For the record, I want to state that I knew. I knew when he said "it's basically a farmers market but with more oysters" that we were not going to the same event in our heads. I knew when he said "we'll just park near the water and walk" while gesturing at a map he had drawn himself, on a napkin, from memory, of a town he had been to once in 2019. I knew. I went anyway.
His name is Soren. He has never been wrong about anything, according to Soren.
We left the Airbnb at ten, which Soren said was "perfect timing, beat the crowd" and which I understood to mean we were already forty minutes later than he'd originally suggested, a suggestion I had been ready for, and he had been the one who needed to find his other water shoe. The morning was already thick and bright in that specific Apalachicola way where the sun is doing too much before noon and the air smells like salt and something botanical and you're a little sweaty just standing next to your car. Beautiful, genuinely. I would have enjoyed it more without the napkin map.
"We're looking for Avenue E," he said, very confidently, walking us toward what turned out to be the river.
The river is not Avenue E. I said this. He said the river was a useful landmark. I asked: useful for what. He said: orientation. I oriented myself toward the correct street using my phone, which Soren feels is "kind of cheating."
The market, when we found it, was everything. Local honey in jars that glowed amber. Bread still warm. A woman selling pies who clearly could have ended every conflict in my life if I just asked her nicely. Soren picked up a jar of something and said "I feel like I could just live here" the way he says that everywhere, but here I actually believed him a little.
He bought shrimp from a man who told him more about shrimp than I have ever needed to know and which Soren absorbed with the focused reverence of someone receiving ancient wisdom. He repeated three shrimp facts to me afterward. I retained two. He quizzed me. I failed. He was kind about it, which is the thing about Soren: the chaos is always wrapped in genuine sweetness, like a disaster in a bow.
We ate oysters at a picnic table and he explained to me, unprompted, the entire history of the Apalachicola oyster situation — the harvest freeze, the water rights, the comeback — all of it accurate, I later confirmed, which is the other thing about Soren. He actually does his research. He just also draws maps on napkins and calls the river a landmark and acts like the thunderstorm that rolled in at two in the afternoon was something that had personally surprised him, despite the clouds having been visible since noon, despite me having mentioned the clouds twice.
We ran from the rain under the awning of a building that turned out to be connected to the historical society and there was music happening inside, a guitarist, someone's granddaughter on his shoulders dancing, older couples in folding chairs. Soren stood in the doorway completely soaked and watched for a minute with an expression I don't totally have words for. Like he'd been trying to get here a long time and had finally arrived, even though "here" was technically an accident.
On the walk back — with the real map, on my phone, which he accepted without comment — he said he thought we should come back in the fall.
I said: will you draw me another napkin map.
He said: I'll draw a better one.
I said: that's not what I asked.
He found my hand in the wet heat of the afternoon and held it and didn't say anything else, which is, genuinely, his best move. The clouds were already breaking up over the water. Everything smelled like rain and oysters and bread and whatever that flowering thing was.
I'm going to let him draw the map.
I'm bringing my phone.