MOVE LIKE WATER: My Story of the Sea, by Hannah Stowe
We are vulnerable at sea. We are vulnerable at home too, but the sea makes metaphors of our vulnerabilities, imbues them with value, lets them teach us. In our offices, in our lives, we might say we are “swamped,” “trimming our sails,” “battening the hatches” or “facing a headwind.” But at sea these phrases describe real urgencies.
The vast, ever-changing beauty of the ocean and its creatures’ epic lives have always called to me. They have called as well to Hannah Stowe, a writer who shares with us her response to that calling in her distinctly wet and salty new coming-of-age memoir.
“Move Like Water” is above all a sensuous book, more felt than described, more described than explained, more painted than penned: part memoir, part journal and — with each chapter named for a creature the author encountered either in real life or in dreams — part natural mystery tour.
Stowe grew up in Pembrokeshire, Wales, in a cottage by the coast, with a loving mother, an accomplished artist who wisely encouraged her daughter’s budding passion. “There was never a time when I did not know the sea,” Stowe writes. “The weather was never far away.”
But not everyone around her understands the storm brewing in her teenage heart. Her challenge is how to achieve escape velocity from the relative banality of working-life expectations. At a “careers week” she attends as a teen, “talks from the marines were pitched to the children as adventure, the inevitable violence concealed,” her future boiled down to: “Vocation: plumber or electrician.”
Stowe could sense but not articulate her longing for a different path. “I wanted to feel intrepid, to experience the rush of nerves as you push your own boundaries,” she tells us. “But, right now, I was just a 17-year-old from the coast with a handful of change from pulling pints in the pub in the evenings.”
Told by the “careers officer” that the life she yearns for is impossible, she leaves school at 18 and takes a job on a boat providing wildlife tours of the local islands. But the work environment is toxic. When a doctor diagnoses a kidney infection — the result of dehydration brought on by 70-hour work weeks in the hot sun with few breaks — she’s told to show up or be fired.
Eventually, Stowe finds her way onto a sailing ship with researchers studying bottlenose whales off Newfoundland. It’s not all smooth sailing: “The water was everywhere. Whipped into a froth as the waves hurtled toward us, a shower of freezing salty spray contrasting with the rain that fell so hard it burned.” But it was the life she had hoped to discover.
One still night of freezing fog and nauseous exhaustion, she has a surprise meeting. It was her turn at watch, to remain awake monitoring the radar for looming icebergs. Sensing “a deep marine presence in the night,” she sees a dark shape rising from the sea. “Something lumpy, a soft glisten of water on an almost gelatinous form. Almost as if it took offense at my curiosity, the animal sent a wet cloud of breath spraying into my face.”
Laughing into the black night at her first sperm whale, she hardly needs to tell us that this is why she is here, freezing and nauseous, rather than snuggled under her duvet at home a thousand miles away. “I had found my north, the area of life into which I wanted to pour my passion.”
Throughout “Move Like Water,” we are treated to little lectures about marine creatures and seabirds. But Stowe’s book is at its best when recounting her travails and triumphs in the first person. “I felt,” she writes about a dip in the ocean while recovering from a spinal injury. “I felt alive again, momentarily cleansed, my body burning from the cold salt water rather than from my damaged nerves. I felt like me. Like the sea.”
“My aim with this book was to give you an ocean to hold in your hands,” she says. I am holding it.
Carl Safina’s newest book, “Alfie and Me: What Owls Know, What Humans Believe,” will be published in October.
MOVE LIKE WATER: My Story of the Sea | By Hannah Stowe | Illustrated | 277 pp. | Tin House | $24.95
