A number of years ago my wife and I were at a bed and breakfast on Lopez Island. Right across the street was a gentle bay that opened out to the great Pacific Ocean. So, it was only natural that the topic of conversation around the table with the owners turned to the seas — and sons. Sons, because we all had raised sons who, like their fathers, had their own very strong ideas about how they wanted to live their lives.

"You should read 'Wanderer' by Sterling Hayden," Mr. Bed and Breakfast Owner said to me in a moment of father-to-father candor. I didn't even know Sterling Hayden had ever written anything. But I sure enjoyed his performance in Stanley Kubrick's "Dr. Strangelove." He played a crazed Air Force officer, Col. Jack T. Ripper. Turns out, the cigar-chomping character was not all that different from the actor portraying him.

But Hayden wasn't crazed — just driven. I took the suggestion to read his book as an assignment and spent the next few years trying to find a copy of it in used bookstores. This would not be a volume I'd want to return to the library. I found a copy last year and waited until I was in the right mood to read it. The mood hit last week and I dove in.

Hayden wrote this autobiographical account of a man wrestling with the sea, himself and the world in 1963. "Wanderer" is the name of his 98-foot wooden schooner built in 1893. The name serves equally well as Hayden's own moniker. In 1959, he walked out of his successful career as a Hollywood actor, left his wife and the lawyers arguing about the divorce, and in defiance of court orders set sail for the South Seas aboard "Wanderer" with his crew and his four young children.

"They never taught wandering in any school I attended," Hayden wrote in the preface to the 1977 edition of the book. "They never taught the art of sailing a vessel, either. Or that of writing a book. It's all so mysterious and — yes — enchanting. And that is what I suppose this book is all about."

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The book is a candid, unflattering but ultimately inspiring quest of a man in search of his soul. The writing is rich, like a deeply textured expressionist painting where the colors are applied by a knife not a brush. Here's Hayden's description of his aunt, whose boarding house he and his parents moved to when he was 16. "Emma was a swart spinster forty-four years old who had been dead since puberty. She was plump and firm as a porpoise, with beads for eyes and biceps like a man's. She had a nun-like face and her hands looked as though someone had taken a cleaver and splintered the stumps of her arms into five pudgy pads apiece."

Hayden's childhood was shaped by poverty, the death of his father and the irresponsibility of his stepfather. His family moved constantly, just barely avoiding eviction, slipping away at night with their belongings and heading off to yet another boarding house.

The one constant in Hayden's life was the sea. It soothed him, it challenged him, it gave him a place where he belonged and it nagged at him if we was gone from it for too long.

Hayden's account of the sailing race he was in when he was 22 reads like a passage from Melville: "The Bluenose tore past the plunging buoy two lengths ahead of us and swung hard on the wind. Her long black snout, streaming spray, reached over a steep sea, then fell like a maul into the trench beyond. Her scarred old timbers shuddered. Her spars pitched hard against their tracery of shrouds. High far aloft, her foretopmast backstay parted and the wire rained down on deck. Fiery Angus — never a man noted for patience — laid down on the wind-honed waters a savage barrage of four-letter words.'

Ultimately, the sea proved as turbulent as the men who plied it. Hayden would have to traipse around the world, become an actor, quit, join the military to support the Spanish resistance, join the Communist party, quit, become an actor again. All the while he never felt "right." He hated acting. He hated Hollywood. And on bad days, he hated himself. On the good days, he recognized that he had to be his own person.

Actors read someone else's words. He would have to write his own. Which he did in "Wanderer," following that with his bestselling work of fiction, "The Voyage."

In the same spirit, fathers must chart their own course and let their sons chart theirs. You cannot be the captain of someone else's ship, even when the voyage traverses the same waters the older captain knows only too well.

Reading Hayden, you never quite know where you're sailing to but you have every confidence that this wild but wise man will take you someplace where you have never been before. Some place where you would never had gone on your own, but upon reflection, a place where you desperately needed to be.