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The best auto parts store in, say, the galaxy, is in Guadalupe, California. A couple hundred miles up the coast from LA, it’s where you want to be if you have the urge to buy a fan belt, new headlights, various oily fluids. Or you can just wander the aisles, like I did, and discover what you can’t live without, maybe a sponge-squeegee combo like the one I use to thwart my windows’ coastal grime. When you’ve finished shopping, you could offer to leave some little thing, testimony of another world—a bill in foreign currency; a campaign button for a battle now forgotten; a theater program culled from the floor of your backseat, particularly if the stars are known. A paw the size of a car engine, made of plaster now weathered—who left that?

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North and west of Guadalupe, down a walkway raised above Oso Flaco Lake, past a sign warning of mountain lions and their preference for children, through dune scrub of native leathery-leaved plants, past the roped and sign-posted snowy plover nesting grounds, along the wild-waved ocean shore, across the inches-deep mouth of the Santa Maria River, I walked into the dunes. Although it was cool that April day, I trod barefoot, my soles massaged by sand. Coreopsis gigantea, a strange, cartoonish plant—thick trunk, three feet high or higher, rubbery leaves sprouting from the top in carrot-like proportions—dotted one hill. The blooming time gone, I saw a lone aster flower. The leaves, a brighter green than most drought-tolerant plants, had already begun to wilt and turn brown, as if paying the price for that color. Veering north, I shoe-surfed down small craters and crawled up the opposite sides, my legs moving just faster than the sand slid down. You can come to the edge of larger bowls, not knowing until you’re there that below your next planned step the sand drops several feet. It feels wildly dangerous, though maybe it’s not.

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