Over the years things changed a fair bit. The Californians came in, building their angular beach houses and yoga centers. The galleries got more expensive. But it stayed largely the same, too. The battered shore pines gripping the road shoulders never left and the old nautical bars kept serving their watery beer. No matter what happened, or how many people came, a certain hovering mystery always remained, coaxing us back.

In 1986 we got married at Cape Lookout, accompanied by a jazz band, a crowd of picnickers looking on from the side. Judy wore a white cotton dress and a white bandanna in her red hair and the freckles over her pug nose shone brightly in the hot July sun. Afterward we moved the party to the Ea gle’s Lodge in Netarts for homemade tamales and blackberry pie, unbothered by the fact that the nuptial sand castle had been destroyed by the incoming tide.

Over time I came to imagine Judy and the coast as somehow the same. It was like her spirit seeped into the manzanita and yellow swamp lantern, the clapboard chowder bars and the chapped whale murals. Driving along Highway 99 a dozen memories were always waiting: the bird house we bought from the rattled Vietnam veteran, the flapjacks in the logger bar with the Paul Bunyan sculpture, the fly-plagued hike up Saddle Mountain. In the city, she could become tense and judgmental. But out among the sandstone and basalt headlands, the funny, spontaneous person I’d always known could be counted on to reemerge.

We couldn’t afford a beach house—I ended up teaching fourth grade, she worked for the state—but in 1993 our rich friend Bill bought a cottage in Newport attached to a defunct hotel and kindly let us use it whenever we felt like it. The cabin had a drafty, double-mouthed stone fireplace, a galley kitchen, and a living room bulging with bay windows facing the lighthouse on the far side of Nye Beach. Maybe it was the positive ions in the sea air, or the white noise of the crashing waves, but I had no memory of Judy as anything but happy there. We went out to the cabin at least every few months and talked almost every time about someday retiring nearby.