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  • Terroir
  • Phillip Hurst (bio)

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One night while counting down the till at Casa de Agave, the San Diego tequila bar I’d been working for a couple of fun but exhausting years, I received an unexpected text: Hey stranger . . . [End Page 111]

Rowan and I had dated throughout my final anxiety-riddled year of law school. Our breakup was hard but practical: her remaining year of legal studies, the relatively short time we’d been together, my desperate need to escape the monotony of Illinois and explore the West and try to become a writer. But we’d been good together while we lasted. Rowan was into hard rock, double gin and tonics, Stephen King novels, animal rights activism, and the wearing of very tight blue jeans—interests that had mirrored my own more or less seamlessly. In truth, when I looked back on law school, on those three interminably dull, dry, slogging, soulless years, Rowan was the only thing I missed. So I was excited to hear from her, although as far as I knew she was still back in the Midwest practicing law. That, and she was engaged, or so said the grapevine. Hey stranger . . .

A prudent man likely would have ignored this midnight epistle. Would’ve assumed his former lover had poured herself one too many double gin and tonics. Would’ve recognized, sensibly, that nostalgia is a pleasure of memory alone.

I fired a text right back.

Soon, texting gave way to e-mails rehashing (revising, glossing over) our history, to discussions of dreams and goals and the frustrations and compromises of postgraduate life, to flirtations and what-ifs, to teasing and innuendo and hush-hush late-night phone calls.

Three weeks later, I picked Rowan up at San Diego Airport and drove us back to Ocean Beach, the bohemian community where I’d been living while tending bar and largely neglecting the reading and writing I kept telling myself was my true vocation. But such worries took a back seat to the beautiful woman in my front seat. Sunset was near, and the view as we descended the Point Loma hills was idyllic: the sea-scoured shacks and glittering coastline, the silver-blue blanket of the Pacific, and the sky layered with streaks of gold and lavender and grenadine like some exotic cocktail I might have whipped up on a lark.

“This place,” Rowan said, admiring the palms and swells, the birds of paradise and trippy head shops, the dreadlocked and bikinied locals spilling from the streetside bars, “is so not the Midwest. It’s like something from a Dr. Seuss book.”

“Dr. Seuss on acid, maybe.”

“It’s amazing. I think I might love it.”

I glanced at her and smiled.

“I really needed this,” she said, still staring out the window. [End Page 112]

A few days later, however, reality set in: this person had broken off an engagement, quit her job, and moved across the country—for me. Rowan was as I remembered, though: lovely, witty, and easygoing. Wanting to fit in around Ocean Beach, she went out straightaway and bought the skimpiest blue bikini available. She wore it day and night, like a vibrant counterpoint to my wrinkled board shorts and faded gray T-shirts. We reminisced about law school, the good times had between cramming for exams, the bad times endured living in that snowed-in and low-rent college town full of slumlords and chain restaurants and lackluster expectations, and soon it was as if we’d never broken up at all. As if we hadn’t decided our connection wasn’t enough, hadn’t had relationships with other people, and hadn’t pierced the brief bubble of sex and comfort and trust that’d been us back in Illinois.

In fact, we spent so much time fooling around in the surf and rubbing suntan lotion on each other’s shoulders and licking tequila salt off each other’s necks that I ultimately decided to quit Casa de Agave and pursue beach-bummery full-time. But rekindling romance wasn’t my only motivation. Since moving to San...

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