I took a canoe trip along the Montana portion of the Missouri River the summer I was thirteen, a summer during which the state was elsewhere being devastated by wildfires. My parents, ever vigilant, packed me off with some rubber tubing and instructions that if the fires came close I was to lie under the water, breathing through the tube, until danger passed. It isn’t quite hot enough for that here yet but it is REALLY ALMOST, so yesterday, instead of a regular field trip, I took the interns swimming.

We drove out to a big lake about half an hour away, surrounded by steep rocky shore and shaggy hanging trees and tons of little paths, enough that every group there had a cove or inlet to call their own. I was in a particularly good mood— I had slept eight hours in a row the night before for the first time in weeks— and was perfectly happy to splash and be splashed and swim out to the center and float for a while, practicing a very rusty backstroke, staring up at the quiet, cloudless sky. I drove home barefoot in my damp bathing suit, surprised not to be salt-sticky and missing it, a little. I did not grow up in a freshwater state.

New Haven lies on Connecticut’s coastline, the water maybe five or ten miles from my apartment, but the shore is impenetrably industrial and the Sound is murky, ugly, brine-tart but waveless, too tranquil to really be ocean. I appreciate its presence, of course, but always miss the frigid Pacific, the draining pull of exhaustion after a day fighting the tide in Santa Monica or Venice. The beach here feels like a respite from the city but never quite an escape: all of the cliches about the massive and impersonal ocean aren’t quite true in the shelter of the land’s curve. You can always see the other side.

It is probably a western frame of mind to need that kind of limitlessness; I grew up at the farthest edge of the country, accustomed to the idea that beyond my home lay the unimaginable and uninhabitable. In California, the sun sets over the water, so that if you stare out long enough you end up in the dark, the sky falling blackly over the flat world’s end. Quaint New England ponds, surrounded by greenery, fresh and sweet, still surprise me; five years here and I’m not yet used to it, not even very good at seeing it for what it is.

It is true though, also, that I used to find the whole place claustrophobic, the town halls and Main Streets, the local ponds and thin strips of beach. I spent my first year back hating this town, how tiny and familiar it was, how boring and known. Increasingly, now, I appreciate it: the sense of adult community, all of us building lives here on a manageable scale. After weeks of stress and exhaustion and funny sunburns and salt-stained clothes a long quiet swim was all I wanted. I could see the shore and it still couldn’t reach me, floating at the center, weightless. It’s not that I plan on staying too much longer— I miss dry winter heat and driving in the canyons too much for that— but I’m starting to think that I’ll miss it once I’ve gone.