The fog rolled over the ridgeline like a river, a tidal wave of froth. We rolled past nurseries and farms, huge road cuts with retaining walls plastered to resemble living rock. Bought hot things to drink and turned south along the coast.

We’d eaten late, drove across the Bay to San Francisco, met the fog there, rolled back with the clutch on the steepest part of Gough, rolled out Geary toward the ocean. I’ve lived here so long, so long, and kept the stories to a minimum, I thought. This was the neighborhood where Becky lived when we were dating. That’s San Francisco State with its radical students of color. This is San Andreas Lake, for which the fault that runs beneath it was named. If my need to explain things bored her, she did not let on.

We pulled off at a wide spot in the road, walked to the edge of a thicket of poison oak (we have that here instead of poison ivy, I explained) and looked out westward. The horizon was a sharp gray line. Wave after wave rolled up to the broad shore two hundred feet below. These beaches aren’t as rocky as I imagined, she said. These are uplifted marine terraces, I said. They are old beaches long buried, pressed into soft sandstone by the weight of ages, then raised as the earth shifts beneath, lifted up out of the ocean to crumble cleanly into sand. You can scratch your name into the rock of these cliffs with a fingernail.

At sea level the estuary wound lazily around the spit, barely brimmed over its outlet. Each tenth wave sent a bore six inches high upstream. The rock was smooth where storm and sandal had shaped it. We climbed among the drifted wrack. Pelicans, I said, and pointed off shore. How can you tell from this distance, she asked. I could not explain at once. They just were. The pattern of flight, the way the birds skim the waves close together, wings barely moving, as if each was connected to the next by a glass rod.

The wind raked her hair — the color of the dried grasses atop the bluff. Eyes the shade of the horizon followed a line from my finger to the rock. Fifteen feet up, emerging, a nest of scallops five million years dead. The next storm will shatter them, an evanscence there with us and over far too soon.

Note:Many old comments were lost in a database crash in 2008. Some conversations may seem to make less sense than they would have. A few will make more sense now.

1. 
   Roxanne 2006 07 31 at 10:03:52 am

   I don’t normally think of the beach when I think of the Bay Area. Weird, I know.