Los Angeles had the highest humidity of anywhere in the country last Thursday, so my friend and I escaped the incessant heat wave and drove up the coast to the beach towns just south of San Luis Obispo to visit another friend who had recently moved there. It was a cool respite, a weekend of beach walks under eucalyptus and coastal live oaks. Throughout the short 45 hours we spent there, I kept shaking my head in disbelief at the fact that I was wearing a sweatshirt under a sky overcast by the marine layer, after days of excruciating heat.

There was a heat wave in the weeks following my father’s death. One of those (more and more common) extreme weather events where meteorologists talked about the “wet bulb temperature” and the “heat dome.” Walking outside, even for just a minute, felt like wading through something heavy and sticky. The air conditioning and drawn shades of the indoors felt like a refuge, but carried its own threat of claustrophobia. Everything felt inescapable. The metaphor was too obvious.

Spending time in on the Central Coast, even just a weekend, reminded me of my life there in my mid 20s. I wondered if I would ever do the sleepy beach town life again, where everything reminds me of the Dar Williams song The Ocean.

When I went to your town on the wide open shore,
Oh I must confess, I was drawn, I was drawn to the ocean,
I thought it spoke to me
It said, "Look at us,
We're not churches, not schools, not skating ponds, swimming pools,
And we have lost people, haven't we though?"

Oh, that's what the ocean can know of a body,
And that's when I came back to town

This town is a song about you.
You don't know how lucky you are,
you don't know how much I adore you,
You are the welcoming back from the ocean.

I went back to the ocean today,
With my books and my papers I went to the rocks by the ocean,
But the weather changed quickly
Oh the ocean said,
"What are you trying to find? I don't care, I'm not kind,
I've bludgeoned your sailors, I've spat out their keepsakes,
Oh it's ashes to ashes, but always the ocean."
But the ocean can't come to this town

This town is a song about you.
You don't know how lucky you are,
you don't know how much I adore you,
You are the welcoming back from the ocean.

And the ones that can know you so well
are the ones that can swallow you whole.
I have a good and I have an evil,
I thought the ocean, the ocean thought nothing,
You are the welcoming back from the ocean.

I didn't go back today,
I wanted to show you that I was more land than water,
I went to pick flowers.
I brought them to you,
Look at me, look at them, with their salt up the stem,
But you frowned when I smiled and I tried to arrange them,

You said, "Let me tell you the song of this town,"
You said, "Everything closes at five.
After that, well, you just got the bars,
You don't know how precious you are,
walking around with your little shoes dangling,
I am the one who lives with the ocean,

It's where we came from, you know
and sometimes I just want to go back,
After a day, we drink 'til we're drowning,
walk to the ocean, wade in with our workboots,
Wade in our workboots, try to finish the job.
You don't know how precious you are,
I am the one who lives with the ocean.
You don't know how I am the one.
You don't know how I am the one.