Golden Gate Bridge. In 1944, my grandfather was elected mayor of San Francisco, and when he was called upon to convey the city’s compliments to a victorious admiral returning from the Coral or the Philippine sea, he sometimes took me with him in the captain’s barge to be piped aboard the deck of a flagship dressed with men in uniform.

My teenage hopes of joining the Navy fell afoul of the physical examination administered by the Naval Reserve Officers Training Corps program to applicants in the freshman class at Yale College in the autumn of 1952. I proved to be blind to the distinction between the colors red and green, willing to steer for the Guerrière and glory but unable to read the signal flags. To correct the courseof my disappointment my father called in a favor from the National Maritime Union in New York that allowed my temporary rating as an ordinary seaman aboard one of the family’s last surviving freighters during the summer between my sophomore and junior years at college.

The SS Mount Whitney sailed from Mobile, Alabama, to load iron ore from a mine on the Orinoco River in Venezuela, and when it slipped loose of tugboats and dropped the harbor pilot at the entrance to the bay, I was astonished by a sense of complete and boundless freedom, a casting off of all the troubles lurking in the hearts and onshore schemes of men. The poet Langston Hughes evidently felt similarly. At the age of 21, he quit the island of Manhattan