1. Mamaroneck A history, one purporting to depict the life trajectory of the grandfather reading by the pool, could easily begin 65 years before that moment in Hawai''i, in an embayment of Long Island Sound called Mamaroneck Harbor. Here is a stretch of sheltered water, a surface barely roughened that day by a wind blowing westward from the direction of Crane Island. A boy who cannot yet swim wades steadily farther out into the salt water, under the shepherding gaze of his mother. She''s hardly fifty feet away, a dark-haired woman in her middle thirties, her legs tucked beneath her, her belly round with a second child. She''s sitting on a wool blanket, embroidering a needlepoint image of field flowers erect in a vase. It''s 1948. She''s conversing with a friend underneath a large white oak tree on Orienta Point, on the Westchester County coast of New York.

The boy halts when he reaches water up to his chin. She watches him steadily now. He wants to go farther, to swim out past Turkey Rock, out farther even, out beyond the Scotch Caps, two islets on the distant rim of the Sound. Past that lies a horizon of water. A blank page. He turns for shore, scuttling sideways like a crab in ripples that break over his small shoulders. A few months later, with the approach of a New England winter and following the birth of his only sibling, the boy moves with his family to a valley in Southern California, an irrigated expanse of farmland. Groves of oranges and walnuts, fields of alfalfa.

Peach orchards. The irrigated San Fernando Valley. This Mediterranean plain is bounded to the south by the Santa Monica Mountains, to the north by the snow-capped San Gabriels. A different life for him, now. A different geography. An unfamiliar climate. Different races of people. One day, a couple of years after the family arrives, the father leaves.

He returns to his first wife, living in Florida with their son, and the boy and his mother and younger brother begin together another sort of existence. His mother teaches home economics at a junior high school in Northridge and, at night, dressmaking at Pierce Junior College, near Calabasas. Other evenings she works at home, creating couture clothing for her clients. The father writes from Florida. He promises to send money but never does. The three of them, anyway, seem to have all they need. The boy is curious, but wary. A suburban crow.

He makes friends with other boys in his neighborhood and with his classmates at Our Lady of Grace, a Catholic grade school in Encino. He gets to know a few of his mother''s students, the sons of braceros working in the vegetable fields north and west of their house in Reseda. He learns to ride a bicycle. He rides and rides, as far north in the valley as Granada Hills and west all the way to Chatsworth. Their mother takes the boys out into the western Mojave Desert, to the eastern Mojave and the Grand Canyon, and south to the San Diego Zoo and across the border into Mexico. One afternoon the boy stands on the shore of Topanga Beach, fronting the great Pacific just east of Malibu. He watches comber after comber crash the strand, stepping clear of the waves'' retreating sweeps each time, as his mother has asked. He understands that this foaming storm surf has arrived on the beach from someplace else.

Here, temperate air embraces him, an onshore breeze softens the burn of the sun''s rays on his white skin. Its light splinters on bits of quartz in the sand at his feet. This, too, is new to him, a feeling of being cradled in harmless breezes and caressed by light. Years later, walking alone in faraway places, he will remember and long for this sensation. A friend of his mother, a man the boy hopes will one day be his father, is accompanying the family that day at Topanga Beach. He tells the boy that far off across the water, farther away even than the storm that makes these waves, is the extremely ancient country of China. The boy has no image of China. The tall, long-fingered, long-legged, soft-spoken man in khaki trousers moves through the boy''s mind with the hesitating grace of a flamingo.

The boy imagines that the man knows many things. He works at the Santa Barbara Botanic Garden and some days brings the boy with him to work. His name is Dara. He points out differences among the plants; he pots with the boy in the greenhouses. He explains how a large flowering plant like a jacaranda grows from a small seed. The boy''s most favorite trees now are eucalypts, the tall River red gums and Blue gums that flank Calvert Street in Reseda where he lives. He likes the royal towering of them, the shedding boles, slick beneath his hands, the fragrance of the hard gumnuts. He carries a few of these buttons in his pockets wherever he goes.

