Deborah Unruh agreed to meet me on the beach in front of the Edgewater Hotel. The spot she suggested was across from the hotel entrance, at the bottom of the concrete stairs that led down from the frontage road. It was a point she’d be passing in the course of her regular weekday walk, a loop that extended from her Montebello condominium to the wharf downtown. Avis Jent had called her on my behalf and after the preliminary chitchat, she’d summed up my mission as succinctly as I might have done in her place. Deborah didn’t seem to require much in the way of persuasion.

I arrived fifteen minutes early and parked on the narrow road that ran behind the hotel. I locked my shoulder bag in the trunk of my car and took a shortcut through the property. I crossed the frontage road and trotted down the stairs. A dense fog was rolling in, spreading a thick marine layer that blotted out the offshore islands, twenty-six miles away. The April air, mild to begin with, was changing its character. Erratic winds topped the waves, creating whitecaps in the chop. It was close to 3:00 by then, and I was already operating on sensory overload. I needed time to breathe and I hoped the bracing ocean air would clear my head. My usual morning jog didn’t bring me down this far. My circuit began and ended at the wharf, with its complicated history of good intentions gone wrong.

Coastal Santa Teresa, despite its many assets, wasn’t blessed with a natural harbor. Early trade by sea was inhibited because shipping companies, fearful of exposure to rough seas, were unwilling to risk their cargo when faced with the rocky shore. In 1872 a fifteen-hundred-foot wharf was finally constructed, allowing freighters and steamers to unload goods and passengers. Over the next fifty years, earthquakes, winter storms, and arsonists laid siege to the wharf, and while it was rebuilt time and time again, it failed to solve the problem of safe mooring for the swelling number of yachts and pleasure boats owned by its wealthy citizens and sometimes wealthier summer visitors.