On my desk is a large abalone shell, its inside iridescent, all knobbed and whorled with four holes under the rim. It is rough in places and smooth in others and a swirl runs through it like the sea. Its colors are silvery blue and green and pink inside, the outside is pale, all pitted and cratered. Two knobs rise from it like big baroque pearls. This shell had a long life in the sea and on the rock from which it was pried. The abalone lives in cracks and crevices clamped to a rock as the waves wash over it. At night, like me, it creeps about to forage for food, always returning to its home spot (for me, our bed) at dawn.

This abalone is the only shell in the apartment that I did not find. It comes from another coast and another time.

Early on Raven and Kimie had asked me how we got to this island. And I explained that my friend Bettye had described her son running on an empty thirteen mile beach. It had been a long journey to find this place and I told them of my search through the Florida Keys and the Jersey shore and assorted Hamptons and that other time on another coast.

In the very early mornings now I go down with Kukla into the sea smoke. The sky is smoky black and everything is wet with the dark glistening the Japanese call kurobakari . When I drove the California coast, I would begin my drives in this same hovering fog as though the sea were breathing out into the land, relieved the night had ended.

Ten years ago, I took the train across the country over the old Trail of Tears and drove the Pacific Coast Highway south to north so that I would be on the inside of the road when I came to the cliffs. I was alone because that was best for my adventure. Also there was no Edward to criticize my map skills or the times on the 10 mph curves I had to pull onto the turnouts and bend over the steering wheel to breathe. The faster cars passed. “Risking is losing” said a sign.

At that time in my life, I wanted edges and borders, but risks of my own making. The coasts get the extremes of violent weather and behavior. They are the places to search for origins and ends. Like deep reef fish that live under great pressure, those who drive the coasts are often pushed to extremes. For me, this meant my work had gone badly. I had given my novel The Angelfish Club to others to read and then I lost heart. I was unable to go back into the book. And yet my characters, climbed into the car with me and pestered me along the way.

All along the Pacific Coast Highway were signs that said Coastal Access. The road would swell to designated scenic areas and families stopped their vans to watch the surfers, wetsuits hanging half off, carrying their longboards down to the Pacific. This was an ocean so powerful it would rip the abalones right off the rocks and so cold it rose to chill the air into these dense white fogs. Many people told me it was a better ocean than the Atlantic, some believed a part of the Pacific Ocean had broken off and become the moon.

The California freeways have bumps in the center to catch up the drifters and wake them from their road dreams. If the drowsy driver crosses the line he is startled back into his own lane. In stretches, the Pacific Coast Highway is so lively and peculiar, reaching out for the stomach or the heart or the dark places, that there is no time to dream. It was summer then and along the way were summer songs, surf songs like “Beach Baby,” but also songs like “Summer in the City” which meant a Dutch artist on 23^rd Street one night long ago, a few hours of what could have been and was not, but would always be there–the heat in the loft, the smell of paint– waiting in a song. Many lost boys in many lost summer songs.

As soon as I did the drive, I found it was something everyone I knew had wanted to do. This in no way ruined it for me. I had carried out a popular fantasy, a collection of fantasies actually—the lighthouse, the open road, distant mountains, trees twisted by the hard winds along a coast that might sheer off and drop into the ocean at any time. I was not yet ready to leave—Edward was editing Esquire then, Lily was in high school—but I was trying to find my future beach and, in the beach, some solution.

I stopped in Montecito to see my quasi-friend Arianna Huffington and my cousin the cult writer John Sandford, who was then 92. We had written but had never met.

John wrote The Land that Touches Mine, The People from Heaven, A More Goodly Country and A Walk in Fire about his blacklisted years. He wrote American history, he was experimental and radical, a Marxist modernist. Along with his wife, the famous screenwriter Marguerite Roberts, who supported him and his father, he had been blacklisted. He had a gold Jaguar in the driveway, but was still a Communist. He joined the party in 1939, and in 1951 appeared with Maggie before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, where he took the fifth and she took the diminished fifth. In the summer of 1931, when he was still Julian Shapiro, he had lived in a cabin in the Adirondacks with Nathanael West and wrote his first book. All John’s 22 books had failed to sell, just like mine.

Maggie was in the top two per cent of salaried screenwriters at MGM, where she wrote the Ziegfeld Girl, Dragon Seed, Escape, and True Grit, all of which enabled her to keep her Johnny in Jaguars and race horses and to live in houses with stables and trainers and hang out with Clark Gable if they so chose, but they did not. They just did their work.

His house had the musty unused and untouched look of extreme old age, but it was very tidy and quiet. John walked two miles down the road and went downstairs to write in his studio every day. He kept his doors closed against the rattlesnakes of the Santa Ynez mountains. He hadn’t moved the furniture since they moved in and the rooms were filled with the tiny clothes and the roving spirit of Maggie, who had recently died. He said he still talked to her but his life was no longer “the swim in sweet water” it had been with her.

“Ready for some John Sanford blather?” he said and leaned back in his chair, flipped his legs onto his desk and, in a slant of sunlight filled with dust motes, read a passage from his new book about Willa Cather’s love affair with Isabelle McClung, a passage complete with “dales and swells and aeroles and the taste of her armpit.” John had always shocked the hell out of my bourgeois family, and was not about to stop trying now.

I sent him my work, from my first college poems on, and he usually didn’t like it. He thought I had “all the equipment” but wasted my time writing about rich people. He was my little white haired conscience up here in the rich Montecito hills, chiding me by his example never to quit. Born in Teddy Roosevelt’s first term, John was being republished under the Radical Novel Reconsidered Series of the University of Illinois Press. He was finally getting his second editions.