He likes the defiant reach of these trees, how they crowd and rake the blue sky, and how the wind chitters in their leaf clusters. He feels safe hiding in their shadows. Dara tells him that around Los Angeles they''re called "skyline trees." He likes that. Originally from Australia, he says, but they grow all over the world, wherever the right conditions can be found. It''s the same for the frangipani trees and bougainvillea vines growing at the Botanic Garden. Those two, along with the eucalypts, says Dara, are now found everywhere "in the colonial subtropics." The boy can''t picture Australia, but he is transfixed by the idea that some trees are carried off from their first country and then grow happily in other places.

When he lies in bed at night, imagining the future he wants, a strategy he uses to probe the vague precincts of his dreams, the boy envisions the Botanic Garden and thinks about Dara, how gently Dara''s hands handle plants. By now, though, he has also learned about some things less comforting. More threatening. He circumspectly regards the lives of poisonous Black widow spiders living in the garage alongside his house, red hourglasses gleaming on the females'' tummies. When he talks to adults about the rattlesnake that startled him and his friend Thair while they were walking in the Santa Monica Mountains one morning, hunting for alligator lizards, he enjoys the way adults attend closely to his story. The snake had snapped at them when they teased it. He doesn''t tell his listeners that he and Thair beat it with a stick until it was dead. One weekend at Zuma Beach the boy is stung by a wounded Portuguese man-of-war, a deep ocean creature, foundering wounded in the surf.

An ambulance comes to take him, vomiting and shivering, to the hospital. He trusts the shelter of the towering gum trees and wonders about the power of Portuguese man-of-wars. The two things are now entwined in his mind. He is ashamed of having killed the snake and of his silence about it. Most every Saturday the boy goes with his mother and brother to the Farmer''s Market in Los Angeles, at Third and Fairfax, driving over from the valley in his mother''s dark-green, 1941 Ford. He loves the shine and heft of the fruit. He has to reach higher than his head in order to feel within the tilted boxes for greengage plums, for kumquats and nectarines. He likes to heft the Belgian endives, to feel the brush of wetted carrot tops across his forehead, to grip a cassava melon in both his hands.

They''re like his first pets. A friend of his mother owns an avocado ranch near Fallbrook. Her husband, a DC-6 pilot who flies every week to Honolulu and on to Tokyo for American Airlines, is not much interested in answering the boy, who wants to know how this actually occurs, Los Angeles to Honolulu, then to Tokyo. The boy has considered that he will one day have a ranch something like the one this couple operates. He''ll raise avocados and perhaps Asian pears, which break as cleanly against his teeth as McIntosh apples. This life appeals to him. He''ll truck his produce and buckets of cut flowers--snapdragons, carnations, irises--to the market. He''ll keep bees to pollinate his flowers and fruit trees, possibly offer their honey for sale, along with fresh eggs, asparagus, and pomegranates at a stand by the side of the road, like the fruit-and-vegetable stands his mother shops at on the drive home from school every day.

Most nights the boy consoles himself as he falls asleep with the certainty of the destination he has chosen. He will operate a tractor, dragging a harrow to break up the clods of dirt left behind after he discs the field where he will grow annuals. He''ll determine exactly how to set out the sprinklers to irrigate the varieties of roses in his gardens. He''ll light smudge pots on cold winter nights to keep the orchards from freezing. The more he imagines a truck farm, the less anxious he feels about the strange man who has come into his life, a man who is not like Dara. One winter afternoon the boy follows his mother into the post office at Canoga Park. While she waits in line he studies a 14'' x 7'' mural on the east wall, Palomino Ponies . He''s mesmerized.

Years later he will misremember the image when he discovers more work by the same painter, Maynard Dixon. He will think of it, wrongly, as a tableau of American Indian faces in profile, high cheek bones, the burnt sienna and ochre tones of their skin. But there are no Indians in this mural of a California vaquero of the 1840s, racing across a golden grassland behind seven palomino horses. The boy will have conflated the image in the post office with the memory of a better-known painting by Dixon, Earth Knower , and he will have further confused the misremembered image with a childhood recollection of having onc.