Phosphorescence

There are journeys we choose, and journeys that begin long before we understand what we are trying to leave behind.The sea has a long history of luring men to its deep waters, and when Andy Butler set out across the Pacific, he was young and restless like so many before him, but he was also propelled by the desire for more than an adventure. The ocean offered distance-from expectation, a dysfunctional family, the military draft, and the momentum of a life that seemed increasingly determined by forces other than his own.His solo voyages fostered unpredictable encounters with counterculture sailors, eclectic islanders, a drug runner in trouble with the law, various lovers, and a crewmate cat. What followed was a personal voyage and an immersion into a world at once ancient and immediate: islands shaped by volcanic fire and relentless seas, people whose identities were rooted in land, ancestry, language, and memory, and a vast Pacific whose beauty could be as indifferent as it was transcendent.Moving between memory and experience, sea and land, departure and return, Butler recounts a life without charts-wayfinding-charting a course by living intensely at the margins of the familiar, where the experience is not scenery but presence, and where the distances between places begin to reveal the distances within a man himself.