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 a remote, unincorporated community in New Mexico, with her husband, M--. 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 full of 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. As it turned out, 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, turning toward me to clutch my wrist. “But what about you? You ask so many questions and don’t say anything about yourself.”
II. august in pacifica
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, commiserative dusk, unlike any North American summer you’ve ever seen before. My friend, who had the better sense to seek refuge in a sunnier place, left her car behind and threw me the keys. It is still August, and I am surrounded by some sort of coastline.
Nestled over the hedge of San Francisco is 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 embody a postcard-perfect Californian, whipping past views with the bravado to know there are more just down the bend. And while I am tempted to drive to a place where summer looks like summer, I drive straight into the fog instead.
I veer off an exit two miles south of the San Francisco border and take a right past a McDonald’s and a waxing salon sitting at the threshold of a low, brown shopping center.
The map-woman guides me through the tendrils of Palmetto Drive until she announces: I’ve reached my destination. The old Dollaradio Station (Dollar-Radio). Available for 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 old radio station was built in 1926 by shipping magnate Robert Dollar and refurbished over the years 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 listing refuses to acknowledge one important detail to prospective buyers: the cliff below is so sorely eroded that it’s chafed right up against the property. While the house is inarguably a “charming fixer-upper,” it is also one sneeze away from tumbling over the edge.
The station, photographed so crisply in the online listing, is hidden behind a mess of slanted fences and bramble. A small trail weaves along the side marked by a 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 morass of taupe and gray condominiums pack the opposite side of the trail. Crowded along the edge of the cliff, each development is as crude and common as the next.
I decide to take the path to the beach, ornamented with warnings. Dangerous Cliffs. Do Not Go Beyond This Point. ‘This point,’ marked off indecisively by rope. As I clumsily shoulder the weight of my camera and tripod on the left side of my body, I pass by a sidewalk that’s split in two. Totally intact until you plummet straight down to a hole in hell.
The fog has lifted. For once, the weather is nice. People trot down the cliff with their hats and sunscreen and umbrellas. It is summer, after all, and this is the beach.
III. Linda Mar
Linda Mar Beach is famous for the Taco Bell Cantina that sits on its shores. They appear to have little to do with each other, other than the fact that from behind the frozen margarita counter you can look out toward the ocean and the falling sun, toward houses climbing up the hill, and everything in between. Without the pull of hunger, you’d hardly find a reason to get up and leave.
On bright days, the beachgoers are in bathing suits. On windy days, they’re in winter jackets. On windy days with bright sun, it’s anarchy.
The kids flirt with the waves before they learn it’s too cold. Adults congregate 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 general shooting of the shit beneath blustering umbrellas. Sandcastles are always in the process of being built and demolished. A magnificent game.
While I would love to pretend that the general ambiance of the beach and its delicious nothing-doingness belongs to some ancient human instinct, Linda Mar happens to be the site of one of California’s most successful managed retreat programs. Twenty-odd years ago, eleven vulnerable properties were moved back to restore the natural wetlands, providing at least a century of protection from floods and more priceless space for perpetual lounging.
And so, the cantina stands as the final manmade edifice. To step out from the doors of Taco Bell is to become your very own Neil Armstrong, planting the flag of tents and koozies and radios, barely bothering to give the world you left behind a sorry little wave.
I wander up and down the beach, taking photos of the back of people’s heads. My camera feels extra fat and gawky; I hide it on my hip and try to keep my distance. A man peeks out from behind his umbrella and stares at me. Children don’t seem to notice at all. I wonder if anyone can hear the shutter.
I ask to take a picture of a woman splayed out on the sand wearing lipstick. Her feet are bare. I hesitate to ask her to remove the plastic water bottle tucked inside her shoes, so I don’t. She smiles and nods and gazes past me.
I am just another passenger of a good long day, and we are here together.
The afternoon draws me farther north, to a small opening in a barricaded area where the cliff drops down. A faraway paraglider wafts closer inland, growing more defined as a banana-shaped object against the curtain of the sky. I skitter over a storm drain lurching out of the dirt to get a better look, when I hear footsteps in the gravel. I turn around to find: a man, middle-aged, down to his cargo shorts and windbreaker. Phone tilted horizontally, otherwise as plain as plain can be. He grins at me.
“Is that a Hasselblad?”
“Do you take photos?” I grin back. I have failed to hide the machine.
“Not anymore. I’m just taking these for my son.”
I steady my camera and tilt it upward, trying not to lose the paraglider in the cloudy wake. One last click.
“Are you from here?” I ask, winding back the roll.
“Close by. But my son and I used to come watch them all the time.” He nods toward the upside-down gondola, floating down toward Linda Mar. “We call them flying eyebrows.”
IV.
I tell R--- 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,” R--- 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 creepy robot norms, or cryptic billboards that yell things like “AI NATIVE OBSERVATIONALITY” on top of the highway.
