ANKA DREAMS OF SOLITUDE
(COMPILATION OF PHOTOS AND TEXT)
I.
Last summer, I met a woman named Anka in Northern California, the area where she used to live and where I had moved only a year ago. For the past two decades, Anka has resided in Hillsboro, a remote, unincorporated community in New Mexico, with her husband, Max. Before the move, she had never seen herself leaving California. Meanwhile, I had never seen myself living here.
“Do you like Hillsboro?” I ask her.
“Well, I am a bit lonely,” her voice carries a hesitant German lilt. “But I suppose that is of my own doing.”
Anka misses the sea. She misses having people around. “I like intergenerational communities,” she shrugs. New Mexico is beautiful; there are plenty of hikes filled with rocks and stones that Anka would bring back to the house, but she found it missing the verve of busy streets and open water.
“I moved at a time when I thought I would be able to rebuild what I had here, anywhere.”
It didn’t help that as a child in Hamburg, Anka had always dreamt of a happy lonesomeness. Being surrounded by trees and wilderness and little else. In reality, aloneness in New Mexico didn’t turn out to be all she thought it would be. Fantasy is too harsh a word. Time just seemed to move slower all by herself.
At the very end of our brief collision, Anka and I glimpsed the sea. The cresting sun sent shockwaves through the tide, breaking it apart into raucous fragments.
“Look at that,” she marveled, before turning toward me to clutch my wrist. “But what about you? You ask so many questions and don’t say anything about yourself .”
II. behind the dollaradio station
No one tells you that summer in San Francisco is dark and foggy until it’s too late. All of a sudden, you are consumed by a daily, commiserate dusk, and it looks unlike any other North American summer you’ve seen before. My friend, who had better sense to flee to a sunnier place, left her car behind and threw me the keys. It is still August, and I am surrounded by coastline.
Just over the hedge of San Francisco sits the city of Pacifica, a six-mile necklace of small beach villages strung together by Highway 1, the outstretched and grinning link to a great many other American pearls. On this highway, a person finally comes to feel like a postcard-perfect Californian, whipping past views with the bravado to know there are more just down the road.
And while I am tempted to drive further away to a place where summer looks like summer, I make it only two miles over the San Francisco border. The bend off the exit reveals a McDonald’s and a waxing salon at the threshold of a low, brown shopping center.
Deep in the tendrils of Palmetto Drive, I park the car behind the backlot of the Dollaradio Station (Dollar-Radio), available to purchase for $1.2 million. Bay Area chump change.
“Situated majestically on the cliffside overlooking the Pacific Ocean,” the listing touts, “this property offers a unique blend of history and modern convenience.”
Half of the ad isn’t lying. The receiving station was built in 1926 by shipping magnate Robert Dollar and refurbished over the years by various property owners to include lavish baths, Moorish mosaics, vaulted ceilings, emerald-tiled floors, and one sprawling window that opens to a glamorous view of the barreling sea.
The other half of the ad refuses to acknowledge one important detail to prospective buyers: the cliffs below are so sorely eroded that they’ve chafed right up against the property. And while the house is inarguably a “charming fixer-upper” with “stunning Oriental accoutrements,” it is also one sneeze away from tumbling over the edge.
In reality, the station I’ve come to explore is tucked behind a mar of slanted fences and bramble. A small trail weaves along the side marked by an obvious sign that reads “COASTAL ACCESS” (arrow pointed away from the road, toward the inevitable West) and another, less obvious sign that reads “STAY OFF PRIVATE PROPERTY, TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED.”
A maze of taupe and patchy gray condominiums stands on the opposite side of the trail. Each development as crude and common as the next, all with a single shared characteristic: top-line views of the sea without one obstruction between you and the sun.
I decide to take the path, ornamented with warnings. Dangerous Cliffs. Do Not Go Beyond This Point. ‘This point,’ marked off indecisively by rope. As I clumsily try to shoulder the weight of my camera and tripod, I pass by a sidewalk that’s split in two. Totally intact until you plummet straight down to a hole in hell.
For once, the weather is nice. People trot down the trail with their hats and sunscreen and umbrellas. It is summer, after all, and this is the beach.
III. linda mar
There are four exits to Pacifica along Highway 1, each one leading to a different beach. The town has walkable places, but no real downtown, no site of congregation that serves as an adequate substitute for the beach: so bright and vast and well-attended.
On bright days, the beachgoers are in bathing suits. On windy days, they’re in winter jackets. On windy days with bright sun, no one can agree.