It somehow seemed right to go from my prickly Communist cousin to Arianna, who was in those days, long before she founded the Huffington Post and merged with AOL, was queen of the right wing. She had recently betrayed me by giving a story to The Times right before I did my cover story on her Picasso book for New York Magazine. She lived in a huge Santa Barbara mansion with her young daughters and her little Greek mother. All the furniture was big dark velvet furniture-for-the-ages dripping with fringe. There were frescoes, peach walls, two large staircases for that regal sweep, trotting assistants, enormous canopied beds. I felt like I had wandered into a giant’s castle, that everything was a different scale from my own. I eyed the huge ovens with a certain ill-ease then looked up into Arianna’s giant beige face smiling at me. I felt suddenly far from the sea, here in the hills with the big gated homes.

“She has beautiful big eyes,” said Arianna’s mother.

“I remember when you had your eyes done,” Arianna said immediately.

“But…” I said. (I had the operation because one eyelid sank, a condition called ptosis which my former husband told me might well be a brain tumor, and he was the one to know.)

Then her mother, holding my hand, took me back to their massive kitchen to load me with food and to the garden to cut me some roses. I brought them to Sanford the next day and told him Arianna gave me the roses.

“That bitch!” he said, annoyed by the mere idea of her.

I drove on through the Santa Ynez mountains, once the floor of an ancient sea uplifted millions of years ago and stopped in LA where Robert Evans walked me to my room in the Beverly Hills Hotel and told me, as I knew he told others, that he used to walk Lana Turner and Ava Gardner down these halls. He offered me his Jaguar for the rest of the drive.

Out of Harmony, the mist lifted and I stopped to see the indoor pool at San Simeon, the Hearst Castle. My life had been strangely tied to the Hearsts since my parents bought their house on East 74^th Street. It was filled with Hearstian vaulted ceilings and statues of saints which my father gave to the church. That is where I grew up, two doors down from Eleanor Roosevelt’s house and, on the other side, the notorious playboy Mickey Jelke, known as “the oleomargarine heir” and pimp. I was too young to know what that meant, but it was my first exposure to the commotion of scandal and crouching photographers on the street. Many years later, in the worst year of the 1970’s real estate market, my mother, a creature of whim whose whims were always indulged, sold our Fifth Avenue apartment to a woman who married William Randolph Hearst’s son. At the time of my drive, my husband and I were working for the Hearst empire, he as the editor of Esquire and I writing articles and the Esquire back page.

In Monterey I stayed on Cannery Row, which must have looked just like Fernandina in the early days of the canneries—only here the product was sardines, not shrimp.A stream of tourists was heading for the Monterey Bay Aquarium, a kind of fish hell or maybe heaven—only the fish could know.

At the Outer Bay Drifters, jelly fish were pulsing along, contracting and expanding, small explosions of color against the blue of the tanks. Moon jellies, white and tendrilly ghosts, haunted an outer wall. A sign said that strong swift fish can swim against the currents but plants and many animals just go with the flow. It was not hard to see myself then as a drifter carried by whim and interest, drawn to the coastal tides and metaphoric marine life. If I went with any flow it was one imposed at birth—a flow of expectations to be a good girl, do the right thing, not to shock –until finally most impulse was crushed.

Monterey had become a city of pets—pet fish, pet writers. Robert Louis Stevenson had lived here three months to woo his Fanny. I had grown up with his poems and, often during New York parties, seeing certain folks, silently repeated to myself lines from his “Windy Nights”: Late in the night when the fires are out/ Why does he gallop and gallop about?”

At the end of his life, Stevenson had his beach bum period and exiled himself to Samoa for his health, and there he died at 44, beloved by the natives who called him “Tusitala”, storyteller, and hacked a path through the jungle to bury him on a hill over the sea.

I drove on, the thick white air hanging over sloughs and artichoke fields, to the Pigeon Point Light Station. I stood at the top of the light trying to decide if I would see my former husband who was then head of neurosurgery at the VA Hospital in San Francisco. I saw myself trying to explain who I was to some receptionist. I saw him in his Norfolk jackets with his antique pocket watches, tying surgical knots with one hand, getting me to wear Victorian clothes that were never my type. I could not go back.

Other victims of ennui, angst, and wanderlust were pounding along Route 1 too. We were all driving the rim in a place with an acknowledged San Andreas Fault, a chunk of coast that threatened to shudder and drop, sheering off into the ocean. The folly and defiance of it added to the beauty.

I drove through dark alleys of redwoods, past vineyards and through forests that later burst into flame. A tall gaunt man who looked rather like an axe murderer, stood by the road selling the shells of the pink Pacific Coast abalone.

“They cling to the rock and you have to crowbar them off,” he told me. “There’s a black muscle inside and ink film and then the meat is pink. You have to pound it with a two by four or a four by four while it is alive so it is soft enough to be eaten. You can’t eat it when it’s dead. The ocean is so powerful in the winter that it will rip them right off the rock.”

I bought three shells for $30.

“You made my morning,” he said.

He said I could see more shells inside his house and waved in the direction of a shack half hidden in the woods. Generations of prudent Jewish ghosts were shrieking “OY! NO!” so I headed out into the wet sea dawn to the San Francisco airport and flew back to New York.

Driving the cliffs, above the turmoil of the sea, I had not found my beach; though the signs said Coastal Access, access was impossible for me then. I was scouting for things other than beaches and I had to return. Lily’s summer camp was ending.

When I moved to the island, the shell on my desk came with me in the car with the other precious things. For me it meant escape and return, like an ocean wave. It meant another chance. It meant not going into the house where something bad might have happened. It meant a single perhaps crucial moment of not being foolish. I brought the shell so I could remember that different time and that other ocean, and so the past would ever be present.