Levi had never been to Cannon Beach before, which meant he had strong opinions about it.
He'd looked at three photos on his phone — Haystack Rock, a storefront with a sandwich board, and what appeared to be someone else's vacation from 2019 — and by Thursday he had already decided which gallery was going to be "the real one," which coffee place was "probably a trap," and that the whole Spring Unveiling thing happening next weekend was "basically already happening, you can feel it."
It was fifty-one degrees and raining sideways off the ocean. I had underestimated the ocean breeze. I want to say that for the record.
We got there Friday morning, which Levi described as "getting ahead of the energy." I asked him what that meant. He said, "You'll see." I did not see. What I saw was a mostly empty street, a gallery that didn't open until eleven, and a man in a raincoat walking a dog who looked at us like we were making a mistake.
The gallery Levi had decided was "the real one" was called something with "tide" in it. He'd never looked up the hours. He'd had a feeling about it.
"I just think this is the kind of place that's open when it wants to be," he said, which is a sentence I will be thinking about for a long time.
He pressed his face against the window. There was art inside. There were also no lights on and a sign that very clearly said OPENS SATURDAYS 10AM.
It was Friday. It was 9:15.
Levi took a photo of the window anyway and sent it to his group chat with the caption found it. Three people reacted with fire emojis. I was wearing one thin hoodie and reconsidering our entire relationship.
The thing about Levi is that he's not wrong in a way you can argue with. He just has a completely parallel relationship with information. He knew, for instance, that the literary festival had just finished — he'd read about it somewhere, he said, gesturing vaguely at his own memory — and he used this to conclude that the whole town was "still in a literary mood," which was why he suggested we "just walk and see what speaks to us."
What spoke to me was a bakery that had heat and chairs. What spoke to Levi was a hand-painted sign for a gallery reception happening May 1st.
"That's basically this weekend," he said.
"That's a week from today," I said.
"Coastal time is different," he said.
I bought a scone. I did not share it. This felt proportionate.
By noon he had found the actual open gallery, which was excellent — genuinely, warmly excellent, full of painters who seemed to be local and work that had that good in-between feeling, like something made for the shoulder season — and he stood in front of a large piece for about four minutes and then turned to me and said, "See? I knew this town."
And the horrible thing is that he said it so sincerely. So completely without irony. Like the closed gallery and the wrong day and the sideways rain had been part of the plan. Like arriving forty-five minutes before anything was open was a form of connoisseurship.
The artist was there, actually, and Levi talked to her for twenty minutes about the light and the tide and she seemed genuinely charmed, and I watched this happen from across the room while drinking a small cup of complimentary coffee and accepting that this is simply who he is.
On the way back to the car he said the fat bike festival in a few weeks looked "really underrated" and pulled up the dates on his phone.
"We should come back," he said.
The wind off the ocean was doing something genuinely unpleasant to my face. The clouds had not moved. It was fifty-three degrees if you were being generous.
"Sure," I said.
He smiled like we'd just decided something excellent, which, honestly — we probably had.