Kids flirt with the waves before they learn it’s too cold. Adults settle closer to the parking lot in folding chairs, arming their children with buckets, so that no one has to choose. Here, or there. Water, or land. Some people bask alone. Others gather for birthday parties, or barbecues, or just general shooting of the shit beneath blustering umbrellas. Sandcastles are always in the process of being built and demolished. A magnificent game.
Linda Mar Beach is known for the Taco Bell Cantina that occupies its shores. It isn’t a beach owned by Taco Bell, nor a beach defined by its presence. Rather, the Taco Bell has become a monument to the beach, and from just behind the frozen margarita counter you can look out toward the ocean and the falling sun, back toward the town with houses gradually climbing up the hill, and everything in between. The coast and the city are only separated by a long, patchy rock revetment with flowers blooming between the stones, and Highway 1, which wraps around the enclave like an arm.
As I walk down the shore, I ask people if I can take their picture. Most of them smile and politely nod, my camera an old and heavy foreign object. I have no reason to be here. Not really, anyway. I see a woman sitting alone wearing lipstick, and I ask to take her photo. She poses, her curly hair blowing beneath her hoodie, her legs splayed out to the left in repose. The beach along Pacifica doesn’t ask anything of you, nor does it want anything in return. I am just another passenger of a good long day.
IV.
While the number of days between visits stays the same, time has almost stopped ticking completely and taken on a horrible drudge. Now, there are two types of days: the days I do not go to Pacifica, and Sunday. I spend the off days wheedled into a narrow corner of my office, refreshing my email to see if the photos have returned from the developer yet, my laptop screen turned toward the wall.
I moonlight in the daylight as a Digital Manager where my professional directive is to ‘create impact’ through digital campaigns for non-profits and other ‘values-based organizations.’ A ‘high’ impact campaign causes quite a buzz online, but most of the time, I just end up sending graphics into the ether, unsure if there’s even a ripple.
My company (located on the opposite side of the office wall) is in an obsessive pursuit of “narrative change” about Big Tech. Worker surveillance, union-busting, labor replacement, data centers. Bad. All bad. Inside my small quadrant, I am a factory of “important work” (‘you do such “important work,”’ the philanthropists like to say) as the sun gets hot and brightens my desk, and the photo of the woman with the lipstick has yet to arrive.
One day, I’ll make as many graphics as it takes to sink a ship.
V. sharp park
I park my car outside of an antique store where the man at the counter lends me a screwdriver to tweak my broken lens. Shooting on film can occasionally lead to the devastating loss of photos, a depression worsened by the time spent waiting for them. On film, there are no assurances. The only lifeline is your own vigilance, and maybe, if you believe in such things, a prayer.
To assuage my fears of a faulty roll, I walk down to the pier where a group of people is cloistered along the iron railing at the end of the road. Every so often, one of the houses that line the street carries a sign that reads “NO MANAGED RETREAT” on the door. I consider taking a photo (one of my precious twelve left), but I hear the group yip and run toward them.
The collection of people turns out to be a party of photographers in thick jackets and wide-brimmed hats, their lenses outstretched like a child’s arm. By the time I’ve reached them, the fervor has passed.
“Whale season?” I ask. None of them seem to hear me, as if my voice were only as loud as the length of my lens, with little regard for how hard I had worked to cudgel it back together only moments ago.
Instead, they chit-chat among each other, swapping stories about gear and weather conditions and whatever else nature photographers talk about. Eventually one calls out “over there, over there!” and the group shuts up to hover over their tiny viewfinders, searching for the breached blowhole like an old Italian fountain spewing over the sea.
The whales aren’t very far – some as close as the length of Pacifica Municipal Pier, which cracked at the neck last June. Now, the once-busy pier sits empty and broken, behind a fortress of tilted fence. The beach continues to exist on either side, despite growing thinner with time.
I wander down to the base of the pier and point my camera back up at the photographers. I try to capture them in the same frame as the dock’s broken mantel, but I can’t seem to make it all fit. A few of them laugh at me; I’m pointing in the wrong direction. The ocean taps against my feet, oozing through the revetment. I wonder what will happen when El Niño hits the West in October. The winds are supposed to be worse than any year before.
For now, the winding crescent of sand is lined by a sea wall. For now, Pacificans are hopeful that the armor will hold.
After a moment of quiet, the whale-watchers burst into a tizzy. I wonder if, when the pier was open, photographers used to all wander so close they could see the grooves of the whale without even trying. But clocking the great hills of their backs still seems to sate them enough, like greedily devouring the top half of a muffin. Anywhere you stand, the best part’s still good.
