Home by the Ocean
Home by the Ocean poignantly expresses Pam’s perennial wish to move back to the Maritimes. She wrote it just after a 2016 summer car trip through New Brunswick, to us in Nova Scotia, and back to Ottawa along the North Shore of the Gaspé Peninsula. She was doing research for a writing project, The Marco Polo Table, and also visiting places she had lived as a child.
And the tug of war between life inland and shore, between work and wages and sea
From Home by the Ocean by Pamela Holm
Tears me apart, wrestles hard with my heart, and I long to be free …
Maritimers and would-be Maritimers love this song.
Video
Here’s Miranda Lever singing Home by the Ocean.
Sheet music
Lyrics
There’s a call from the heart of my soul
to go down to the tide, to the salt crested tide
to the shoreline where waves gently roll
to the wild rocking beat, cooling sand ‘neath my feet
to be home by the ocean once more.
A rover I am, a sailor on land.
I’ve lived in far places, journeyed through foreign lands.
I have braved other climates in the heat and the rain,
gazed at far mountains, and come home again.
A sailor on land, my home is my car
On four wheels I’ve travelled, follow some distant star.
I have lost myself over and over again
Then the smell of the seaside brings me home once again.
And the tug of war between life inland and shore,
Between work and wages and sea,
Tears me apart, wrestles hard with my heart
And I long to be free
To follow the call of my soul
to go down to the tide, to the salt crested tide
to the shoreline where waves gently roll
to the wild rocking beat, cooling sand ‘neath my feet
to be home by the ocean once more.