EXCERPT FROM CHAPTER ONE: "Good Water, Bad Water" I would like water better if it were not always trying to kill me. The first time I died I was five. It was Easter weekend, clear and hot, and in the middle of a normal Saturday afternoon I drowned in a swimming pool in Las Vegas. How I fell in I don''t remember, but once I accepted the fact that I was dead, I could enjoy the greeny-blue color of the light at the bottom of the pool. There was no thrash- ing or panic: like two tiny pink ballast tanks my lungs filled with water, and as I passed out, the colors seemed peaceful, nice. Even now, blue is one of my favorite colors. Hours passed. What urgent beast dragged me back to the surface? It was a large fish, I think, or my tall, strong mother, or a body belonging to one of the many strange faces crowded over me, blocking the sun as I lay calm and dead on the warm cement.

Eventually there was a trip to the hospital, though now that I think about it, I am not sure why. One is either drowned permanently or else only drowned for part of the day, and there is nothing a priest or ER doctor can do to change either state of being. The next time was in high school. I had been gifted a two-week climbing course by my parents, held near Sequoia National Park. Given what a klutzy weakling I was at most sports, when it came to climbing, I was surprisingly competent, even talented. I liked everything about it: the secret lingo--"On belay? Belay on!"--and the clickity sounds the carabiners made, and learning the knots, and hearing the stories of the Yosemite hardmen, men like Yvon Chouinard and Royal Robbins and Warren Harding, men who had done bold leads on big walls and had not been stopped by running out of water or having all their pitons pop out during a screaming fall. We were sleeping in tents and peeing in the bushes and not taking showers (because there were no showers), and since two weeks is a long time to climb without a break, it was agreed we would take a day off and go to a place called Lake Hume. I still couldn''t swim--any time I tried to learn, water tried to drown me again--but everybody else was a yes vote, so I thought I could take a book and watch from a warm rock while the others did laps or jerked off in the seaweed or did whatever it is that high-octane male teenagers do in cold water.

Short story shorter, once we got to the lake, I was grabbed from behind by some boys from the adjacent Christian camp (who apparently thought I was somebody named George), thrown in, and held under. They were trying to prank one of their own but got the wrong sap. Ever since Las Vegas, I had (and still have) a pathological fear of water, and one thing about runty guys, we can fight like honey badgers when we have to. I got back to shore not by swimming or calling for help but by smashing and hitting and grabbing. I kept trying to get ahold of something that would squish or detach, assuming that any injuries would slow them down enough to let me use their bod- ies as ladder rungs to get back to shore. Finally, I panic-thrashed my way back to land. I looked at my hands. There was blood under the nails.

Mine or theirs? I had cuts on my legs and knees, so I was not sure. I must have swallowed a lot of water, and, legs shaking, I leaned against a Jeffrey pine, throwing up in the ceanothus. Once upon a time, Earth had no water at all. And then, somehow, it did--and not just a little, but pretty soon, oceans and oceans of the stuff. In the Quran, God sends water down from Heaven. It is up there, presumably abundant, and with Allah''s divine concern, now it is down here. I also like another theory, the one that guessed water arrived on comets and meteors during something geophysicists call the Late Heavy Bombardment, even though more recent work disappointingly suggests you can get a planet''s worth of water just from early magma interacting with atmospheric hydrogen. Whatever alchemy was involved, it worked.

According to the United States Geological Survey, adding up all the moisture on, in, and above Earth produces a total of 332,500,000 cubic miles of water. Only a little bit hangs out in muddy trickles like the Amazon or the Yangtze or the two Hearst Castle swimming pools; most of that volume is in the ocean. And so that means if we borrowed all the ocean water on Earth for an hour and magically patty-caked it into a sphere, it would create a ball of water larger than Pluto. Pluto is welcome to it as far as I am concerned, yet as one says about a bad relationship, it''s complicated, since I am totally and utterly devoted to seabirds. I like their weird names, I like how they fly like magic superjets, I like how we know so little that almost any trip I take, I have the possibility of contributing to science through casual observation. It''s a big term, "seabirds," since they range from sparrow sized to albatrosses with wingspans four feet wider than Shaquille O''Neal''s widest, stretchiest reach. There are over a hundred main seabird species, plus one hundred kinds of gull and tern. There are seabird species whose world populations number in the tens of millions (Wilson''s storm-petrel), and there are some species whose tally barely comes to 250 birds.

