What do Silicon Valley pioneers, North Pacific fishermen, a bullet train in Japan, a war fought over a single British pig, and a Victorian-era great-great-aunt navigating Lake Erie in a sinking ship have in common? They all belong to the same man. Journeys Over Water is the memoir of David Knight — Wisconsin farm kid, accidental Silicon Valley insider, commercial fisherman, steel boat builder, philosophical wanderer, and self-described "Valentine Michael Smith" (human raised by Martians, returned to Earth to find its customs baffling). It is a book about what happens when you replace the life plan with a small notebook and let the current take you where it will. Knight arrived in Mountain View, California, at seventeen — barely — and found himself in the middle of the most improbable technological gold rush in history, working alongside the legends who would name and build Silicon Valley. He stayed twenty years, then traded circuit boards for fishing nets, and built the steel boats that carried him into the North Pacific, where the seas are rough, the work is brutal, and laughter is the only thing that gets you through the day. Along the way: a Shinkansen ride through the Japanese countryside at 200 miles per hour. A wolf who walked with him. A pig whose international consequences summoned admirals and eventually a German emperor. A great-great-aunt who crossed a storm-wracked Lake Erie in 1853 with 600 passengers and a leaking hull, so that the rest of us could exist. These are true stories, told with the dry wit of someone who has made a considerable number of mistakes — and suspects the universe reserves its best material for people who do. Equal parts frontier history, technology memoir, philosophical meditation, and outright comedy, Journeys Over Water is the account of a life lived the only way it could have been: without a plan, and all the better for it. "The universe is kind to drunkards and fools, and as a charter member of the latter at times, the universe saw fit to drop me off in Mountain View, California, at the very inception of Silicon Valley."