Ground forms and reforms under attentive boots. Transitions from mud to grass, grass to concrete, concrete to sand, sand to wood; each is rendered salient by the steps you take, or the steps that are given to you. As these steps inform your altered circumstances, you must forget the ground you were on before. Instead you must focus on whatever new place you have entered and the sensations that define it. You feel the wind and smell the salt and anxiously flick your fingers at every white-crested wave that foams over onto dampened planks.

At sea you really find out what ground means. Ground is stable, something vital that you can count upon, sit upon, lay upon and run upon. Whenever you leave ground, it is only for a finite period of time. And that finitude is comfortable. At sea, what is striking is the infinity of unbreakable ground that surrounds you. And if you think about it, for a few seconds or a few minutes or a few hours, it's terrifying. It's terrifying because you can never be truly comfortable in water. It's ground without a fixed form. Something shapeless that can’t be safely predicted. 

As I write down this thought, my dinghy bobs over slow waves. I try to ground myself in their rhythmic breaking and folding, breathe calmness like I would if I were back home on firm ground. But the splashes against the wooden hull remind me over and over that I cannot be at home. Home at sea? It's impossible for people to be at home here, whether they live on a barge or a cruise ship or a boat city. We are only ever visitors. This is a truism I realised growing up in Achill, consolidated by my time in the Navy. But it was really only stitched into my mind after I met the seal. I guess because I fell for her, cherished her, and yet I could only ever appreciate her distantly, no matter how close I felt we were. When I remember our time together, it seems almost as if she were still present and posing at the end of my camera lens. 

 She used to pop her head up to greet me. Her messy whiskers always flourished with gems of salty moisture. She would sneeze excitedly, spewing water from her wet black nose as she emerged.  

I loved her eyes the most. They shone with curiosity as much as they hovered with suspicion on my boat and my own eyes, anticipating some violation from me. As though I would try to atterrate her home for the sake of my own comfort, cover her with soil so that I might tread confidently upon the breadth of her dark speckled back.  

I’m sure she knew of my discomfort, how hard it was for me to find a home in hers. Even on land I struggle to feel that kind of homey comfort. I fear the steps I have already tread, and that fear can’t be suspended by any mystical mantras or ancient meditative disciplines.   

If I could swim like the seal, I would be comfortable in the ocean. I can swim if I want to, but with none of the seal’s power, grace or poise. I feel like sinking would be more satisfying. Sinking like she did, down into the deepening shades of blue and grey. What is it like to swim like that, sink like that, and feel completely grounded? I witnessed, at one stark point of my life, men who sank and never rose again. None of those men seemed satisfied by the experience. Then again, those men were taken away by the depths, placed under the waves against their will by other men with bigger boats. Those sinkers were not in control of their descent.  

In contrast, she could afford to descend comfortably and surface merely to express her interest. Her interest was not exploratory or anxious, but an awareness of deviation. If someone appeared in my backyard, I would be interested in them. And I think if she were in a boat that took her floating through the human world, she would be disconcerted by the hardness of the floor underneath her and those firm confident eyes focused on her every ignorant motion. 

Sometimes she would lay on her back and gaze up at the sky. I wonder if she thought about flight, about existing in the space above the water. Did she watch the birds and think as I think, and wonder some of the things I wonder? Or did she just feel grounded as she looked around at all the ungrounded things? I guess ground is a relative term, depending on how you stand.  
Maybe she was just waiting. Expecting something from me that I couldn’t comprehend. Surely she didn't know that I used to hunt seals. It was only for a brief period, when they discharged me on medical grounds and I needed some work around Norway. I didn’t enjoy it, but I was good at it. The only reason I stopped was because the waves kept setting me off. I could’ve kept hunting seals if I wasn’t so scared of the god dam ocean.  

Could she tell? Could she smell it on me? Most of the time I don’t think about it. But sometimes, when she gave me that look, hovering there like a face in a mirror, it seemed like she knew everything about my life. And she wasn’t scared or angry. She was just observant and aware.  

Maybe ground is about degrees of awareness. If it's your ground, you know what’s happening on it. If it's familiar ground, you have seen this ground used a few times before, and seen how people treat it. 

So I guess I’m on familiar ground. I have been living in Monterey for almost a year at this stage. Overall, the Bay coastline is pretty recognizable to me. My perspective on the Pacific must be approaching familiarity. 

The seal could’ve known that. And she knew I couldn’t swim like she could. She could even tell that I recognised her every time she came to spy on me. And she certainly intuited the fact that we were both transfixed by our odd bond, before it was broken.  
She was a kind of ground to me because she was familiar. Partly because of the clipped whiskers on the right hand side of her face. And the little chunk missing out of her nose. Mostly it was the scar that ran from her eye to the top of her head and down to her neck. Perhaps someone had tried and failed to hunt her once.  

She used to appear in a subtle mist of droplets, normally once I had halted my boat just off Lover’s Point. But sometimes it was when I was looking for whales down off the coast of Big Sur. I would often see her when I was up at Fisherman’s Wharf around the sea lions.  

