I Forgot This Wasn't Normal
- Roman Bergeron
- May 2
- 3 min read
Updated: May 3
A moment at an open house that reminded me why people fall in love with floating homes:
I was hosting an open house this morning when I caught it on video, a slow pan across the living room, out the window, and there it was. A seal. Just hanging out in the water like it was nothing.
For me, growing up here, it is nothing. Or at least, it's normal. Seals show up the way squirrels show up in a backyard somewhere else. The birds in the morning, the slap of water against the dock, the occasional curious head popping up out of the channel, it's the soundtrack I've always lived inside.
But today, watching a buyer's face when I showed them the video of the seal from the home, I remembered: this is not normal. Not even a little.
What I forget, until someone reminds me
When you grow up on the water, you stop noticing the water. You stop noticing that your house moves a little when a wind gust comes (everyone always asks how much you can feel the rocking). You stop noticing that you can hear gulls before you can hear traffic. You stop noticing that the tide changes the view out your window twice a day, every day, forever.
People who tour floating homes for the first time always notice. They go quiet at the windows. They tilt their heads at sounds I've stopped hearing. They ask questions I've never thought to ask, because the answers are just… my life.
Why people actually buy floating homes
I used to think people bought floating homes for the novelty. The cool factor. The cocktail-party answer to "where do you live?"
To be honest its my answer to "whats a fun fact about you" at every icebreaker.
Sitting at this open house today, watching the water do its slow, ancient thing — tide pulling out, light shifting on the surface, that seal going about its morning. I finally got it.
People don't buy floating homes for the novelty. They buy them to be part of something bigger than their living room.
A regular house puts you next to the world. A floating home puts you inside it. You're not looking at nature through a window the way you'd look at a painting on a wall. You're a participant. The tide is happening to your house. The wind is moving your floor, just barely. The seal isn't visiting your view, your together in the water enjoying the neighborhood.
It's the difference between watching a documentary about the ocean and standing waist-deep in it (something I've done 100s of times building and fixing docks/homes)
The big flowing mechanism
I was sitting there during a quiet stretch between showings, just looking out at the water, and the phrase that came to mind was: the big flowing mechanism. Mother Earth, doing her thing. Tides, currents, weather, animals, light. All of it moving, all of it connected, all of it indifferent to whatever is on my calendar today.
Most homes insulate you from that mechanism. That's their whole job. Walls, climate control, fences, lawns. All of it designed to give you a little island of human-controlled space inside the chaos.
A floating home doesn't really do that. It floats on the chaos. It rises and falls with it. And somehow that's not stressful. It's the opposite. There's something deeply calming about living somewhere that reminds you, every single day, that you're a small part of a much larger system that has been running just fine for billions of years.
What the seals already know
The seals don't think about any of this, of course. They're just living. Eating, swimming, sunning themselves on whatever they can climb onto, occasionally popping up to check out the human in the floating box (or swimming along side them, a true story for another time)
But I think that's actually the appeal. When you live on the water, you get to experience a sliver of what they experience. The same tides. The same fog rolling over the headlands to land on the harbor. The same morning light on the same patch of channel. From the comfort of your couch, with coffee, in pajamas, but still, the same world.
That's not a view. That's a life.
If you've ever wondered
If you've ever toured a floating home and wondered who actually buys these things and why.
It's people who want to stop watching the world from behind glass and start living alongside it. People who want their morning to be punctuated by birds and lapping water instead of leaf blowers. People who want their kids to grow up thinking seals are normal, the way I did.
I'll take "normal" like that any day.
(Video below - that's the seal. Promise I didn't pay him.)
