I spent three summers traveling on the northern most ferries, trying to make a loop. It wasn’t often quite as far north as the arctic circle, which is 66° N. My ferries were 59° N to 65° N. I calculated once, and if I recall correctly, traveled around 14,000 miles. Land miles, or standard miles as they are called. Nautical miles are 1.1508 nautical miles, and when I calculated distance, I used maps not charts. I have nautical charts for all the seas I’ve traveled.

I love to be at sea. It brings me a calm happiness that I don’t find in many other places. Even in big seas, I feel a state of bliss. When a ship hits waves so big that my body floats momentarily in space, it is a moment of silent perfect. In January, I took the ferry from Helsinki, Finland to Travemunde, Germany. 31 hours across the Baltic sea. It wasn’t particularly full, being January, it wasn’t tourist-on-the-deck-season. Winds were high, fog settled, and at times, I could not see either shore, just a glorious dawn Rothko.

One night, asleep in my bunk, I woke to that sense of my body floating a few inches above the bunk. We’d hit high seas and were slamming straight into them, waking me up with that bliss and smile state I only get at sea. The Finnlines ferries that run this route are made for ice, and we did indeed have to pass through ice pack in the Helsinki harbor. A grinding salt-flat pattern of floes against the hull. It’s beautiful, the sea, the ice, the motion.

I don’t tend to stay in place. I don’t always have an abode to call home. In the 2010s I started keeping my artist’s studios, but giving up my homes, so I could wander from place to place. I kept my studio in NYC for a decade; the books and maps and charts are home, and they need a place, but I, this body, does not, it seems.

When I was 19 I moved from Massachusetts to California, for university, and have since been in 63 countries, lived in five (or is it six), lived in a dozen places in the US. It was in 2013 I took my first long ferry ride, it took me 27 days to get from Unalaska (Dutch) to Bellingham, Washington. Part of that was weather related, and part was that when I reached Ketchikan, AK I realized I did not want to go back, so I started hopping smaller ferries out to explore the islands.

Despite the movement and the countries and the places I’ve wandered, I am not, as often described, a nomad. It is never a word I used for myself, especially not after spending two summers in northern Mongolia with nomads. Nomads have homes, and places, and communities. Their places might be within them, or within a fixed distance. But there is, in traditional nomads, a belonging.

Ferry travel is, for me, destination-less. I am not trying to get where the ferry goes, I am going where the ferry goes. I see places slowly, I am at sea, and with the exception of two people, everyone I have met on ferries, from the captain and crew to staff and passengers, has been amazing. I have notebooks full of stories people tell me.

There are qualities of this that are so inherently me.

Solitude. There is an internal silence in me, when I am at sea. I can sometimes recreate this on land, especially when deeply engrossed in a creative project, but at sea it is as though some calm cool color has poured through me, and any scratching or noise or edginess or anxiety dissolves.

Continuity. Ferry travel doesn’t stop moving. There is always somewhere else to continue on to. And it is slow, and one is at the mercy of the world. A ship at sea is a tiny acorn on the ocean. It is glorious.

Serendipity. Ferry schedules are, mostly, just suggestions of when they might leave. Even more so depending on what country one is in. Online schedules exist, and then you show up at the port or the dock and discover that the online ferry plan and the physical ferry plan do not overlap in any form of reality, except for ship on sea.

When I first started solo traveling by ferry, I was, I realized, deep inside myself, afraid of the world. Ferry ports are often outside the towns, a few miles walk. They tend to arrive at odd hours, 11pm, 2am, into another town where it is a few hours walk to the center. Planning arrival doesn’t make sense usually, as things will change, and there is often no cell service in the places I travel to. So I arrive, and sort it out. I pack to be able to walk the miles if need be. One accepts rides from strangers (especially in bear country).

A few years earlier I had started solo winter camping. The first night alone on a hill in the snow, I thought, this will be fine, or I will panic, and then I will know (something!) It was glorious. I also wanted to panic at times. Beginning to move solo through the world, through places without safety nets, I realized how much I had been raised to be afraid. Of nature, of men, of being alone in the wild, of being alone on the road. Of being female.

More than solo camping in the snow, it was on the sea and with the wind and finding the expansive the kindness of strangers, the remoteness and the stories, so many beautiful stories people told me of their lives, that I found such a love, a care, a pleasure, in humans.

There is a lot more wandering about I’d like to do. In the woods, solo travel is solo, but most elsewhere, even when traveling alone, I meet people. People who tell me things. I collect their stories with care, and keep them in boxes in my studio. I often think of doing something more with them, of sharing them with the wider world,