spent several summers as an instructor at the Hurricane Island Outward Bound School on an island off the coast of Maine. Each of the North American Outward Bound schools had a different milieu   Colorado, for example, emphasized climbing   and Hurricane’s, the sea, was by far my favorite. On the first day of the course each of us instructors introduced his “watch” of students to their open pulling boat, which would be theirs for the duration. Thirty feet long, heavily built, and powered by sturdy oars or old-fashioned sprit-rigged sails, they were the perfect vehicle for building rapport and confidence in a group of young strangers. After a couple of days’ sailing and camping on beaches at night, we stayed in the boat around the clock, until it became a part of us, and we of it. The motions of the boat, the sea, the tides, the winds carried us back to beginnings and made of us a crew. It was lovely.

What is it about water that so enchants us? It’s more than that we can’t live without it. We get baptized in it, and at the end many of us choose to be scattered over an outgoing tide. We love to live beside it in almost any form, and pay increasingly exorbitant prices and taxes for “waterfront property.” It creeps into our consciousness in all its moods   stormy and gray in the dark, misty and golden at dawn, wet on our faces on a windy afternoon, aflame at sunset. If I look up from my desk here, almost every picture on the wall is of a small boat or a canoe in an idyllic setting. But every one expresses at the same time the tension between the solid security of the earth that’s become our natural home and the water that draws us back to adventure.

I stood one late afternoon on the beach of a little town called Nettuno, about an hour’s drive south of Rome on the Tyrrhenian Sea. In the distance, sea and sky merged in an invisible line. Somewhere out there was Corsica, but I couldn’t see it. What I could see was the mystery that for thousands of years has enticed us to leave our comfort behind and look for whatever lies beyond the horizon. The Greeks, Phoenicians, Polynesians, Celts, and Norse did it, with Columbus, Cabot, and Magellan right behind them. We can’t do it anymore   our GPS displays can locate us within a few feet of our actual position anywhere on earth   but we can sense the excitement they felt.

Driving up the Waits River the other afternoon, I spotted two kayaks, red and yellow, bouncing down the white water, paddles flashing in the sun. Dressed in suit and tie, with miles to go, I was in a universe different from theirs. But I could feel with them the surge, twist, and plunge of each wave   and without the troublesome necessity of hitchhiking back upstream to my vehicle.

The memories you create on water last a lifetime. Nansen Watch was confused in the fog and an absolutely flat calm past midnight somewhere near Southwest Harbor. We needed to find a particular bell buoy to regain our bearings, but in that calm no bells were ringing. We rowed ten strokes, sat still, oars dripping, listened, then rowed some more. Finally we heard a faint creaking: the hinge of the bell clapper about ten feet away.

Another time, Bob and I were the last canoe in line going through what looked like a mild rapid on the mighty George River. Carelessly, I steered through the drop just a few yards west of the previous boat’s course, and directly into a hole in the river the size of a Volkswagen camper. Later I wondered whether what I had said was a blasphemy or the start of a prayer. After an episode like that, Bob has an inimitable way of looking over his shoulder and raising an eyebrow.

I don’t tackle the wild, snow-fed whitewater of April much anymore. The clearer water of May will do just fine. This week some friends and I will be out on moving water. The canoes, which have lain patiently upside down through the winter, will come to life again as they feel our weight settling into the seats. Once more, as I start my sixty-first year in a canoe, I’ll recite (silently; no sense alarming my partner), “It may be that the gulfs will wash us down; it may be we shall touch the Happy Isles, and see the great Achilles, whom we knew. Though much is taken, much abides.” And I’ll remember the wonderful logbook entry that has always said it all: “Somewhere out there in the water something is breathing. Something very big.”