This is the coast south of Half Moon Bay, which is to say this is the part of California that people who live here do not talk about at dinner parties. The road runs through artichoke fields. The fog comes in the morning and does not always leave. Twenty minutes south of anything you’d call a town, there is a place called Pescadero, and if you have never stopped there you should stop.

Everyone goes to Duarte’s. This is correct. The soup is what they say it is.

But there is a gas station across the street, and this is where I want to take you.

The building is burnt orange. There are strings of lights along the front that were probably Christmas lights once. Inside, past the motor oil, there is a counter, and behind the counter someone is making carnitas that certain people — the kind who pay attention to such things — will tell you are the best in the Bay Area. The place is called Mercado & Taqueria De Amigos. It is cash only. There is a white sauce at the salsa bar that I have not been able to identify or replicate or stop thinking about.

There is a man who comes in at lunch — work boots, a particular kind of flannel — who does not look at the menu. The woman at the counter is already writing when he speaks. He sits outside. Eight minutes, start to finish.

California is full of places that exist entirely for the people who live in them. We drive past most of them. We are always on the way to the lighthouse, the next town, the thing someone told us not to miss. The gas station in Pescadero is not on the way to anything.

I keep going back.

Here’s a revised and extended version:

The Other Side of the Street

This is the coast south of Half Moon Bay, which is to say this is the part of California that people who live here do not talk about at dinner parties. The road runs through artichoke fields. The fog comes in the morning and does not always leave. It hangs in the cypress trees and in the low places between the hills, and some days it is still there at three in the afternoon, the light going gray and cold, the ocean invisible a quarter mile west.

Twenty minutes south of anything you’d call a town, there is a place called Pescadero. Population 643. A post office. A feed store. A bar that has been a bar since before your grandfather was born.

Everyone goes to Duarte’s. This is correct. You should go to Duarte’s.

But there is a gas station across the street, and this is where I want to take you first.

The building is burnt orange. There are strings of lights along the front — Christmas lights, probably, once, now just lights, strung there so long they’ve become part of the architecture, the same way certain things in certain places stop being decorations and start being load-bearing. Inside, past the motor oil and the WD-40, there is a counter. Behind it, someone is making carnitas. The place is called Mercado & Taqueria De Amigos. Cash only. At the salsa bar there is a white sauce that I have spent three years failing to identify and cannot stop thinking about.

There is a man who comes in at lunch. Work boots with the kind of dried mud that doesn’t come off, a flannel shirt the color of something faded, a straw hat with a cord that keeps it on in the coastal wind. He does not look at the menu because there is no version of this transaction in which he needs the menu. The woman behind the counter is already writing before he finishes speaking. He carries his food out back, where there are picnic tables under whatever sky the fog has left behind. His truck is parked along the side — an old Ford, the kind that has stopped being a vehicle and become a tool. Eight minutes inside. He stays longer out back.

If you walk up around the corner — it is a short walk, less than you think — there is an auto shop. The walls have been painted so many times in so many colors that the paint itself has become the material, layers of blue and cream and rust bleeding into each other like a tide chart, the wood beneath showing through in long vertical streaks. The doors are not garage doors. They are paneled, ornate, the kind of doors that belonged to something else in another century, pressed into service here and painted over until they forgot what they were. Above them, a small Ford dealer badge, neat and official, as if someone wanted to make sure you knew this was still a place of business.

Keep going. Cross the street. Further on, there is Saint Anthony’s — a white Catholic church with a steeple that rises into whatever the sky is doing that day, a rose window above dark red doors, a hand-carved wooden sign out front that someone made carefully, with time. It has been here long enough that the people buried in the surrounding hills were baptized here, married here, carried out those red doors for the last time. The man with the cord on his hat has probably sat in those pews. His parents almost certainly did.

If you keep walking — past the church, out along Pescadero Road where the land opens back up — you will find Harley Farms. They make goat cheese there, small rounds of it, sometimes rolled in herbs or edible flowers, the kind of thing that sounds precious until you taste it and understand that it came out of this specific soil and this specific fog and couldn’t have come from anywhere else.

The gas station in Pescadero is not on the way to anything. Neither is the church. Neither is the auto shop, or the farm at the end of the road with the goat cheese that tastes like the fog smells.

I keep going back. I’m still not sure I have earned it.

There used to be a pier with a shack on top jutting out into Princeton Harbor in Half Moon Bay.

The fog still comes in low most mornings, softening the breakwater until the boats in the slips are only darker shapes. You hear the harbor before you see it—the wet cough of diesel, the slap of water against fiberglass and steel, the occasional metallic ring of a line pulled tight.

When the marine layer lifts, the place shows its modern face: rip-rap stone, poured concrete, the long gray L of Johnson Pier running into water that no longer knows how to rise up and test a wooden structure. The air carries salt and exhaust. Gulls work the edges. Trucks idle in the lot. It is orderly now, built to stay.

But the order has removed a sound. The old pilings no longer work against one another with that slow, heavy creak. The deck no longer gives a little underfoot after it was soaked with a firehose once a week. There is no longer the low groan of a chain hoist swinging a load of salmon or crab up from a boat in the dark, or the close, briny steam inside the shack where Vera kept coffee going and put food on whatever table or crate was free. The lights that once burned at the outer end—small and steady against the black water—are gone. Before the breakwater was finished, winter storms still reached that far end. Men braced the doors and listened to the ocean hammer while the whole structure trembled on its pilings like something that might, on any given night, decide to let go.

Joe Romeo drove those pilings in 1942. The shack he raised was built to be lived in as much as worked in. It smelled of diesel from the fuel tanks on the deck, of wet creosote warming in the sun, of fish blood drying on the planks, and of whatever Vera had on the stove. Fishermen came in with scales still stuck to their forearms. The wood stayed dark and heavy because it was never allowed to dry out completely. After the breakwater went in, the water inside grew calmer and the work changed with it, but the pier still took its beating every season. It held because the men who used it treated it like something that had to be argued with rather than replaced.

By the time the county harbor district took it over, the pilings had begun to rot and shed pieces into the channel. What had once been a place where men ate and slept and unloaded fish became, in the new language of the harbor, a navigational hazard. The district saw liability where others still saw memory.

In 2018 the cranes came and the pilings were cut and hauled away. The shack that had held the life of a fleet inside its four walls was dismantled and carted off like any other piece of condemned wood.

What remains is the absence of that sound and that light, and the particular way a working harbor can be made safe enough to forget what it once required of the men who kept it alive.

The Other Side of the Street

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