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one that hadn’t existed when my father had been a boy. To get to school each day, he’d had to row himself and his three siblings forty minutes each way across this inlet of the Baltic. I wondered what sort of prayers he must have said on stormy days when his boat seemed so small and the fjord seemed so wide.
    Our family’s house was a three-story wood-frame Victorian built in the 1800s. The house could sleep forty; back when my grandmother was alive, she ran it as a boardinghouse for fishermen, feeding them and doing their laundry. During the summer, my family stayed on the third floor, my uncle Leif and his wife and their two childrenstayed on the first, and the second was rented out to vacationing families from Stockholm, the logic being that Leif’s family had the benefit of having no one underfoot and easy access to the yard and street. Our family had the benefit of being on top—the best views and no noisy neighbors overhead. And the renters, sandwiched in the middle, didn’t have many benefits at all. They paid the expenses necessary to keep the house going.
    “We’ll stay down here this time,” my father said, taking our bags into Uncle Leif and Aunt Barbro’s room. His entire academic career had been designed to escape this hard fisherman’s life, but I could tell from the way he inspected the rooms, cranked up the radiators, cast his gaze toward the sea, and breathed deep in the cold salt air that my father had missed Smögen. That, in fact, he’d been counting the days until he could get back.
    I WOKE UP AT 5:30 the next morning to the sound of a radio news program and the smell of hot chocolate. Groggy, I walked into the dark kitchen just as my father’s best friend, Stellan, burst through the back door. In Hasselösund, which was the tiny community where my father was from in Smögen, no one bothered to knock or call before coming over.
    Stellan had been a
yrkesfiskare
, a professional fisherman, for twenty-five years. The punishing sixteen-hour days out in the boats were like too many rounds in a boxing ring: They made his body sore in ways that sleep and ointments could never fix. He now held the less demanding role of handyman for the Smögen elementary school. As soon as my dad started speaking to Stellan, he lost his city accent. He no longer sounded so intellectual, choosing instead to speak in a local dialect so thick I could barely follow along. I sat at the table and ate the breakfast my mother had packed—orange marmalade and sliced
hushållsost
, a mild farmer’s cheese, on a triangle of rye crispbread—and I listened, picking up a word here and there. My dad and Stellan drank coffee and talked about how well the fish were biting, what mackerelwas going for at the local fish auction, and what we were about to do with the boats. They talked about the sea, always with great deference to its power. My father’s father had died at age fifty, on a boat, and it scared him, I think. It made him want to go to university, to make a living with his head, not his hands. He wasn’t afraid of hard work and he wanted to work outside, but he didn’t want a fisherman’s life. Geology was a way out.
    It was a three-minute walk to our boathouse. Like every other boathouse in Hasselösund, ours was painted a carnelian red with an even darker red pitched roof and white trim around the eaves, doors, and windows. The houses were small, not much bigger than the average American two-car garage, and arrayed in a perfect line up and down the pebbly beach. Inside was our boat and a mishmash of tackle: nets, traps, rods and buckets, buoys and oars and fish knives. When I got a little older, my father promised, we would also store water skis there.
    The day before our arrival, Stellan had drowned the boats, pulling each one out about four feet from shore and filling it with rocks until the hull filled with water. The boats had been out of the water all winter, so the aim was to make the wood swell, which in