book. I’ve entirely failed to reconcile fatherhood with adventuring. When I decided to quit my job and resume the chase, Beth and I recognized that my intermittent but prolonged absences would be hard on me, harder on her, and especially hard on our son, Bruno. But we’d told ourselves that he would profit vicariously from my travels, my discoveries. I would come home with souvenirs and pictures and stories that would fill his little mind with wonderment. I would bequeath to him a patrimony of curiosity—about Alaska, the ocean, the mysterious land on the other side of the planet whence most of his possessions came—and instill in him a sense of responsibility for the natural world. And perhaps that is how it will turn out in the end. For now, though, all I seem to have bequeathed to him is timidity.
Bruno, about to turn two, is this summer afraid of fire engine sirens; of the skeletons at the natural history museum; of Spider-Man, whose face to his eyes resembles that of a skeleton at the natural history museum; of SpongeBob SquarePants, whom he calls “that funny snail”; of the Wild Things in Where the Wild Things Are. Even Sesame Street characters scare him (he doesn’t like their “googly-eyes”). He is also, Beth told me when I called her one last time this morning from Seward just before Pallister and I shoved off, afraid of the sea. Hearing this, I thought with affectionate distress, He is his father’s son.
Although in adulthood I’ve learned to bluff, I am an exceptionally fearful person, ill-suited to the role of journalist, or adventurer, or errant duckie hunter. The greatest among my many fears—greater than a fear of heights that makes me faint-headed if I stand too close to a plate-glass window in a skyscraper; greater, even, than my fear of mysterious contagions, or of terrorists, or of bankruptcy, or of disgrace—is my fear of sharks and therefore of the sea. For that fear I hold neither myself nor my parents responsible.
Those whom I hold responsible are the feckless counselors of the summer camp to which my parents sent me at the impressionable age of seven or eight. Those counselors, coaches and college kids mostly, would subject us campers to a morning routine of desultory sport involving pink rubber kickballs. In the afternoon, they would gather us around a television on a wheeling cart and plunk into the boxy maw of a VHS player a film.
One afternoon the film of choice was Steven Spielberg’s Jaws. There I sat, cross-legged on the linoleum, trying as best I could to be a well-behaved child, a good child, and there on the screen coeds lounged around a campfire on a beach, smoking something. And there on the screen one of the female coeds ran naked into the moonlit waves. And on the screen, as she swam, there came a sudden jerk, and a look on her face of awful yet somehow comical surprise. And there on the screen the naked coed disappeared beneath the waves. Across the water spread a slick of blood. And on the beach, the following morning, there appeared a dismembered forearm. And although I once dreamed of becoming a marine biologist, I have been afraid of the sea ever since—so afraid that even now on trips to the seashore I’ll wade in waist deep but no farther.
I mentioned none of this to Beth when I spoke to her this morning. Friends of ours had invited Beth and Bruno to spend the weekend at a beach house in Delaware. The house was beautiful, she told me, and Bruno was having a grand time playing with the daughter of their hosts. All the same Beth was beginning to wish they’d stayed home, on account of Bruno’s fears. Yesterday, when they went to the beach, he’d refused to go near the waves. Today, he was refusing to go to the beach at all. She’d tried coaxing him, goading him, coercing him, but the very mention of the beach sent him into screaming, sobbing paroxysms of dismay.
I told her what parents always say when trying to reassure each other or themselves—“It’s just a phase.” I told her this, but in truth I wondered if my absence might be partly to blame, my absence and my genes. Perhaps, I suggested, Bruno would like to hear his father’s voice? Beth summoned him to the phone, and at the mention of my name, he came running, running so excitedly he tripped. I