I remember the moment when I was about to be handed the keys to my first houseboat rental. It was the eighties, we were out of college, and I had brought 20 of my best friends to Herman and Helen's Marina, on the Sacramento–San Joaquin Delta, in Northern California. The boat in question was 40 feet long, ten feet wide, and, aesthetically speaking, little more than a floating tin shack. Even though I had confirmed the reservation twice, I imagined some last-minute snag. I was sure the deckhand would notice that all we had brought for the weekend was beer or that we had twice as many people as the boat was designed to sleep. But my worry went deeper than that. With all the tort lawyers and insurance adjusters out there, it just didn't seem realistic that someone would allow a 25-year-old with no demonstrable seamanship skills to motor off into the distance with a boat this large.

The grizzled deckhand, who had a nose the size and color of a rutabaga thanks to the twin ravages of sun and drink, did give me the keys. Once under way, I instantly got us lost in the 1,000-plus-mile canal maze of the delta. But I was also deliriously happy at the helm of such a vessel. Even now, I have no trouble reconciling how the boat looked—with its corrugated-tin exterior, Plexiglas windows, and fake-brick linoleum floor—with how it made me feel. I was in love with that boat—the Pelican—because it made me feel like a ship's captain in the same charitable way that the first woman to yield to my fumblings made me feel like a man.

Of course, my understanding of what a captain might act like was drawn entirely from the movie Jaws and some other pop-cultural tidbits. While at the helm, I chomped on a cigar, squinted like Popeye, and, most unnervingly to my friends, loudly hummed Gordon Lightfoot's "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald."

Not surprisingly, I was dangerously unskilled. That first weekend, I managed to get the boat stuck on shore at a 15-degree angle. (Who knew the delta was tidal?) Like Captain Queeg in The Caine Mutiny, I plowed over my own anchor line, wrapping it around the prop so tightly that I had to order one of my friends down into the dark water with a steak knife in his teeth to cut us free. I had minor collisions with a sailboat, an island, and a dock. I also got a fishhook sunk so far into the flesh between my thumb and forefinger that it had to be pushed through and de-barbed before it could be removed.