From the Editor’s Desk

There’s a rock off a beach I used to walk where the sea lions haul out, and every time I went, somebody on the sand was pointing at it and telling somebody else what it used to look like. Once it was a grandfather telling a boy there had been a hole through it you could see the sky through. Once it was a woman telling her friend it had been a lot bigger when she was a kid. Neither of them was quite right, and neither of them was wrong. The rock just stood there, barking, and let everybody be its historian.

That’s the thing about a rock that stays put. The people change, the goods change, the money changes from shell beads to quarters, and the landmark keeps its own counsel. It doesn’t need a plaque. It needs somebody to remember.

So for this issue the three of us picked one place and each took a different era of it: a small cove on Monterey Bay, and a granite rock three hundred yards out that every stall on that ground has faced for a thousand years. This week’s three stories go in order of time. Around 1180, at the last market before the winter storms, a woman who keeps the spring and everyone’s accounts is asked to declare a man clear of debt, and remembers a boat. In October 1986, the city bolts a bronze plaque to the new boardwalk railing, and it gets the rock wrong by seventy-seven years, and a woman with a chowder stand and a counter rag decides which sentences to polish. And in the summer of 1987, twelve feet from the same plaque, a photographer finds out that a true picture of the rock sells for eight dollars and a false one for forty. The last two stories share a boardwalk and a neighbor, and that’s on purpose. It’s the same rock. Read them in order, and then go stand somewhere that’s been standing longer than you. And then pass them on. Tell somebody.

(Next issue: The High Season — the market at its annual peak.)

— The Editor