The sea and I do not understand each other.

I was born with the blood of a seafaring people but I have only known a desert life. The red in the hair of my childhood has faded to brown and the freckles that were scattered across my nose and shoulders have been bleached by the days under an endless sun. The pale skin of Vikings and Celts that is stretched across my bones like canvas has been tightened by thin, arid winds. In the warmer months, it is painted the colors of the desert – a camouflage of caramel and cinnamon that is washed away through long winters.

I am walking along a small sliver of rock on the Sonoma Coast, high above the Pacific that is crashing violently against the rocks below. It is 5:00 am, and the fog that has swallowed the world around me has also taken the stars and the moon. The only way I know my next step will not drop me onto the rocks below is the faint glow from my phone that I am using as a flashlight, but I can only see three steps in any direction. Everything else is covered in gray, as though I have buried myself under a thick woolen blanket.

Every breath of air is unfamiliar to me. It is a spring rain suspended in time. With every step I take, I feel the moisture on my lips and cheeks like the kisses of a lover that steps back into the darkness every time I open my eyes. My coat has become heavier and the fog seems so solid that I can’t help believing that if I kept walking past the rock under my feet that the mist could support me, or maybe I would sink slowly beneath the fog and it would drown me before I ever hit the water.

The wailing of rocks below as they are thrashed incessantly by the sea is terrifying to me. They are basalt - an armor forged in the mouths of volcanoes, built to withstand the constant pummeling from the whips of the sea. But even they are broken because the water always wins. This is true in the desert, too, where sandstone is smoothed and modeled into writhing canyons by trickles that barely cover my ankles. If this ocean was rolled into a river, it would cleave the desert into an endless chasm and split the world in two. Here, by the sea, the rocks still stand, but their blackened backs are worn into humps that weigh heavy under the master of the tides.

An hour passes. I have hopped a fence with mossy posts and am winding my way down a trail that writhes in and out of the contours of the rock, through manzanita and willow thickets and under the heavy limbs of cypress trees, perfectly twisted into giant bonsai, their top branches fading into the gray of the morning. Everything leans inland, away from the sea, flinching from the hisses and moans of the Pacific. The grasses are khaki and gold this time of year, punctuated by a rubbery plant that is stained the color of blood. The fragrance of sage and lemon verbena that would awaken my senses in the desert are replaced by the smell of saltwater and seaweed that was captured between the rocks when the waters were high, but have since been left behind when the tides retreated to the bottomless sea.

I climb clown-footed across the rocks, slipping in the wrong shoes and using my left hand to catch me, stumbling in this tripod motion until I am standing where the foamy tongue of the ocean licks the sand that extends until sky, sand and water are woven into a featureless slate in either direction. Just over 100 feet offshore, I can make out the silhouette of a giant black monolith – a solid paper collage torn away from the gray sky. I can hear the water trying to scale its walls, crashing recklessly into its shins and trying to knock it from its footing in the shallow water. The sea foam circles around the black, basalt spearhead, melding together in the shape of a heart as it advances toward my feet, and I see why lovers are drawn to the allegories of the sea.

To the Pacific, I am just another pea-coated wanderer pacing along its borderlands. It does not know me, nor does it care. It has ships to carry, and bellies of fish to care for, gardens of coral to tend and its tug-of war with the moon to keep the tides on time. Whether I step away as the waves creep up the shore or dive full into the water to be taken by the undertow is of no matter to the sea. It can take a life without conscience or consequence solely because humanity is no match for its power.

In the desert I can follow my footsteps back to their origins. It scarcely takes the passing of a subtle wave to erase my presence here. My mark on the shoreline is as ephemeral as the fog that has lifted now, but has painted everything from my shoes to the horizon in monochromatic gray. I wander in and out with the waves in a zigzag motion as they move in toward the wall to my right, occasionally miscalculating their approach and tiptoeing instinctively as the water laps across the tops of my shoes.

It is only on my return up the dew-heavy trail that slithers up the wall and back onto the overlook where I started that I hear it. I have been singing under my breath but I don’t know when the words left my head and actually charged my throat to make a sound. I have been singing the songs of my childhood – songs about sailors in Raglan wool and mothers who call to their children on the bottom of the sea. Songs of lovers with long black hair that young men will never see again. They are songs written in gaslight bars, where voyagers cross paths among mossy wood and damp rope. They are songs about The Darby Ram and Elsie Marley, of pretty girls and lonely men.

The songs of my childhood are the songs of the sea. They are the only words I know that the sea understands.