VI.
I tell Remy about the Taco Bell that sits on Linda Mar Beach on the southern tip of Pacifica, right on the sand, in front of the waves. They call it the most beautiful Taco Bell in the world.
“You just like weird things,” Remy pets my back as we lay in bed, indifferent to the view of Mission-Dolores that hangs beyond his window. I bristle at the insufficiency of the word ‘weird.’ Maybe Pacifica is weird compared to San Francisco’s own futuristic logic and robot norms, as indecipherable to me as they are. So maybe I am weird in exactly the way Pacifica is weird. Maybe our whole shtick is just one big refusal.
Or maybe it’s the “like” that bothers me. Lately, liking things has been a contested concept in our relationship. I never thought that I would be someone to move across the country for another person. The truth is, I didn’t have anywhere else to go. By the time I had to decide, the lack of choice was choice enough. Since then, what I like seems to come second to the appearance of dignified maturation.
But it was only a few steps off the plane that I began to miss the soft mutter of street life, of teleporting from one place to the next and so on and so on, for as long as the city extends. How there were always faces and more faces, tired, drunk, fierce, walking through train cars, plazas, dark bars, scaffolding. I miss how seconds used to become hours, tied up in the passage of those faces. There has to be a word for all the things I miss that he does not.
“I’m glad you got the car for the summer,” Remy asserts. “You’ve been way less sad.”
Anyway, I have an itch. An annoying, terrible itch. He runs his hand up and down my spine; he doesn’t even know it’s there.
VII. esplanade
I head down closer to sunset this time, hopeful that lovers and families will be peppered along the shore and I will have plenty of new faces to capture. Instead, a nasty fog has sunk in and swept up the sun, and I have nothing to behold except for an overwhelming and impermeable gray. No one is out except for a pair of teenage girls with blue streaks in their hair playing beach paddle ball. This is the first time I have seen so few people along the waterfront, but there is nothing much to see, and so I cannot blame them.
The first picture I take is of an old pipe lurching out of the cliff wall. Then, like a lazy archaeologist, I begin to find other fossils lying atop the sand: smashed plastic, dropped cinderblocks, burlap sandbags. On the front of a cracked cement slab, graffiti reads “I’M” “BROKEN,” divided by the fracture. Barbed wires stick out like antennae. The tip of a fence just finishes at the end of the cliff – linked to nothing, stopped.
Dozens of pelicans fly back and forth along the shoreline. More than I’ve ever seen before, their beaks and gullets rounded. Sunlight begins to emerge along the sky, but just a narrow keyhole. It illuminates a barge as long as a city block burrowing through the downward push of the fog.
I desperately look upward toward the cliff while I still have the light. Maybe I can take a photo of the houses, continually being developed despite all signs of danger. Instead, I just see a craggy top. And then I realize: I’m looking at the bottom of a different structure entirely. A new rock attached to an ancient one.
A vulture stops in the sky and looms above my head. I wonder if it’s hunting me, almost dead in a certain kind of way, until I see thousands of birds racing over the top of the sea, a black current, heading south for minutes and miles long. A woman behind me whispers to her infant daughter, “Look, they’re still going, and going, and going…” The sun has now all but completely faded and taken the silhouette of the barge with it.
I lean down to take a photo of the gap between the sea wall where there’s a fresh scarp. Just as soon as I click the shutter, a stream of pebbles falls toward my camera, loosened from the face of the bowing bluff.
VIII.
In 2025, Gary Griggs, Chase Davenport, and Lida Davar noticed an overuse of the word “resilience” in reference to the land management of coastal communities. The three scientists then surveyed
52 relevant people to identify each one’s definition of a “resilient coastal community.” Here are the top ten most common answers, amalgamated and deduced by Griggs, Davenport, and Davar:
1. A resilient coastal community can recover and bounce back after being impacted.
2. A resilient coastal community is one where homeowners maintain and protect their private properties.
3. A resilient coastal community is well-informed about near-future threats and can take action before a threat happens.
4. A resilient coastal community has an increasing quality of life over time, despite the climate change challenges, through sustainable development.
5. A resilient coastal community uses science to balance public safety, beach access, and the rights of private property owners.
6. A resilient coastal community has resources to recover and bounce back with minimal damage after being impacted by extreme events, and it is establishing its sea level rise adaptation plan while maintaining its structure/culture and increasing its quality of life.
7. A resilient coastal community has the resources to recover and bounce back after being impacted and is establishing its sea level rise adaption plan.
