The Girl Who Knew the Sea

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The little girl knew everything about sailing, though she had never been on a boat. She knew port from starboard and bow from stern. She knew that sailors watched the clouds and trusted the wind, and that somewhere beyond the places she had seen there were lighthouses turning their great lamps across dark water. She knew about storms and islands and harbors with strange names. Most of it she learned from library books and an old atlas that showed the oceans in faded blue. At night she sometimes opened it on the floor of her bedroom and traced the coastlines with one finger, wondering how much water there really was in the world.

Because there was no ocean nearby, she made her own boats. She gathered twigs from beneath the trees and saved Popsicle sticks in a jar on the back porch. She tied them together with string and cut little triangular sails from construction paper. Red sails were for fast ships. Yellow ones were for exploring. Blue sails were for long voyages where no one had ever gone before. She gave each boat a name, though the names changed often because ships, she believed, should be allowed to become something different if they wanted to.

Rain was what she waited for. An afternoon storm could turn the driveway into a harbor and the gutters along the street into rivers. She would kneel beside the curb with her knees wet and her hair hanging across her face and place one boat carefully into the rushing water. Then she ran beside it. The mailbox became a lighthouse. A pile of leaves was a dangerous reef. The storm drain was the edge of the known world, and no sensible captain sailed too close to that. When a boat overturned, she reached into the water and rescued it, straightened its soggy paper sail, and sent it out again.

Sometimes the rain stopped before she was ready. The rivers grew smaller. The puddles became still, holding pieces of the clearing sky. Her little boats would settle against the curb, their construction-paper sails bent and wet, their voyages finished for the day. She would sit beside them and look down into one of the puddles where the clouds were reflected so perfectly that it seemed possible to fall through and find another world underneath.

Then she would choose the least damaged boat and push it gently across the water. She could hear gulls there, though there were none. Smell salt in the air, though the sea was hundreds of miles away. And when the evening breeze caught the little paper sail and carried the boat slowly toward the other side of the puddle, the little girl smiled.

She had never been on a boat. But she had sailed everywhere.

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