"I first met him in Piraeus. I wanted to take the boat for Crete and had gone down to the port. It was almost daybreak and raining. A strong sirocco was blowing the spray from the waves as far as the little cafe, whose glass doors were shut.  The cafe reeked of brewing sage and human beings whose breath steamed the windows because the cold outside." – Nikos Kazantzakis from Zorba the Greek





The sun shone down from the sky above Point Reyes so bright that he said he could not believe just yesterday the fog was so thick that when he tossed a tennis ball up twenty feet he lost it, it blew a foot to the left, and it bounced off the cliffside and somewhere into the jagged shore.  There was only one real fishing shack at Nick's Cove, and it had turned, many years ago, according to the old man, into a mostly unknown tavern for the last of the straggling fisherman past the fishing hour along the north coast.  It took three minutes to walk from the shore over the dock and to the shack, which stood on what

seemed thin stilts, albeit a protected bay.  A few fisherman, and one fisherwoman, stood out on the deck before front door smoking pipe and cigar, as anybody would imagine.  The cliffs to either side of Nicks Cove were like solemn yet elegant guard against virtually everything imaginable out beyond its influence.  Waves here churned like mad; wind gusts could burst to 130 miles per hour at its peak, and trawlers could notoriously get caught inside the treacherous admixture of wind and fog that would leave them tipping like silly tops against the rocks at the head of any cove or shore.  What did I know of such things?  The sea, of course, was chaos compared to the barely lolling waves of lakes or even

most rivers.  Three more men opened the driftwood door with tall cans in their fists.  Their ruddy faces matched the roughness of the ocean only yards out from the reach of the backside of the shack itself.  I first met him as the fourth man out, the old man who lived here, and who had, for so many years, travelled this top end of the western coast as though as if it were the globe, finding deserts in the beaches, mountainous terrain in the sea cliffs, rivers in the meandering estuaries, and any foreign sky you could conceive at the touch of the finger above.  "When is the last time you've paddled along a sea lion?" he asked, picking me out as I approached, knowing, I am now sure, that I was there to observe

and knowing, at the same time, that I likely had never done such a thing. "You see, along these waters out there, not everybody knows, that if you are caught paddling next to a sea lion, you are bait twice."