Ten years ago today I moved to Korea. I hated it then. Now I'm known to myself only by this event. I don't remember who I was before.

I'm parked on the sand.

I've been at the coast since yesterday and am remembering some things that I forgot can be done—behaviors of my heritage: leaving the car parked on the side of the road while you wander off into the woods, driving on the sand in fast straight lines or squishy wide circles that kick up chunks.

I came to the ocean to celebrate leaving my job, which ended yesterday. I wanted to be away on the 10-year anniversary of moving to celebrate that source and a return to that place, in a sense.

It couldn't have been any better timed, leaving my job the day before the anniversary and also learning that the past two years of effort had crashed and burned. All arcs completed at once.

Thursday night, packing and tying up loose ends at the office, she stood at the door and said, "You ready to have your last day ruined?" And that was that.

(I knew it somehow—had sensed it in December or had at least known better than to trust. And since I had decided to leave as soon as possible, it had felt like the leaving and the decision were on a collision course. I kept thinking that I just had to make sure I was gone first. Through some dark serendiptiy, they actually did collide.)

I could hardly contain my grief, with her at first and later when I was alone and finishing up so that I could flee that oubliette.

She said I should not be discouraged by these events. She said I possessed that rare mix….

If that is true, then… ?

I cried a lot that night. Everything given to that effort to reach the goal, and now it is like I did nothing.

Before I left town, I went to Zuishinan for a bowl of tea. I told sensei about all that had happened. She asked if I had focused at all on family these past few years. I said I hadn't. She observed that another student at the school has worked toward a Ph.D. while also raising two boys. She said that at this point in her own life she wishes she had spent more time cultivating family. When she was young, she had lost love in tragedy. At the time, the lesson she took from that was that you can't count on anyone to support you financially, emotionally, and all else—that you must do all of this on your own. She said she now thinks that was the wrong lesson. The right lesson, she said, is that what you seek will come to you.

When I arrived in Tokeland, I found a little hotel called The Tradewinds. The woman at the desk had just returned from the airport where she sent off her daughter to Korea. The daughter’s husband is stationed at Osan and the daughter is going to live with him there. The woman asked me lots about Korea and it was fun for me to talk about it.

In the morning I drove up to an area of the coast where an entire town is washing away: aptly called Washaway Beach. I spent a lot of time walking around the edges looking at the carnage. As far as I can tell, no government entity has stepped in to clean up the detritus and the beach is pocked with half-buried parts of dwellings and various housewares and the sand is striped with rust and pavement. The pavement, once pounded into particles, looks a lot like the crushed lava that makes the black sand beaches in Hawaii. People continue to live in the eroding town, and one homeowner, at least, spent a fortune building a jetty to protect the house. The tide had recently undermined one house and the toppled structure lay crumpled where it landed on the sand, all of its contents upended and mostly still contained within. A snapped power line lay in the road, now closed, just above the house. I almost stepped on it—it’s probably dead—but caught myself just in time. A little later, I watched another tourist do the same thing. There were no warning signs and no one had bothered to move the line.

North of there were the cranberry bogs, which are colorful and timeless. My friend’s grandfather used to own one of the farms, but I couldn’t remember which one. I remember my friend said that you can’t walk out onto the bog so you have to tend to the plants from a platform that slides on rails installed in the bog. The little buildings attached to each plot must be where the platforms are housed. In some far-reaching association, the little buildings and the platforms on rails made me think of the rat things and their little houses in Snow Crash.