Rotterdam, Netherlands

Leigh's hometown gives her a love of the ocean and a childhood filled with the violence of her father, who works as a water engineer, continually trying to keep the country from drowning. She learns to swim, and after a near-death experience in the bay, becomes a diver and a marine biologist. “I was born in the lowest part of the country, 22 feet beneath the sea,” Leigh says on page 3. As a child, she lived in a region of the city that was “newly excavated, freshly claimed from the seafloor” (3). Her father tells her not to dig too deep in the sand as a child, a metaphor for the artifical or terraformed life in the city. Rotterdam also inspires Leigh to adventure. “The Netherlands had had to reinvent itself, and became a country of the imagination. While the original Netherlands had stayed in one place, its shadow...