Dispatch No. 1: The Day California Finally Showed Up

Monterey, California: Day One

The rental car smelled like someone else's road trip. That particular combination of air freshener and recirculated air means you are finally, actually, in motion and that the trip you've been planning on Sunday afternoons between shifts has crossed over from the hypothetical into reality.

We landed in San Francisco, grabbed the keys, and pointed south.

The first stop wasn't Big Sur. It wasn't the 17-Mile Drive or the Monterey Bay Aquarium or any of the places I'd had pinned on my map for months. It was an In-N-Out Burger, because we don't have them in Northwest Indiana, because it is a California institution, and because, in all honesty, we were starving. We sat down, ordered at the counter, and ate like people who had just crossed two time zones and earned it. Some arrivals are cinematic. Some arrivals begin with a Double-Double and no apologies, and honestly, I recommend those more.

The Drive Down

Highway 1 south of San Francisco does something to you even before you reach anything worth stopping for. The light changes. The air, even through the vents, carries a different quality, something coastal and unhurried that the Midwest simply doesn't have. I've done enough 7-to-7s to know what it feels like when your nervous system starts releasing tension it didn't know it was holding. It feels like that. Like something in your chest quietly unclenching on the drive south while the Pacific showed up in flashes between the hills.

I didn't say anything about it. I just noticed.

Monterey

We walked the town as the afternoon light stretched long across the water. Monterey is the kind of place that doesn't try very hard to impress you, which is exactly why it does. The wharf is a working waterfront complete with crab traps stacked stories high outside Gino's Fish Market, pigeons picking their way between the pallets, the smell of salt and rope, and something faintly fishy that I mean entirely as a compliment. This is a place where the ocean is still a livelihood, not just a backdrop.

The seals had already settled in for the evening by the time we found them; four of them hauled out on the sand below the bluff, completely indifferent to us standing above them. That particular quality of stillness that large marine mammals carry. The kind that makes you feel slightly ridiculous for having been anxious about anything.

We had dinner at El Torito, the kind of easy, unhurried meal that doesn't happen on shift nights. No one needed anything from me. No call lights. No twelve things happening at once.

The Rocks

After dinner, we climbed down to the shore.

The rocks at the water's edge in Monterey are rounded and dark, covered in aquatic life: barnacles, kelp, and the kinds of biological accumulations that form over decades. The water moved through them in no particular hurry. A sailboat sat motionless on the horizon. Seagulls held their positions on the highest points, as if keeping watch over something.

I stood there with my hands on my hips and looked up.

And I exhaled.

Not the polite exhale of someone stepping outside for a moment between tasks. The other kind. The kind that carries something out of you that has been sitting in your chest through too many shifts, too many nights of running on obligation when the reserves were gone, through the final push of a degree that sometimes felt like it was happening to someone else while I was busy keeping everyone else alive.

Nine years of bedside nursing teaches you a lot about what a body looks like when it's been running on empty. I had been looking at mine and choosing not to chart it.

The rocks didn't fix anything. That's not how this works. I know that clinically, and I know it personally. But there is something that happens when you stand at the edge of something vast and realize that it has been here, indifferent and continuous, through everything you've been carrying. The Pacific doesn't know what a 12-hour shift is. The tide doesn't care about your to-do list. That particular indifference is, paradoxically, one of the most restorative things I know.

This is what I came for.

Not the postcard version; the real version. The sitting-down-at-In-N-Out version and the rental car smell and the pigeons on the wharf and then, finally, the rocks and the water and the exhale that meant I had actually arrived.

Dispatch No. 1, filed from the shoreline.

There are thirteen more days.

See you on the trail — Yours in hiking boots, Julie · The Nurse Hiker