pulled into the parking lot near Pillar Point on the California coast, the sky was still midnight blue. I was surprised to see we were alone; I’d expected the parking lot to be swarmed already, a squeaking flurry of rainboots and aurora of headlamps as other visitors hurried out to the rocky shore near the end of December, during an unusually low tide. But it was just the two of us amid daybreak’s unspooling fog, which blurred the hard edges of the horizon. The lot was so resolutely empty that I peed in the port-a-potty with the door wide open, afraid of being trapped inside the squelching dark. I watched T adjust the plastic bags knotted around their feet and under their shoes, and then we trudged toward the dirt path that snaked around Pillar Point Harbor and toward the tidepools.
