Gideon has a relationship with distance that I can only describe as aspirational. Not delusional — he would push back on delusional. Aspirational. As in, the place is basically there, you just have to want it enough.
This is how we ended up standing in the parking lot of the Carmel Plaza at 9 a.m. on a Saturday morning in what I can only call a light-sweater-plus-psychological-damage kind of fog, with Gideon pointing confidently toward the ocean and saying we were "basically already at the beach."
We were not at the beach. We were next to a Pottery Barn.
The plan, as explained to me the previous evening in the tone of someone describing a very good plan, was simple: park once, walk to coffee, walk to the water, walk to the gallery thing he'd seen someone post about, walk back, done, easy, beautiful. He said this while scrolling his phone, and I should have noticed that he never actually looked at a map, because Gideon doesn't consult maps so much as he consults vibes.
The vibe, apparently, said fifteen minutes.
The coffee part went fine. There's a place near Ocean Avenue that does a cortado that genuinely improved my mood and made me briefly forget that I was following a man who navigates by confidence. We stood outside with our cups while the marine layer did its whole gray-silk thing over the village, and Gideon looked out at the general direction of the water and said "okay yeah, it's right there," and I said "how far" and he said "close" and I said "Gideon" and he said "it's a vibe situation."
A vibe situation.
What followed was not fifteen minutes. What followed was Gideon leading us with total conviction down a street that curved pleasantly away from the ocean, then doubling back, then stopping to read a placard about the founding of something, then getting genuinely excited about a gallery window — "wait this might actually be the one," it was not the one — and then pausing to film a sea otter notification on someone else's posted flyer because he wanted to send it to his group chat.
Thirty-eight minutes after the parking lot, we reached the water.
It was beautiful. Obviously it was beautiful — it's Carmel, the coastline there looks like someone hired a set designer. The rocks, the cypress trees doing their windswept lean, the Pacific being enormous and cold and gray-green in that Memorial Day weekend way. Gideon stood at the edge of the path and breathed in like he'd earned it, which, technically, we both had, in the sense that we'd walked significantly farther than advertised.
He turned to me and said, "See? Easy."
I looked at him for a long moment. He had coffee on his jacket. He was extremely pleased with himself. He was wearing an expression that could only be described as a man who has just been proven right by the universe, except the universe had taken forty minutes longer than he said and gone past a Pottery Barn twice.
"You said fifteen minutes," I said.
"I said basically fifteen minutes," he said. "Which is different. Basically fifteen minutes just means you get there eventually."
"That's just the definition of eventually," I said.
"Right," he said, like I'd agreed with him.
Here is the thing about Gideon that I have spent considerable time thinking about: he's not wrong in a way he can defend, but he's also never quite wrong enough to stop. The coffee was good. The otter sign was actually funny. The gallery we eventually found — the real one, not the aspirational one — had a piece in the window that made us both stop and stand there longer than we meant to. The beach was, in fact, beautiful.
It's just that he told me we were basically already there when we were in the parking lot of a Pottery Barn.
He's already planning next weekend. He says there's a place in Carmel Valley he wants to check out — super easy to get to, basically right off the road, thirty minutes tops.
I've packed water. I've downloaded an offline map. I've made peace with the Pottery Barn.