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 the type of person to move across the country for somebody else. The truth is, I didn’t have anywhere else to go. And so, I packed my bags and left the East Coast. The lack of choice was choice enough.
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,” R--- 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.
I tell R--- 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,” R--- 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 creepy robot norms, or cryptic billboards that yell things like “AI NATIVE OBSERVATIONALITY” on top of the highway.
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 the type of person to move across the country for somebody else. The truth is, I didn’t have anywhere else to go. And so, I packed my bags and left the East Coast. The lack of choice was choice enough.
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,” R--- 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.
V. sharp park
I park the car outside of an antique store where the owner lends me a screwdriver to tweak my lens. On film, there are no assurances. The only lifeline is your own vigilance, and maybe, if you believe in such things, a prayer.
To distract myself from my fear of a faulty film roll, I walk down to where a group of people is cloistered along an iron parapet at the end of the road. Every so often, one of the houses lining the street displays a sign on the door that reads “NO MANAGED RETREAT.” I pause, my finger pinched on the shutter, but then I hear the group yelp and run in their direction instead.
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. They don’t seem to hear me, as if my voice were only as loud as the length of my stupid lens, with no regard for how hard I had worked to cudgel it back together only a few minutes ago.
Instead, they swap stories about gear and weather conditions and whatever else nature photographers talk about. Eventually one calls out “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.
I roam 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.
El Niño is set to hit the West in October. The winds are expected to be worse than any year before.
After a moment of quiet, the whale-watchers burst into a tizzy. I wonder if, when the pier was open, passersby wandered so close they could see the grooves of the whale without even trying. But clocking the great hills of their backs seems to sate them enough, like greedily devouring the top half of a muffin. Anywhere you stand, the best part’s good.
VI. chit-chat cafe
Bob is annoyed. Still, his eyes find a way to crinkle and soften beneath his hat, the sun beating down from its two o’clock perch. He gazes at a condominium building, saddled on the bluff above a sea wall. The concrete shield fissures beneath the weight, its edges lifted and cracked. “Maybe they’re right not to think about the future,” he waves his wrist toward the condominium, exasperated. “Have you ever read the poem, ‘The Peace of the Wild Things?’”
I shake my head no.
Bob is a coastal engineer who lives one mile away from Pacifica’s shoreline, as any good coastal engineer would. When we met at Chit-Chat café earlier that afternoon, he didn’t know who I am, or how I know of him, or what I could possibly want. Bob isn’t in the business of asking too many questions. Anyway, I’ve already bought him a sandwich, which looks feeble between his giant fingers, and so he feels obligated to sit with me for at least a sandwich amount of time.
Before he takes his first bite, I lean in and ask him about the managed retreat of it all. He moves away from the plate and back into his chair, discomforted. The linen curtain casts a lunar glow on his face. From here on out, we speak in whispers.
Bob’s been threatened before. By whom? Real estate developers, townspeople. “Maybe I’m a little paranoid,” he laments. But it’s happened.
Liability seems to be the word that lives on the top of Bob’s tongue. If a coastal engineer makes a mistake, they’re liable to the state and to their client. If a real estate agent discloses certain truths, they’re liable to be fired by their employers for devaluing the property. There is no legal obligation to disclose that the property is built on vulnerable land. To the salesman, market rate is only decided by the value of the dollar in the present. The dollar of the future is only a lame harbinger, a parasitic forecast.
A woman buying a cookie shouts from the counter, “Saving the world again, Bob?” Her name is Sue. Bob introduces me and says that I’m here to photograph the shores. “Better do it quick!”
Sue throws her head back and chortles. She clarifies that she has served on Pacifica’s City Council for four terms. Her face is matured and empathetic, but she shows hints of a biting tongue. I tell her that I’ve been reading about John Keener, the Pacifican mayor who served for only one year. Sue’s voice tapers to the bitter mutter of a wary insurgent.
“What happened to him was horrible, all lies. It should have never happened.”
Bob glances at me, then down at the table. Sue calls out, “Look!” and just through the curtains of the café, over the fence that lines the bluff, a whale’s tail slaps against the surface of the water.
VII.
Now, there are two types of days: the days I do not go to Pacifica, and Sunday. I spend the off days wedged 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 don’t like to say that I moved to California for R-. I also needed a job. Every morning, I leave my house at 8:40 AM and arrive at the office ten minutes after the day has officially begun. I take the train home between 4:57 and 5:02 PM. The commute costs me five dollars, twice a day.
The ride takes approximately twenty-five minutes from one side to the other. There are six security cameras in every car. The train is full of faces, but all of them are pointed downward, giving the impression that each of us is in our own little separate rooms.
Sometime between 9:12 and 9:24, I head to the Nespresso in the communal kitchen. As the coffeemaker groans through its daily constipation, I like to peek out of the window at a strange piece of graffiti scribed in girlish handwriting on the face of the road: fucked in the window of the 7th floor.
