MOVE LIKE WATER

Stowe seeks to give readers an ocean they can hold in their hands.

The author, a writer, painter, and sailor who lives in Germany, opens this lovely memoir with her description of a young girl at night’s “ink hours” watching a nearby Welsh lighthouse by the Pembrokeshire coast cast its light in her darkened room. “There was never a time when I did not know the sea,” which would frequently “shape my studies, paintings, words.” She became familiar with the local seabirds, jellyfish, seals, dolphins, a basking shark, and harbor porpoise. Stowe feels “as if I had absorbed the shape of the land, the water, into my bones.” Sadly, she has also deeply felt the negative impact humans have on her precious seascape and wildlife. After school, she wanted her own “odyssey,” an “entirely different space” in her mind. In one adventure, Stowe takes us onboard a ship roiling about, rain lashing down in a “Mephistophelian chaos.” It’s a small sailing boat–turned–floating laboratory, conducting research on bottlenose whale populations on the east coast of Canada. “I felt rather than saw my first sperm whale,” she writes. She capably conveys the awesomeness of its size as well as the fact that it exhales as it dives and can accumulate tons of carbon. The author also recounts how, during college, she suffered a severe back injury that resulted in excruciating pain, making sailing difficult. Nonetheless, she bought a boat, named it Brave, and ventured out like a wandering albatross to Pembrokeshire. She decided her dissertation would consist of an ambitious visual survey of the local animals, and she worked hard to pass her Yachtmaster exam. Her incisive discussion of humpback whales vocalizing and sound pollution is fascinating. For Stowe, “there was hardly a minute of time on land when my mind did not drift to the sea.”

Nature lovers and sailors will savor Stowe’s personal, thoughtful, science-filled voyages.