There we are in the maternity ward, proud dad holding a newborn up to the camera. Weeks later at home, me exhausted on the couch, her clinging to my chest like a little tree frog. The two of us on the hardwood floor of the kitchen, me coaxing a spiky-headed baby into crawling. There's a toddler in a Jolly Jumper wearing a striped stocking hat, eyes lit with the glee of a bouncing new life. Then come the early Christmases -- each wearing a new bathrobe, Sophie on her feet by now, buried to the ankles in Barbie accessories and piles of torn gift-wrap.

As she grows foot by foot, we stand father to daughter in our snorkeling gear on a beach in Cuba, or sit splay-legged in the sand, both wearing lopsided Panama hats in Mexico. In another photo I'm piggybacking a tuckered-out first grader, both of us in matching Helly Hansen rain gear, making our way home from a West Coast hike.

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William Head Federal Penitentiary, aka Club Fed, is an 80-acre windswept rocky peninsula that juts out from the southern tip of Vancouver Island into the Straits of Juan de Fuca. It is both a penitentiary and a place of terrible beauty. At night you can see the lights of Port Angeles, Wash., 20 miles to the south; Victoria, British Columbia winks from five miles away to the northeast.

A high steel fence topped with razorwire and backed up by two gun towers closes off the land entrance to the joint, and the cold black waves of the Pacific lap the perimeter shores like hungry guard dogs.

The prison serves to keep us separate from society, cut off from the daily commerce of life. But the sea that all but surrounds us, especially in the winter storms that batter the rugged shores, also brings in messages, signs of lives being lived out there beyond our reach.

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