I saw her there for the first time, in the silky blue water that tossed around Cannery Row and its harbour. It was my first weekend in the area, and I heard the raft of massive blubbery beasts before I saw them. I was coming along the cycleway, and the harbour loomed up with all its boats and its thick masses of rocks climbing up away from the water. It was enclosed by the bay, and overhung by the ridged tan slopes of the distant Santa Cruz Mountains. 

I heard the commotion on approach, and I thought it was a flock of angry seagulls or some other noisy birds that stood out of sight. All I could see were fat, sleek bronze and onyx lacquered rocks spread all over the beach. But as I moved closer, I noticed that the noise was centred on those rocks, which were in fact wriggling roaring sea lions splashing and rolling about as they filled the air with rumbling honks.  

Further out to sea, away from the hopping crowd of greater pinnipeds, was the gentle seal. Staring upwards at the sky, ignoring her primal cousins madly wrestling on the shore. I tried to catch a picture of her with my camera, but she disappeared beneath the waves before I could get her in focus. I waited patiently, hoping that she might return. 

I had almost given up, before she reemerged nearer to the shoreline, staring at me with that brightness of hers. The intensity of her eyes sparkled in tandem with coruscating mountains on the other side of the bay, as they lit up under arcs of evening sunlight slanting over my head from behind. In those few instants she stared deeply into me and prodded the waves of my past life to alter their tidal pull and rip back towards the ocean. 

It's hard to forget an encounter like that. It was the type of meeting that never really ends. You know those meetings. The ones that seem to last forever, because they recur in your mind in a cycle of spiritual purification. And you feel the same feeling every time, even if new feelings get added on top of the first one. 

It was only after our meeting that I regained the courage to go out on a boat. In fact, I went out to fish or take photos every day for a month after that. And each time I found a spot to settle offshore, it seemed like my boat had acquired an extra ripple to its wake. A haunting spectre of curiosity, poking me in the back with its eyes. The seal appeared on every one of my journeys thereafter. She was as cosmically present as the cloud covered empyrean. 

Towards the end, she started to bring company. Another recognisable seal, bobbing alongside her, or on the far side of my boat. It was like she had told them about me, with my strange compulsion to point a camera at her and my pathetic efforts to catch fish from a static position above water.  

Sometimes I had taken pictures of the other seals too. But mostly I preferred to capture her when she was alone. I felt an intimate connection to her that I couldn’t faithfully represent in any medium. I merely sought to imitate the sense we shared. To preserve things in photographic form is an imitation of reality. We pretend there is this unmoving moment, this frame of existence, where conditions are balanced and favourable - a meeting of light and motion that sits at an equilibrium and stays there forever. I never intended to rely on this fantasy as a tonic for some of reality’s deepest pains, but the seal made it an easy option.  

 Until the last day. On this day she brought more friends than she ever had before. There were six seals circled around my stationary vessel, and I was in love with them all. But my friend, the regular seal, I was most grateful to. She had spread the word of my boat and my unfamiliarity. Others like her had heard of me and came to observe, providing a soft and stable accompaniment to my thoughts. It was the first time I felt at home there. It is in the comforting presence of comradery that we find the firmest ground.  

But this feeling was held so briefly, and not tightly enough to retain. Instead I held on only tightly enough to leave a lasting wrinkle imprinted on my tired chest. A chest which heaved heavy bloody breaths as water exploded around me with tremendous force. My camera and eye were entrained to sudden carnage, having attempted to capture the image of an unfamiliar seal. My chest thumped and weakened as I involuntarily snapped shots of a shark's massive mouth closing around the body of that seal from beneath, while screaming struggles of natural evil splashed crimson into the air and shook my boat. The camera shots were blurred by jostling waves, the squirm of death, and a tremor in my hands.  

Within seconds it was over, a puddle of viscera dispersing into the ocean as the creatures disappeared into the darkened depths. It was suddenly still at sea, soundless but for the distant call of a seagull hanging over softly sloshing waves. 
All the seals had scattered, leaving foamy trails as they fled. I could only see her, having moved a good deal farther away. But I recognised her as she looked at me for the last time. I could see the expression on her face. It was like she could hear me saying something that she didn’t believe to be true. Her expression of pained surprise cut through me. And then she was gone, away over her ground, leaving me to fall into the space where my ground used to be. 

It hurt to lose her on my trips. It had been so easy to get her attention, but so hard to hold on to it. One moment of uncertainty, one moment where our connection was interrupted, and her conscription in my process of renewal was ended. Waves returned to broken slush, memories resurfaced and sank again, all without her and the ground she allowed me to rebuild. She imparted to me a meaning in life that I had lost, and I thought she knew I needed it. Maybe she didn’t. Maybe we were just each other’s last step in a transition back to known ground. 

As I point my boat back towards shoreline and shallow waters, a whale’s tail breaches the ocean surface far to my right and reminds me that the seal might be hovering very close to me, unseen. Within the endless depths of unbroken ground, there remains the possibility that her ripples will one day jolt my vessel again. Then I might be able to thank her for bringing me into her world and grounding me there.