It was only two days before our regular trip that Judy was riding her bike along Interstate Avenue and a dump truck turned without signaling, veering across her path. The driver never saw her. She was crushed under the rear tire along with the bike and her groceries. I got the call at work and rushed to the hospital as fast as I could, but by then it was already too late. She had no idea I was there. She held on for a few hours, her ribs broken and her brain badly swelling, and that night, with only the two of us in the room, she passed away. After twenty-five years together, close to half our lives, she was gone, right on the cusp of our fall vacation.

Three months later I drove out to the coast, hoping for what, I wasn’t sure. If nothing else, I told myself, I just needed some space. Ever since the funeral it had become almost impossible to leave the house without running into wet-eyed well-wishers, and staying at home had become an unpleasant option, too, what with all Judy’s things staring at me from the corners. I appreciated the support I’d been getting from friends and family—it kept me alive— but in a way even the charity was a burden, a constant series of obligations to fulfill. What I needed was a vacation, and the cabin was the first and only thing that came to mind.

In the back of my head I also held the idea that the coast might hold some kind of message for me. I didn’t know what it would be, or how it would be expressed, but I imagined some kind of reckoning to be done out there. It only seemed fair. Judy had been taken away so quickly, without anything like a proper good-bye. I felt I deserved at least one more chance to communicate with her, and the coast seemed like the only place where it might actually come to pass.

I left on a Friday afternoon. The minute I pulled away from the house it started raining and it kept up, on and off, the whole way out. Rain doused the windshield, followed by bolts of sun, followed by rain again, intermixed with patches of fog, sleet, and buffeting wind. The weather might have seemed ominous if I hadn’t driven the route so many times before and known there were at least eight microclimates between the city and the ocean. For a drive to the coast in the wintertime, this was just par for the course.

I crossed the Willamette valley, passing the fallow fruit farms and groves of oak trees, and climbed into the moist coastal mountains. The thin stands of Douglas fir barely shielding the blasted clear-cuts whipped by on either side, making me wonder, as always, whom the loggers thought they were fooling with their trick. Not me.