When I pass the green sign on the side of the road, I know I’m getting close to the end of my commute.  It says Half Moon Bay City Limits in two lines centered at the top.  In the lower left corner it says Elev. 25, and in the lower right Pop. 5,167.  Only three more miles to go.  The whole trip was overcast and cloudy, and it looks like that’s the way it’s go’n’a be for the rest of the day here.  I bet it burns off by noon in Santa Cruz.

            I’m go’n’a have to start thinking about finding someplace to cut hair there.  I’ve been doing this commute for five months now, and it’s starting to wear on me.  I need to get a job closer to home, so I can get back on my bike, like how I used to do when I was cutting in Belmont Shore and taking classes at Long Beach State.  In those days I went everywhere on my bike.  For the last six years, since I moved north, I’ve been getting everywhere in the car, and I’m really getting tired of all the driving.  The only saving grace to this commute is the scenery along Highway One, and half of that’s go’n’a disappear in another couple month’s with the time change.  Unless I find something closer to home, my drive back to Santa Cruz will be in the dark.

            It’s pretty amazing how suburban sprawl has spread in this area since when I first moved here five years ago.  The shopping center I’m passing here at the corner of Highway One and Highway Ninety-two wasn’t here three years ago.  The houses I’m coming to on the left were one of the first tract developments in the area.  They were just finishing the last ones when we moved to El Granada.  Next was Dolger Tract, just north of El Granada across the highway from the airport, followed by Sea Haven and Frenchman’s Creek, right here on my right.  I think this horse ranch’s days are numbered over here on the left.

            As I pass Miramar Beach, I notice that there’s a little bit of sun shining up in the El Granada highlands.  It probably won’t spread down to the Flats, which is where my shop is.  I take my right at the turn-off at the south end of El Granada.  I follow Alhambra up to my shop, which is in a small strip center with a view of Pillar Point harbor and the ocean beyond.  Also located in the center are a library, which occupies about a third of the space in the building, a contractor, a cable T. V. office on one side of me, and a beauty shop on the other side.

            I often ask myself how I ever got to this place in the fog.  My best friend from graduate school at Long Beach State got me pointed in this direction.  He and his wife stayed in our apartment for the two weeks that Jessica and I were gone to Hawaii on our honeymoon.  When we got back, we took weekend trips to different towns along the California coast in the hope of finding some place outside the Los Angeles basin to move to.  We’d both been raised there, and by the time we got married, we were tired of it.  It had grown too much for either of our liking, thus the thought of getting out.  Our only criterion was that wherever we moved, it would have be close to the coast.  So, at the end of a three-day weekend, I got a call from my grad school buddy.

            “I think I’ve found the place you want to move to,” he said.  “Santa Cruz.  Up the coast a little ways from Monterey.”

            By that time we’d looked in Ventura, Santa Barbara, Morro Bay, Dana Point (though I never was crazy about Orange County), Fallbrook (which wasn’t close enough to the coast for my liking), and Oceanside.  We hadn’t yet gone north of San Luis Obispo.  Our first trip to Santa Cruz changed that, and when we got there, I realized that we should’ve skipped all the rest and started there in the first place.  We stopped at Cabrillo College first.  I got an application for a position in the English department.  We picked up applications for Jessica at all the elementary school districts in the county.  We spent one day and overnight there and fell in love with it.

            Jessica and I got our applications in and waited to hear.  I got no response from Cabrillo, but she got calls for interviews from Scotts Valley and Live Oak.  She landed a fourth grade position at Brook Knoll School in Scotts Valley, and we moved to Aptos.  The best I could do was a haircutting job in Live Oak.  By spring I got an evening college job seventy-five miles away at Skyline College in San Bruno.  That same semester I landed a tutoring job at Cabrillo.  In February we learned that we were pregnant, so Jessica quit her job at Brook Knoll in June, and we moved to El Granada to be closer to Skyline, where I was hoping to eventually get a full-time tenure-track teaching position.  That was five years ago, and that job never materialized, so I got back into cutting hair at a time when hairstyling was taking off.

            We’d bought a house in Montara a year before I opened the shop in El Granada.  It looked like we’d be settling down in the Half Moon Bay area, when one weekend two springs ago, we went down to Santa Cruz to visit friends.  We dressed in our warm woolies and turned on the windshield wipers when we got out onto Highway One.  By the time we passed Pigeon Point, it was so warm and sunny that we were peeling off our layers, and when we got to the Beacon station on the corner of Mission and Chestnut, we saw a young couple on the sidewalk wearing only cutoffs and go-aheads.  The woman was wearing a bikini top.

            “Would ya’ look at that,” I said.

            “They’re looking pretty comfortable, aren’t they?”

            “What the hell’re we doin’ living up in that God forsaken foggy place.  We moved up north to live in Santa Cruz.  We oughta’ think about moving back here.”

            “It’s okay with me.  Didn’t you say Fred Lane is a customer of yours?  Give him a call tomorrow and put the house on the market.”

            And so we did.  That summer we went from Memorial Day to Labor Day without ever seeing the sun.  Needless to say, the house didn’t sell after a ninety day listing, so we took it off the market for the holiday season, and tried again with more success after the first of the year.  By last spring we’d moved back to Santa Cruz, and I’ve been commuting Highway One ever since.

            It’s five to ten and my first client isn’t here yet.  Herb is behind his desk in the construction office, and Joleen is behind hers in the cable T. V. office.  I wave to both as I approach my front door, and they wave back.  As I get the shop ready to start cutting, my first client comes in.

            “’Mornin’ Mike.  How’s it goin’?”