The Ocean: Memory Row, Lost and Found in the Fog

John Steinbeck: Cannery Row
Led Zepplin: The Ocean

It hit me all at once.

The salt in the air. The soft hush of fog curling around old rooftops. Sea lions barking like ghosts from the other side of a memory I hadn’t lived but somehow still knew. Monterey didn’t feel like the first time. It felt like walking into a dream someone else had held for me, carefully folded and saved, like a story pressed between the pages of an old book.

And that someone was Jamie.

He had talked about Cannery Row for years. About the ocean, the aquarium, the fog, the street. He told me I’d love it not in the way people say that about places you might visit someday, but in the way someone says, “I’ve been saving this for you.”

The smell alone nearly broke me. That mix of seaweed and memory. Childhood and rust. We hadn’t even made it past the first corner before my eyes welled up and my chest cracked open just a little. Jamie squeezed my hand, already smiling like he’d known. Of course he had. He always does.

This wasn’t just a stop on a map.

This was Cannery Row.

And we had finally made it.

[Then: Mrs. Wells & the Spark of Literature]

I was sixteen the first time I read Of Mice and Men.

Small town Texas high school, junior year English. The kind of classroom where the windows sometimes stuck and the lights hummed overhead. But none of that mattered, because Mrs. Wells was the kind of teacher who lit the whole room from the inside out.

She was young, brilliant, passionate the kind of woman who made you want to understand. She didn’t just teach literature. She embodied it. Arms moving with each sentence, voice full of heat and heartbreak, pacing around the room like she was leading us somewhere ancient and holy. And somehow, she was.

She didn’t just show us Steinbeck she translated him.

She taught us how to read for the ache, how to listen between the words. How to see ourselves inside the loneliness, the longing, the little human kindnesses that lived between Lennie’s hands and George’s sighs. I still remember her voice as she read the ending. The room had gone quiet. Not because we were afraid of the silence, but because we felt it. Together. And that was her gift.

She broke me open and gave me language for what I already carried inside.

Not just about the books but about how to write.

How to look deeper.

How to feel on purpose.

How to make sense of the chaos by putting it into story.

I wrote some of my favorite high school pieces in her class—paragraphs and pages I can still feel in my bones. And though I never got to thank her the way I wanted to, I carry her with me still. Every time I return to a book. Every time I open a memory like a map.

Every time I remember that stories aren’t just things we read.

They’re things we become.

[Then: Jamie, The Odyssey, and Mr. Ramsey]

Long before he was mine, Jamie was once a boy in Monterey.

He still talks about it with that light in his voice that good childhood glow. The kind of happiness that settles deep and stays with you, even as the years shift and scatter. He remembers the ocean air. The way the town felt both peaceful and alive. When he speaks of it, it’s not in detail so much as energy... a kind of golden warmth he carries in his chest.

And then there’s Mr. Ramsey.

His favorite teacher. Ever.

He said it the same way every time with a kind of reverence that didn’t need to be explained. Mr. Ramsey had this calm, poetic way about him. The kind of man who made you feel smarter just for being in the room. Who made the Odyssey feel less like a dusty assignment and more like a map of the soul.

Jamie still remembers reading it for the first time in that classroom, and thinking: this is what stories are supposed to feel like.

It wasn’t about ancient gods or wooden horses. It was about finding your way back to something you lost. About getting bruised along the way, but coming home anyway. That story burrowed into him, settled somewhere deep and never left.

Sometimes I think Mr. Ramsey and Mrs. Wells were working together before we ever met. Like they knew we’d need this someday.

A girl raised on Steinbeck’s aching beauty.

A boy raised on Homer’s long return.

And now here we were.

Walking the same streets Jamie once walked as a child.

Both of us carrying the people who taught us to love words.

Both of us writing a story that had been waiting for us.

[Now: The Aquarium, Doc’s Ghost, and the Quiet Sacred]

The Monterey Bay Aquarium wasn’t just beautiful.

