Water, Salt and Fresh.

I wasn't born with a fascination with the Ocean, but by the year I was 7, and had read a few Robert Loius Stevenson books, and been taken several times to the beach in summer for the day, Huntington Beach mostly, I was hooked.

We spent the whole day and part of the night on the shore. It was the cheapest way for a family with very little money to have fun, and you could build a fire at dusk and roast the hotdogs and marshmallow feast brought from home. And to go shell collecting along the surf was a kid's paradise.

The beaches were not that far away but of course there were no freeways then in Los Angeles County, so we started very early, to "get a good spot" and did the boring route over the surface roads. We spent as much of the day down there that we could, and luckily our Dad loved the beach more than most.

Along the coast in little beach towns, at night, you could hear the surf and watch it in moonlight. You could hear the gulls calling and the fog horns and bouys warning ships away from the rocks. Since my brother and I spent a lot of time running around in the light of the moon at home- we had a very big playground on Mom's little farm, and were quite safe back then- we loved the special effects that moonlight lent to the surf. And the sound of it crashing, making the foam that gleemed silvery white, was an unforgettable childhood memory.

The biggest body of water I'd ever seen to that point in my life was Lake Erie. Our grandparents shared a family owned cabin near the shore of Lake Erie, and they would take my cousins and I there when we were quite little. Grandpa would go fishing and that's about all I can remember about it. I do remember being shocked, later on, to taste the ocean water and finding out it was salty! No one told me there were two sorts of water on Earth - Salt and Fresh.