In the beginning...

So I was born on the Pacific coast, though I grew up land-locked and have no conscious memory of my first home by the ocean. But I think there must be something in me that remembers. I can't think of a time in my life when I didn't know that the Pacific was my home. All through my childhood I knew that once I graduated high school I would move to the west coast, though I'll admit that my childhood dreams never went further than the west coast of North America. Now that I've been here for almost five years, I still feel the pull of the Pacific, and it's pulling me further into itself. I had the fortunate experience of living in Hawai'i for four months. What a short amount of time! Only enough for a small taste of what the rest of the Pacific has to offer. So what next? Well I tried (I really tried!) to find a job that would allow me to live and work on the Pacific Ocean. I had interviews for jobs in California, Hawai'i, American Samoa, and Oregon. But nothing came through. I didn't know what to do, I couldn't understand. I have a B.S. in Ecology and Evolution. I'm an intelligent, hard-working person. Why can't I land a job? And then I got an idea. I didn't come up with it all on my own. Thousands of other people in my situation have had the same idea I'm sure. But it seemed so crazy to me at the time that I was afraid to even tell people about it. What was my idea? The Peace Corps...