It was sacred.

Jamie had come here as a kid. That fact alone was enough to split me open. Watching him walk through the same space again but this time with our children, with me was almost too much beauty to hold. There was something circular about it. Something beyond words. Like the ocean itself had waited, patient and wide, for this moment to arrive.

It felt like stepping into a Steinbeck story.

Into Doc’s lab, refracted through glass and wonder.

It felt like a resurrection.

Like the bones of something sacred had been preserved in glass and tidewater, waiting for someone to remember what it all meant.

It was Doc’s world not in name, but in feeling.

Western Biological, reborn through filtered light and the hum of blue tanks. The man who had once catalogued sea life like scripture, his spirit still moving through the corridors, quiet as a ripple.

And there was Jamie walking through it like he’d never left.

Because he hadn’t, not really. He’d been here as a boy. He’d carried it. And now he carried us through it, gently, like a man offering something fragile.

Doc never asked to be understood.

He simply observed.

He listened.

He gave his life to tidepools, to music, to humanity in its roughest forms.

And somehow, standing in that room, I saw all of that in Jamie.

Not just in the way he looked at the sea life, but in the way he looked at us.

As if we were something fragile, something beautiful.

As if he knew before I ever did that this was a kind of homecoming.

[The Ocean]

It was everywhere.

The rhythm of the tide.

The pulse in Jamie’s step.

The way memory moved in layers past, present, something beyond—all folding into one.

We didn’t need to hear the song.

It was already playing.

The Ocean.

The one Led Zeppelin wrote like it was pulled straight from the bones.

Wild, rhythmic, uncontainable.

A little messy.

A little magic.

Just like this.

There was something in the air that felt like it had been looping for decades something electric, reverent, familiar. Like a needle dropped on a record that never really stopped spinning. The kind of current that lives in your chest before you even know what to call it.

Jamie carried it.

Not in a loud way. Not in words.

In the way he looked at the sea. In the way he looked at me.

It was all part of the same music.

The road, the Row, the aquarium.

The otters. The fog.

Our children laughing in the wind.

The weight of a place you dreamed into being long before you arrived.

This wasn’t just a trip.

It was a verse.

One we’d been writing for years.

And somehow, the ocean already knew the melody.

[A Musical Moment]

In Cannery Row, there’s this moment: quiet, simple, where Doc finally plays the record he’d wanted to hear all along. Octet for Strings by Mendelssohn. The chaos has come and gone. The noise, the party, the breaking and the trying again. But in that one moment, when the music plays, everyone just stops. No speeches. No explanations. Just stillness. And it’s perfect.

The music isn’t background. It’s balm.

It’s understanding without explanation.

It’s what love sounds like when everyone stops talking.

Not because the music fixes anything. But because it holds everything.

The ache, the joy, the effort.

That’s the kind of moment I felt with Jamie on this trip.

Not loud. Not showy. Just that soft kind of understanding that only arrives after you’ve already lived through the wild parts.

 [Closing]

There’s something sacred about returning to a place you’ve never been.

Like walking into a memory that doesn’t belong to you but still lets you in.

That’s what this trip was.

Not a destination. A convergence.

Jamie’s boyhood. My stories. The teachers who saw us before we saw ourselves.

The songs. The pages. The ghosts.

Even my dad somehow, I felt him here too.

In the way the wind moved. In the stillness after laughter. In the quiet between tides.

He would’ve loved this place.

Loved seeing Jamie carry the past like something sacred.

We didn’t set out looking for revelation.

We just wanted the ocean.

But it gave us more.

It gave us time, folding in on itself.

It gave us our kids, spinning on sacred soil in the same air Jamie once breathed.

It gave us something unspoken, but understood.

And when we drove away—

I could still smell it, that mix of seaweed and memory. The place we’d been. The story we’d lived. Still clinging, soft and sacred, like it didn’t want to let go either.

A road.

A row.

A writer.

A song.

And the man who brought me there.