At three-thirty the night is still dark. The wind has started to rise from the northeast. The only sounds in Brendan's cabins are the rush of water along the hull, the whine of wind in the rigging, the hum of the radar as it pulses around and around, casting an eerie glow on the face of the person who watches.

I've just been relieved after my half hour's duty on the bow, so at the moment I'm the only person on board who is not on watch. I lie on my back on the settee in the main saloon, fully clothed, listening to the sounds of the wind and feeling with my body the motion of the boat as she rolls and plunges through crossing seas, drawing ever closer to the Labrador coast.

It's funny, I think, how easy it's become for me over the years to distinguish among the various components of the crossing wave train as Brendan moves through them. There is the short, chattery motion of the northeast wind-wave slapping against the hull and bow, mounting as the wind mounts. There is the slow rise and fall of the southerly groundswell as it marches up from a weather system somewhere far down in the Atlantic. There is the pitch and yaw of Saturday's easterly-a last, dying memory of coastal winds far astern. And now there is another motion recently added-an increasing surge from the north, angry and insistent, that serves as a warning of more wind to come.

A dozen years ago, before I knew Brendan as well as I know her now, such motion at sea had often seemed random and chaotic. Rolling and jerking and slamming into waves, the boat had seemed a thing possessed, and on the roughest nights I'd even felt a twinge of nausea.

But now the motion is comprehensible. The sounds that the hull makes as it moves through the water are like the whisperings of an old friend. The various combinations of surges and plunges and long, slow rolls are like the rocking of a long-remembered cradle. The wave train, rather than seeming an alien thing, has come to feel like a familiar messenger, carrying news from half a dozen sources and delivering it together in a complex chorus of sound and motion.

How is it, I wonder, that the human brain is able to sort through such a mishmash of intersecting patterns and somehow find the order in them? Ocean waves, after all, are highly irregular. The series of crests and troughs that they produce as two or more crossing trains intersect create a pattern of the type that mathematicians term "nonlinear" - that is, a pattern that refuses to repeat in an orderly manner but only continues to permutate in endless new combinations.

It seems that the human brain must have the ability to collect and store such complex information in a plastic way so that we may shuffle it, sort it, play with it, recombine it, subject it to the most fantastic leaps of imagination. The unedited patterns-like those of the crossing waves-may at first seem chaotic, yet after a time the brain tells us that they are merely complex, that indeed they do contain logical groupings, and that these groupings are finally comprehensible.

The deep ocean is not the only setting in which one may develop this capacity for dealing with complexity. We are surrounded everywhere in our experience by complex systems. The rise and fall of the wind as it blows across an open field, the movement of clouds in an approaching thunderstorm, the dance of flames in a fireplace, the flow of traffic on a crowded freeway, the pattern of branches in a forest in winter, the behavior of gases at the surface of a boiling pot of water - these and thousands of other phenomena in the world of everyday experience exhibit the qualities of complexity, and most of us learn to think intuitively about them and eventually to make reasonable sense of them.

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