January 18, 2008, Night, 35^°04'N, 129^°06'E THE SUN HAS SUNK behind the Taebaek Mountains, and on the blackening foothills the million lit windows look like stars. Three days late, delayed by dirty weather in Shanghai, the 5,618-TEU box boat Hanjin Ottawa arrived this morning at Pusan, South Korea, where I've spent the past four days waiting for it.

Ever since I was a kid growing up in San Francisco, I've wondered what it would be like to ship out on one of these behemoths, which I could see out on the Bay from my bedroom, going to and from the docks in Alameda, transacting their mysterious business with the faraway. I hoped that shipping out might prove my theory that the high seas are the wildest wilderness after all.

Although security restrictions put in place after 9/11 have made most shipping lines avoid taking on "supernumerary" passengers like me, I found one company, Reederei NSB, that still does a side business in tourism. The NSB Web site promised that a voyage aboard one of the 109 freighters the company operates—which includes the Ottawa—would teach me "firsthand what it means to ‘sail the seven seas' aboard an ocean-going giant."

We're scheduled to leave for Seattle at 2 A.M., but tonight at dinner the captain informed us that the gantry cranes probably won't finish in time. Three of them have been at work all day and will continue late into the night. I spent much of the afternoon watching them. A gantry crane unloading and stowing containers is a surprisingly dexterous thing, like a giant repacking his suitcase with tweezers. One crane operator zips out inside his little trolley along the crane's cantilevered boom as another zips back toward shore; one container drops on steel cables like a spider on its thread as another comes rising up out of the hold's shadowy depths. Once the crane operators finish their work, the lashing crew will have to finish theirs. It could be dawn before we get under way, the captain said. He had come to dinner late and eaten his pork stew in preoccupied silence, until Claire decided to bother him.

It turns out I'm not the Ottawa's only supernumerary. A retired couple named Bob and Claire are taking the round-trip from Seattle to East Asia and back. Minutes after I got to my cabin—where I saw that I had my own desk, television, DVD player, bath, two portholes looking out at the uppermost containers, and enough glassware to host a cocktail party—Bob and Claire stopped by to welcome me aboard. They seem perfectly nice, but there's nothing to dispel one's fantasies of adventure like a retired couple on holiday. The eastbound trip had been lovely, just lovely, Claire said. The view from their cabin, one deck above mine, was breathtaking, and the Filipino cook, who was getting off here in Pusan, was absolutely wonderful—it was like eating in a fancy restaurant three meals a day. It's as though, having attained Base Camp on Everest, one were to find a pair of senior citizens lounging in lawn chairs beneath the awning of a Winnebago.

This afternoon, up on the bridge, I checked the latest forecast, a litany of warnings. There are storms and gales expected in the western Aleutians, the waters east of Hokkaido, and the Sea of Okhotsk. Although it forebodes sleepless nights for the captain, this is good news for me. So long as I survive to tell the tale, I want to see just what the North Pacific can dish out. Odds are I will survive it, all too easily, but the odds are also good that we'll see a little action, a little sturm and possibly some drang, before we make Seattle.