I was 10 when my dad pulled me from my fourth-grade Northern California classroom, along with a stack of independent study materials, to travel to Southeast Asia. He was a single father who’d just had a bad breakup with his then-girlfriend, a beautiful park ranger named Ann. Suddenly, he aspired to start a sailboat charter business as far from Mendocino, and Ann, as possible.
During the two months abroad, Dad and I traveled through Micronesia, Japan, Hong Kong, Thailand, and the Philippines. I remember my awe at swimming among giant clams and reef sharks in Palau, and my dad marveling at the mega yachts and hover ferries in a Hong Kong bay.
As we moved from place to place, my brain was a sponge in an ocean of newness. It sucked up what it found compelling: marine ecology, World War II history, how colonization influenced Filipino foods (spaghetti, fried chicken, ketchup). I learned how to learn on that trip—how to immerse myself in something that interested me, to ask questions, to study for fun. My dad never started the sailboat charter business. But our trip set the course for my life. It turned me into a traveler, yes, but also a journalist, and a person with a restless curiosity.
I’m now in my mid-forties, with a 10-year-old daughter of my own, Roxie, and a seven-year-old son, Felix. In the 35 years since my first trip to Southeast Asia, I’ve never again seen underwater life as kaleidoscopic and vibrant as I did then. This year, with Roxie on the cusp of middle school, I felt the urgency to see my own kids experience abundant marine life. My travels, it turns out, also made me the kind of parent who prioritizes international adventures over time in school.
With that in mind, my husband Tim and I maxed out the kids’ independent study allowance and traded our credit card points for plane tickets to Singapore. From there, we would begin a monthlong trip through Malaysia and Indonesia, two countries new to all of us.
On the 17-hour flight from our home in the Bay Area in January, Roxie curled up beside me. Her long limbs everywhere, she looked like an ostrich chick pushing against its shell. Staring at her as she slept, I thought of my dad—circa 1991—with his own gangly little girl. Then, I flashed to his ashes, carefully spooned into a Ziploc bag and pressed into a round, palm-size tin, tucked into my carry-on. It was just enough of him to sprinkle in a new patch of ocean, as I have again and again in the four years since he died.
Illustration by Elfi Husniawati
“It’s a fish tornado,” Felix said, dropping his line into the water. He stood stoically alongside local men in sarongs on Gili Air, one of three city-park-size islands off the northwest coast of Lombok, Indonesia. Below us, toothy teal-and-fuchsia parrotfish, prison bar–striped angelfish, and two-foot-long needlefish circled. They nibbled and batted at Felix’s stale bread but didn’t bite.
There are no cars on Gili Air, so we rented sturdy bikes with thick tires for $2 a day and rode across the island’s two square miles. We filled our days idly, sprawled on a patch of sand, drinking magenta dragon-fruit juice between snorkeling sessions and card games. When the afternoon rains came, we flew through puddles as we raced back to our rental.
On one of our rides, Felix found his place: the municipal dock, where fishermen gathered at dusk and dawn. He crouched at the edge, staring into water that glowed an iceberg blue beneath the nearby streetlights, desperate to join the action. He got lucky. Among the men there that evening was Idris, who ran the island’s fishing shop. Seeing Felix’s enthusiasm, Idris lent him a compact tackle box of lures and bobbers to use with his simple line.
Each Gili island is small enough to circumnavigate in an hour or so. On the first morning Felix took me fishing with his new gear, he led the way, pedaling furiously along the island’s narrow alleys in the near dark, dodging residents returning from the predawn Ramadan meal of suhoor and the few tourists who remained after the start of the holy month—most of whom seemed to be catching a ferry to leave. Sleep deprived from waking with the call to prayer, I felt like a tipsy marlin weaving through the motorless traffic with a fishing pole balanced on my handlebars.
Felix doesn’t eat “sea meat,” which was especially unfortunate in a country with some 17,500 islands. He threw back every small, flopping fish he caught, though there weren’t that many. Rather than fishing to provide for the family, he seemed drawn instead to the discipline of rising early, mingling among strangers and swapping tips across a language barrier. With each cast, I saw him embedding himself in a place we were otherwise just passing through. And I watched him becoming the person he will grow into: someone with his own passions born of adventure, someone fast to make friends, someone who wants to be part of something.
Roxie, meanwhile, is semiaquatic. The number of hours per day she can spend in the ocean sometimes seems limitless. One afternoon on Gili Air, she and I were far from shore when she paused to adjust her snorkel mask. I treaded water, waiting, until I felt something behind me. I turned. The largest sea turtle I’d ever seen was coming straight for me. I waved and spat garbled words to Roxie, “Tuuurtle, tuuuuuuurtle!” She shoved her face into the water just as the animal dipped and glided below me. It was so close, and so big, with a carapace nearly as long as me (at five-foot-five). I felt a rush of adrenaline, the distinct anxiety of being out of my element.
We swam to shore without stopping, emerging silent and stunned. Unlike in the early 1990s, when dad and I encountered discarded turtle carcasses on Southeast Asian beaches, conservation efforts seemed to be everywhere, and successful. During this trip, Tim, the kids, and I spotted suitcase-size hawksbills camouflaged in the seabed and watched hundreds of clumsy baby turtles slosh like children’s bath toys before being released to the Indian Ocean.
Prior to our time on Gili Air, I’d thought of this kind of trip—a childhood adventure to what feels like the ends of the Earth—as an education. I wanted Felix and Roxie to experience that ocean of newness beyond their Bay Area suburb, to find themselves in the larger world in the way I had.
But on Gili Air, I realized what I was seeking was something more: the concentrated, focused togetherness that only comes when we’re away from the busyness and overload of daily life. For our family, that time is found on and in the water. And for me, the intimate moment in the sea between Roxie and me and the turtle felt like the reason we’d come all this way.
It was storming on the day we left, and we nearly missed our ferry. We returned our bikes in the rain, then loaded a horse-drawn carriage with our bags, and that poor horse galloped, bells jangling, to the port. We arrived just in time to catch a dinghy to our ferry, itself too big to come ashore in the shallow waters.
The ferry skirted Lombok’s steep, green coast before powering west across the strait. We were only a half hour into our four-hour transit to Nusa Lembongan, an island southeast of Bali, and Felix already looked queasy. I told Tim I needed a minute and lurched to the upper deck, where I was alone except for one mother and her son. The boat was rolling in the steep, irregular swells. I braced myself against the railing, watching the Gilis evaporate into the dark clouds, wind slapping my face as I carefully emptied dad’s ashes from their tin. As they blew out across the Indian Ocean, I thought, this is my inheritance—this unconventional life, this fierce love of family, this way that being at sea feels like home.
