For two years and twenty-seven days, a twenty-foot white fiberglass boat with no engine and no crew refused to sink in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Her name was Kamome, meaning Seagull. She was the training skiff of Takata High School in Rikuzentakata, Japan, a town where the March 2011 tsunami killed over 1,700 people and wiped the high school off the map. On April 7, 2013, after drifting four thousand miles across the ocean, Kamome washed ashore on a beach in Crescent City, California, covered in four feet of gooseneck barnacles. Why did California officials not simply crush the boat with a bulldozer like other tsunami debris? Because the teenagers of Del Norte High School in Crescent City stepped in and refused to let her be destroyed. Crescent City had also been hit by the 2011 tsunami waves across the ocean. When the American high school students learned that the kanji painted on the bow belonged to Japanese teenagers who had lost their school and classmates, they made a decision. They grabbed scrapers, brushes, and water hoses. Together with local fishermen and police officers, those American kids spent hours scrubbing every barnacle off the hull by hand until the white fiberglass and the Japanese characters shone in the California sun. In October 2013, Kamome arrived back home in Rikuzentakata. When the Japanese students touched the clean hull of their boat, they realized they were not forgotten on the other side of the sea. Since that day, students from both high schools have crossed the Pacific every year to visit each other as family. The ocean can take a town away. Only good kids with scrub brushes can bring hope back across four thousand miles.