The house I grew up in was built in 1810 by a retired sea captain from Newburyport, Massachusetts. People were always surprised that a man who had spent his life at sea would retire to the dry hills of southern New Hampshire. Those people had never looked out at the south field on a windy day to see waves upon waves of tall grass rolling away toward the trees. They didn't know that at night the sky was dark and wide, as over a small sea.

We didn't know much about the captain or his family. But my brother and I found a tube of brittle, yellowing nautical charts in the attic one summer, and after that we imagined a lot about him and a lot about the sea. The charts were beautiful and complex, with tiny numbers and shapes like constellations drawn around them. I didn't know how to read the charts, but their usefulness didn't depend on my knowing; they were heavy with purpose in my hands. Sitting on the roof of a dilapidated chicken coop, my brother and I would imagine ourselves lost in some exotic sea with only a chart and compass to guide us. The thought of all that deep, watery mystery solved by the chart in our hands never got boring. We played that game for years after all the other games had stopped.

Eventually we left that house and left the charts with it. We moved to town and our parents built a new house. Once, in high school, I went back and asked the people living there for permission to walk the land. The chicken coop was still there, slumping a little more deeply into the ground. I walked through the south field and the woods at the edge of it to the old dump. Strewn over the rocky hillside were all kinds of rusted cans and mattress springs, broken chairs and bicycle wheels. That day I found a beautiful magnifying glass. The metal rim was rusted and the wooden handle split, but the glass was clear and miraculously intact. Instinctively, I brought the glass above my hand, examining the tiny lines. For the first time in a long time, I thought of the sea captain and wanted so much to see with his eyes. All the criss-crossing lines of me, stretching out in all directions, mapping out a life I could not see.