That one is called Bryan''s shearwater, and it nests in the Bonin Islands, south of Japan. It is the world''s smallest shearwater and was only described in 2011. Are there other, tinier ones waiting to be found besides that one? Probably. Seabirds are found in every ocean of the globe. And therein sits the conflict, since the Almighty has decided to keep the seabirds in the sea, and the sea, dagnabbit, is also where the planet keeps the water. To experience seabirds, I have to go to them, which means water and boats and fear, lots of fear. All water is insatiable; no matter how many shipwrecks you feed it, no matter how many naval tragedies and drowned sailors, it always wants more. Ocean, I name you squall doom and hunger comb, salt burn and plunder mouth.

I name you starlight''s coffin. I name you enemy. Even so, I reluctantly admit, saltwater really is as interesting as promised. In parts of the ocean, water circulates so slowly, it has been out of contact with the atmosphere for hundreds of years. It will rise up and remix eventually, but not in our lifetimes. Black smokers are jets of iron sulfide shooting out of the ocean floor at seven hundred degrees Fahrenheit, creating exotic ecologies we will next encounter on an ice-clad moon of Saturn. There is an ocean animal, the Longman''s beaked whale, that is one of water''s long-standing mysteries. Until 2003, the only evidence for its existence came from two weathered skulls: one found on an Australian beach in 1882, and the other on the floor of a Somali fertilizer factory in 1955.

It is not true that we know the moon better than the deep ocean (since we know a lot about the ocean, all in all), but it is true that both continue to surprise us. For me, I like any ecology that can be home to the coelacanth fish, last known from when the comet took out the dinosaurs and presumed to be extinct until 1938, when one was found off the coast of South Africa. So taken as a whole, they are jazzy places, these oceans. Too bad they have so much water in them. [.] In making these trips, wonders began to accumulate like medals on a general''s chest: Here is my service ribbon for when I crossed over the Mariana Trench, the gash in the planet that drops down more than six thousand feet deeper than Mount Everest is tall. This silver bar commemorates seeing a squid that glows in the dark. Waterspouts get their own pip, as do each of the Seven Seas.

There have been the usual problems and detours along the way. I have, for example, been lost at night kayaking in the South Pacific, and I have continued to try--and invariably failed--to learn to swim, failed despite multiple lessons from multiple kindly, well- intentioned instructors. "Tenth time is the charm," I told myself the last time I tried (and failed) to master the strange condition of being in the water and not drowning. Sometimes I get lucky and find ways to avoid water while still getting hits on my pelagic wish list. That happens when seabirds come to me, brought by storm or error to the desert, which is where I live when I am not on boats. One of these times was the summer of 2023. Tropical Storm Hilary passed over my house in the dark, and by dawn petrels from Mexico were dropping out of the sky like black hailstones. In one lake near my house, there were more wedge-rumped storm-petrels in one place than had ever been counted before by all the bird- watching boats from all the ports of California put together.

The other inland birders and I were high-fiving. We couldn''t believe our luck. My kids can tell you about driving home from church and how I stopped the car in the middle of an intersection, shouting " jaeger, jaeger, jaeger," and running down the street. A jaeger is a deep-chested, falcon-winged ocean bird that chases lesser birds with the velocity of a TOPGUN graduate taking down a Cessna 150. They do this because they want to harry the victim--usually a tern or small gull--until it pukes up a fish, which the jaeger then scarfs up. A folk name for it is jiddy hawk. To see a jaeger in the desert was improbable but not impossible. As I knew, there were previous records.

But there are three similar species. Which kind was this one? I chased after it, trying to get a better view. The engine was still on. The turn signal was still blinking--I had been in the middle of turning left out of the bank parking lot when the bird appeared. My driver''s door was open. The jaeger was going twenty or thirty miles an hour, so I was never going to catch up. That didn''t stop me from trying. What about my family, back in the car? Oh, them.

Right. I.