Mokhtar had grown up in San Francisco, surrounded by water—oceans and bays and rivers, estuaries and lakes. He’d spent years in Yemen, a country with a twelve-hundred-mile coast. He’d gone to middle school on Treasure Island, an actual island. But he’d never been on a boat. He’d always wanted to, but the ferries and yachts and sailboats he’d seen throughout his youth seemed part of some unattainable other world. His first experience with any watercraft was going to be in a tiny skiff leaving Yemen in the middle of a civil war. He stepped in and they left the shore. They were carrying the first
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A momentous occasion, perhaps not marked with the appropriate pomp.
