It was an incredibly blue, cloudless sky. Above me and slightly out of reach was a wooden rowboat. The white hull seemed so stark against the perfect turquoise sky. A handful of dark-suited men were at the gunwales. They were shouting and pointing, one reached down toward me with a hooked pole. I watched them with great interest and curiosity about their actions. My arms floated above me as I sank backward through the water.
 
The water couldn’t have been clearer, imitating the clean perfection of air. And it was cold, easily tearing through my clothes and into my body, turning me numb. I continued to watch the men. Their attempts quickly became more desperate. They were completely unable to reach me and oddly, I could not move toward them. All I could do was watch as I slowly drifted downward. 
I recall considering the moment as inescapable. ‘I don’t think I’m going to get out of this one’, I thought. I knew there was nothing I could do about it, but agree to it. It was in that acceptance that I found absolute calmness. With awareness of no ability to reach to my rescuers I watched them grow smaller as my world grew darker.
 
That dream replayed for years. I’d never been in that position, not even close so it wasn’t remembering a trauma. I thought it strange that this of all things would be so repetitious. Why not some childhood incident or imagining myself in a movie or school anxiety? What was drowning supposed to mean? Maybe that was the school anxiety. The entire dream must be a commentary on my trepidations over the need to achieve tremendous success. No other rational explanation, I kept telling myself…yet my soul still wasn’t buying it. At the time I wasn’t entirely aware that I had a soul, much less how to hear him.
The dreams, like the hardcover lighthouse book, were shelved. They simply fell into my Twilight Zone life. A great many strange and inexplicable things accumulate over the years. Some seemed connected, others random. I came to refer to the collective experience not as good luck or bad luck, but strange luck. They made for good conversation starters. 
In the eleven years since having bought the book I went about my business and came to forget about the officer photo. It and the dreams blended into the Twilight Zone and, as time passed, faded into the background. I went off at university, worked on creating my life and generally enjoyed myself.
The strange luck happily continued and I began making frequent trips north to Lake Superior. This newly adopted home was a 368-mi / 592-km journey from my then address in Iowa. I was easily absorbed by the northern hardwood forests, the rugged wilderness, the sudden Superior tempests, the huge cargo ships and lighthouses. The odd trip “whenever I had time” intensified. At the height of travels I was trekking up there every other week, intoxicated by the landscape and mesmerized by the ships and crews I came to know. I developed a maritime photography hobby, which exploded into the very small business of selling prints to sailors I met. In the dozens of trips around the region, nothing truly distressing ever happened. That is until the summer of 1998.