8. A resilient coastal community has the resources to plan for moving out of hazard zones (retreat).
9. A resilient coastal community has resources available to establish strategies to adapt to sea level rise-induced changes.
10. A resilient coastal community has established and implemented its adaptation plans; therefore, it will not be severely impacted by sea level rise-induced events.
Survey participants’ background: 31% state/county/city official, 29% academic researcher, 17% consultant, 11% coastal homeowner/attorney, 10% NGO member/community activist, 2% federal official.
IX. rockaway
August is almost over. Soon, I’ll have to return the car to my friend. My little escape will be gone. Or rather, it will keep living twelve miles down the road, each of us back to our own ways of being, only a highway apart.
Down on Rockaway Beach, a middle-aged woman in a string bikini stands aplomb at the exact point where the wave dissolves into a soft tide. Her fingers are clenched into fists, her legs a pyramid. She doesn’t show any desire to move forward into the frigid water, and apparently a stringent resistance to moving back even a foot onto the sand.
I wait to see if she flinches. She does not.
Remy jokes that we should buy a house here. I wonder if I would do it. The appeal is clear: proximity to the ocean, the feeling of waking up next to the sound of the rolling tides, the frenetic pelicans and the well of fog, to look out the window and see the sun split into pixels behind a cloud. With the monstrous cost of housing in the Bay, the view almost makes the whole situation a pretty good deal. Even with the expiration date.
Across Pacifica, there seems to be a quiet hope that maybe, one day, the ocean will choose to leave everyone alone and back off. While the water can be distracted by revetments and deterred with the implementation of sand, this is simply not the case. And so, in this city, the same resilience that is often treated as a noble venture is thrown into a different realm of precarity: the bitter reluctance to retreat based on total delusion.
But who can blame them?
For now, the resilience of Pacifican homeowners will last them years. One year, it will become months, and one day, it will be only minutes. A problem of later times; for now, for now, for now, the sunset.
I lay back on a pink bench dedicated to an eleven-year-old girl named Isabella. The bronze plaque reads #PLAYLIKEBELLA. Between me and the water are people, and between people and me, a camera. I like it that way. While a view flattens miles of land into one detailed, distant image, a photograph begs for complication. I like when people block my view of the ocean, and even more when people block my view of other people. The beach is the closest place to a city I’ve yet to find. What do we have to do with each other, other than the fact that somehow, we’ve found our way here?
If I ever put my camera down (which I occasionally do), it’s easy to forget myself within the crowd. A woman wrangles her spastic Pomeranian along the rocks. A baby in a bonnet cries while two friends relax into the crook of each other’s necks. A pair of ten-year-old boys beat each other with a pair of sticks; a girl throws a rock against the cliff while her parents drink beer in the sand. No one is looking at me without my camera, and I’m not looking at them, not really.
X.
Back up the path to the car, I decide to stop at the Dollaradio station. By the mouth of the trail, the fence is low and easy to climb. I swing my feet over first, with the camera and tripod to follow. The house is nestled deeper in the lot than it looks from the outside, and I tunnel my way to the door. Two majestic wooden portals with intricate designs carved into squares, protected by an overhead trellis wound with vines, sun shooting through holes in the side. Locked.
I burrow around the other side of the house, pushing through twigs and checking behind me to make sure no one knows I’m there. Every window is covered; the whole house deserted. Around the side, I spot a small set of stairs that lead up to the porch. I check my camera. The roll count is ticked to the last frame. The wood feels shaky, but I ascend anyway until I’m standing on the balcony next to the window that overlooks the sea.
Facing outward: there is nothing. Only a fence made of cheap wood that marks the boundary of the big, lonely house. Beyond that, there is no visible land, or people, or curvature of the Earth. I have never felt so unsheathed, so on the verge of being eaten.
On instinct alone, I lift my camera to place an object between me and the end of things and take one more step toward the edge. It’s a step too far. As soon as I hit the trigger, an alarm goes off and sends me hurtling back through the woods toward the road.
While I figure out how to climb the fence in the backlot, I spy a couple approaching, and I pat my hair down to hide the fact that I’m sweating even as the alarm blares from inside the house. I finally find a low part of the fence to jump over, throw myself into the car, and hook it back to San Francisco, hoping the sirens I hear on the highway aren’t meant for me.
I wish I could write some kind of epilogue here, but really, I’ve never felt so alone or so breathlessly alive, so far and so hungry for land and for people. There was almost no space left between me and the bluff and the interminable blue. My camera dangling off my neck, suspended on my stomach with one frame left. I don’t know how to describe it: the push, the click, and all the time thereafter.