My company, located on the opposite side of the office wall, is in an obsessive quest for “narrative change” about Big Tech. Worker surveillance, union-busting, labor replacement, data centers. Bad. All bad. Inside my tiny annex, 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.
VIII. esplanade
I head down closer to sunset this time, hopeful that lovers and families will be peppered along the shore and I will have new faces to capture. Instead, a nasty, familiar fog has sunk in and swept up the sun, and I have nothing to behold except for a pair of teenage girls with blue streaks in their hair playing beach paddle ball.
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 finishes at the end of the cliff – linked to nothing, stopped.
Dozens of pelicans pour back and forth along the skyline, their beaks and gullets rounded. Sunlight begins to emerge along the sky, a narrow keyhole. It illuminates a barge as long as a city block burrowing through the downward push of the fog.
I desperately look up toward the cliff while I still have light. Maybe I can take a photo of the houses, continually being developed despite all signs of danger. Instead, I 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 red-tailed hawk looms above my head. I worry that 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…”
I lean down to take a photo of the gap between the sea wall where there’s a fresh scarp. As soon as I click the shutter, a stream of pebbles falls toward my camera, loosened from the face of the bowing bluff.
IX. chit chat cafe, again
“I talk about the whales to make people happy. Everyone loves whales.” Bob and I have migrated to the beach across from the café. Every few minutes, a plume of water (and “whale mucus” as Bob puts it) ejects into the air. Where there are birds, there are fish, and where there are fish, there are predators. Bob squints and glares into the distance. For a big man, his eyes are a dainty shade of blue.
“I feel bad about what happened to John Keener.” Bob turns toward me, now that no one is around. “He didn’t even mention managed retreat. We agreed to build a sea wall to buy more time to figure out a more sustainable solution. All of a sudden, these protestors came out of nowhere with signs. I feel bad. I feel like all of that happened because I was talking about it, and he was affiliated with me.”
Everything about Bob seems to end with a sigh. He constantly amends his irritation – he doesn’t want to judge, and most of all, he is tired, tired, tired of trying. I ask Bob what his tactics are for trying to get people to care about the future. “That’s the part I never cracked.” he clasps one arm in the other, running a finger along his elbow. Beneath the sun, the hair on his arm looks like wilted wheat.
For some reason, I want to talk to Bob about death. He picks up small pieces of plastic scattered along the storm drain and lets out a laugh.
“Here’s the thing: I actually like erosion. It’s a natural process. The water sweeps the sand out to sea, and the eroding cliffs replace it. It’s really a quasi-stagnant thing. That’s what people don’t get. They think it’s supposed to be still, but it’s not. The beach is always supposed to be moving.”
X. rockaway
August is almost over. Soon, I’ll have to return the car, and my little escape will be out of reach. 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 threadbare one-piece stands with 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 staunch resistance to moving back even an inch onto the sand.
I wait to see if she flinches. She does not.
R- eats a pastrami sandwich and jokes that we should buy a house here. He’s a surfer, and so the appeal is clear. With the cost of housing in the Bay, the whole situation isn’t a bad deal. Even with an expiration date.
I try to imagine it: I could walk from my house to the beach. Watch the people and melt into the day. Once more, there would be a passage of endless faces, and time would turn into the color of the sky, and even though the sand would eventually wane to a slender crescent, it would only mirror the forward march of my lifetime.
How fucking morbid. I want to shake myself loose. For now, for now, for now, the sunset, even though it is still hours away.
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.
XI.
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. Then, the camera and tripod.
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 sit beneath a trellis laced with vines, sun shooting through holes in the side. Locked.
I burrow around the other side of the house, pushing through twigs and checking to make sure no one can see me. 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. Beyond the cheap wood fence, there is no visible land, or people, or curvature of the Earth. On instinct alone, I lift my camera to place an object between me and the end of things. I take one more step toward the edge. It’s a step too far. As soon as I hit the trigger, an alarm screams from within the pit of the mansion and sends me hurtling back through the woods.
I pace through the backlot to find an exit point, but wherever I came in is gone. A couple approaches the path to the beach. The alarm blares. I pat down my hair to disguise the sweat and pace to the other side. I am dignified.
Finally, I find a valley in the gate to fling myself over, jump in the car, catapult past the waxing salon, windows open, hooking it back to San Francisco, praying the sirens I hear on the highway are meant for some other trespasser somewhere down the twisted road.
I wish I could write some sort of epilogue, but a shutter lasts less than a second. Within that frame: there are no intruders, no distance, no lines. On that cliff, I had never felt so unsheathed, so on the verge of being eaten. In the car, never so hungry for land or for people. But for one, swollen fraction of a second with my camera laid flat against my stomach, time pressed up against all living things, where all living things were dreaming.
