I used to ask my dad about the ocean. On nights when smoke trailed out the motel room window and cars sputtered down the interstate highway; on nights when the air held a depth and hue I couldn’t comprehend, I would ask him.

We lay across the carpet, swimming in moonlight that streamed through our window. Mr. McCready shut the power off at 10 p.m. and our room always smelled like black coffee. My dad told me about his time in the Marines; he had been so sick those first few weeks, but soon enough he grew to love the water—how salty it tasted, how raw. On nights when we talked about the ocean, I would dream of whales as big as Florida and wonder how Jonah must have felt, being swallowed like that.

Some days we hiked up Pete’s Mountain, as high as we could go, and amidst the fog my dad would point to a speck in the distance and say, “Do you see that line way out there? That’s the Atlantic, where I used to sail.”

We lived several hundred miles inland, but still I squinted until a blue splotch appeared in my vision, barely discernible, and I would reply, “I see it. Right over there.”

I became consumed with the idea of a body so vast that you couldn’t tell one end from the other; with a vision of drifting through waves that both gently enveloped and violently minced; with the way my father conjured up images of a deep blue creature that lived and heaved, its liquid chest rising and falling with the moon’s incessant tug. I dreamt of the ocean just as often as I dreamt of flying, and threw tantrums over it. My dad would smother me in his shirt and let me pound against his chest until I inhaled enough of his sweat and soap to be pacified.

One afternoon I came home with a black eye, a bruised rib cage, and a snot-streaked face from a fight with a kid who had jeered about the way I smelled. I yanked my pictures from the fridge and stuffed them in my bag, slathered jam on a slice of bread for dinner. It was my third fight of the month. I raced out the door and clanged down the metal stairs before my father could interrogate me. When he caught up, tripping down the sidewalk that paralleled the interstate, he asked me where I was going.

Swiping at tears, I declared, “To the Atlantic.”

He squatted down in front of me, ran a hand over my bruised eye. It was only May but hot as a desert. I wished to be swallowed by water.

My dad furrowed his brow. “That’s going to be a long trip.”

“I don’t care,” I said.

He exhaled, his breath coffee and canned tuna, and a daring look crossed his eye. “Well then, let’s go together.”

We had to wait until dark to leave. We took all our clothes, the coffee kettle, and a loaf of Wonder Bread. We took the Bible from the motel drawer, its pages bookmarked by five-dollar bills. My dad peeled the eviction notice off the front door and laughed. I stumbled after him, onto the balcony and down the stairs, streetlights barely illuminating our path. He lifted me into the front seat of our rusted pick-up truck and, after three or four attempts, revved up the engine. What was left of the pink motel sign flickered behind us as we rumbled down the highway.

Our journey was marked by numerous truck stops and greasy food at local diners. We spent our Bible money extravagantly, and I gorged myself on beef patties while my dad won belching competitions against truckers at the bar. After dinner we laid down blankets in the back of our pick-up and slept side by side under open sky, strewn all over with Midwest stars. Fuzzy with dinner, my dad would say, “Slap me if I don’t get up tomorrow.” I never did. In the mornings I woke up bundled like a sausage in the blankets, my dad humming show tunes while he tinkered with the car. The closer we got to the water, the more animated he grew. “Do you hear the seagulls, Nick? Can you taste the salt?” The sun was almost always out. My bruises faded to yellow.

The first time I glimpsed it, I was shocked by its color. It did not swirl dark blue and broodingly; rather, it was green—green and white and frothy—and I felt acutely that I should’ve been born a sea creature, but God must have forgotten to make me into one. We pulled into a parking lot near the shore. In the car, my father stared at the last of the Bible money, two fives tucked into Deuteronomy. He stuffed the bills in his pocket, then swung me out of the truck with a force that made my spine crack. We walked to a shack stacked with kayaks. After some rumination, my dad pressed the bills against the counter and rented one medium boat for an hour.

“You ever kayaked before?” asked the girl at the register.

“Oh, plenty.”

“You can take the red one. No going past the buoys.”

After I had received a brief paddling lesson, my dad and I buckled our life vests and set out. He paddled in large, sweeping strokes that propelled us forward ten feet at a time. The waves lapped crudely against our plastic ship, and I stretched sideways to touch them. I brought my fingers to my mouth. Any apprehension I might have felt was hidden beneath adrenaline and wonder.

“Don’t fall out, now, Nick.” When I looked back, my dad’s eyes glistened mischievously. When we spotted whales, he whooped in delight. He unbuckled his life vest and plunged into the water.

My father possessed the agility of a sailfish. He spun through the waves and came back up grinning. He sputtered, whale-like, and teased me about sharks. He asked if I wanted to come in with him. But my dad and the ocean were old friends, and I was a kid, suddenly shy in the presence of a long-admired idol. So I shook my head and remained in the kayak, the top half of my body safely dry. I watched my father dive and resurface, and dive again, his form drifting away from the buoys and from our kayak, until I didn’t see him at all. I waited for his hand or head to pop out of the waves. I tamped down my unease. But after calling for him a fifth time without response, panic stretched through the width of my chest. Immediately my thoughts progressed to the worst—electric eels and killer currents and ancient sea dinosaurs with three hundred rows of teeth, and the ocean had taken my father—and worst of all, maybe that was what he had wanted, just like me, to be taken by it.

I paddled back as best I could, salt and tears stinging my eyes and biting at the edges of my mouth. A lifeguard spotted me and pushed me the rest of the way. I was brought into a watchtower and shivered under someone else’s towel. People asked me where I last saw him and what he had been wearing and why we had gone past the buoys. I muttered my answers: Near the yellow floating one and Black swim shorts and I don’t know. An older woman brought me a glass of iced tea, and I glared fiercely into the water, having learnt its true nature over the course of a single afternoon.

There was a soft knock. The lifeguard who had pushed me to shore stood at the door. Beside him, my father’s dripping form. He was bruised and cut up everywhere. Ocean debris clung to the creases of his elbows and knees as if he and the water had become intimately affixed. The tears I had worked so hard to suppress came pouring to the surface. I shrugged off the beach towel and rammed my head into his torso, and heard him soothe, “It was just a small current, Nick, just a little current. I came up half a mile away.” He smelled like seaweed and sulfur and fish, and ran his hand over my hair repeatedly. I whimpered like a five-year-old, stuck somewhere between fury and elation.