Soren had a plan. That was the first sign.
The plan was as follows: we would drive down from the city on a Saturday morning, hit the farmers market at Shoreline Station for "like twenty minutes, just vibes," and then head to Tunitas Creek Beach for the afternoon. He had looked at it on Google Maps. He had, and I want to be precise here, zoomed in on it. This constituted research.
I will say that the drive down Highway 1 was genuinely beautiful. The fog was doing its coastal thing, that particular Half Moon Bay gray that isn't quite depressing but isn't quite encouraging either, just sort of hovering at 54 degrees and waiting to see what you'd do. Soren had the windows cracked. He said it smelled like "real California." I didn't ask what fake California smelled like.
The farmers market was actually great. We got there at 9:15 and Soren immediately became very interested in a table of heirloom radishes in a way that felt performative but then turned genuine, which is honestly his whole thing. He bought a bag of something the vendor described as "a lemon that gave up" and seemed deeply proud of this. We had coffee. A dog looked at us for a long time. It was a good twenty-five minutes.
Then we got back in the car.
I want to be fair to Soren. I do. He did, at some point, pass a sign. He later confirmed this. The sign said TUNITAS CREEK BEACH — CLOSED: CONSTRUCTION AND LANDSLIDE REMEDIATION — REOPENING SUMMER 2026. He has not disputed the existence of this sign. His position is simply that he "didn't fully process it as applying to us," which is a sentence I've been turning over in my mind ever since.
We drove down the access road for approximately eight minutes. The road became gravel. The gravel became uncertain. Soren said, "It's probably just closed to, like, vehicles," and then immediately drove a vehicle further down it. I pointed out that the construction fencing was present, physical, and orange. He said it looked like they were "wrapping up."
There was no one there. There was quite a lot of evidence that the cliff had recently done something catastrophic and was not finished doing it. There was a porta-potty on its side. I am not sure what Soren thought this indicated but he remained, at this stage, confident.
The turnaround was not graceful. The road was narrow and Soren takes approximately eleven thousand point adjustments to reverse in any situation that requires spatial reasoning. At one point we were facing directly into a blackberry thicket and he said, calmly, "I've got it," which is the sentence I will have engraved on something someday.
We made it out. The fog had committed to staying. My jeans were damp from leaning against the car door to check clearance on the left side, which was never my job and somehow always is.
Soren was quiet for about two minutes, which is his processing time. Then he said, "The market was really good though." And then, with genuine warmth, he held up the bag with the lemon-that-gave-up and said he thought he could make something with it tonight.
He did make something with it. I don't know what it was exactly — a vinaigrette situation, very confident, loosely following a recipe he'd seen a video of once. It was actually pretty good. He was so pleased. He stood in the kitchen in his hoodie, salt air still in his hair from the failed beach excursion, doing this little hum he does when something comes together, and I thought: this is the whole story, really. Not the beach. Not the fencing. Not the eleven-thousand-point turnaround.
Just this guy, improvising at full commitment, and occasionally it works.
The beach is closed until Summer 2026. I have told him this twice since we got home. I think he believes we can get there before then if we leave early enough.