Lopez - Horizon

Coast of Oregon

Eastern Shore of the North Pacific Ocean

Western North America

Mouth of Alexandra Fjord

East Coast of Ellesmere Island

Nunavut

Canada

Isla Santa Cruz

Archipilago de Coln

Eastern Equatorial Pacific

Turkwel River Basin

Western Lake Turkana Uplands

Eastern Equatorial Africa

State of Tasmania

Northern Shore of the Southern Ocean

Southeastern Australia

State of New South Wales

Western Shore of the South Pacific

Queen Maud Mountains

Central Transantarctic Mountains

Northern Edge of the Polar Plateau

Antarctica

Brunswick Peninsula

Shore of the Strait of Magellan

Southern Chile

The boy and I are leaning over a steel railing, staring into the sea. The sun is bright, but shade from a roof above us makes it possible to see clearly into the depths, to observe, quivering there, whats left of the superstructure of a battleship sunk seventy-two years before.

My grandson is nine. I am in my sixty-eighth year.

The memorial terrace on which we are standing, alongside my wife, has been erected above the remains of the USS Arizona, a 608-foot Pennsylvania-class battleship overwhelmed at its moorings on the morning of December 7, 1941, by Japanese dive bombers. It sank in minutes. The flooded hulk, a necropolis ever since, holds the remains of many of the 1,177 sailors and marines killed or drowned on the ship that morning. Im explaining to the boy that sometimes we do this to each other, harm each other on this scale. He knows about September 11, 2001, but he has not yet heard, I think, of Dresden or the Western Front, perhaps not even of Antietam or Hiroshima. I wont tell him today about those other hellfire days. Hes too young. It would be inconsideratecruel, actuallypointedly to fill him in.

Later that morning the three of us snorkel together on a coral reef. We watch schools of tropical fish bolt, furl, and unfurl before us, colored banners in a breeze. Then we have lunch by a pool at the hotel where we are guests. The boy swims tirelessly in the pools glittering aqua-tinted water until his grandmother takes him down to the beach. He runs to jump into the Pacific.

He cant get enough of swimming.

I watch him for a few minutes, flinging himself into the face of wave after wave. His grandmother, knee-deep in the surf, scrutinizes him without letup. Eventually I sit down in a poolside chair with a glass of iced lemonade and begin to read a book Ive started, a biography of the American writer John Steinbeck. I glance up once in a while to gaze at sunlight shuddering on the surface of the ocean, or to follow flocks of sparrows as they flee the tables of the hotels open-air restaurant, where theyve been gleaning crumbs. For prolonged uninterrupted minutes I also watch, with a mixture of curiosity and affection, the hotels other guests, sunning on lounges around the pool or ambling past, completely at ease. The clement air and the benign nature of the light dispose me toward an accommodation with everything here different from myself. When I breathe, Im aware of a dense, perfume-like scenttropical flowers blooming in a nearby hedge. Is it bougainvillea?