It was one of those Friday afternoons along Orange Avenue in Coronado when even the threat of rain couldn’t chase off the boys in wetsuits pulled down to their waists, the women in muumuus and …

My father’s death from cancer last June, at age 71, was a mercy not just because it freed him from the pain of his illness but because he was — always had been — a …

Jim Harrell makes a fist. Shows a brown hump of knuckle. How the fist feels is hard. It’s not as big as a breadbox, but pretty near the size of a pound round loaf of …

The Pacific Ocean swung at anchor several miles inside the entrance shoals of San Ignacio Lagoon. I hadn’t expected this place to be so big. Neither had I expected so many whales, such abundance of …

The smartest hitchhiker I heard about was a guy who hitched carrying his belongings in a gas can with the bottom cut out. Drivers who will never pick up a hitchhiker will stop for a motorist out of gas.

“This is my pride and joy,” Kern says. A shark’s tooth. He found it while doing field work for his dissertation. Four or five million years old. “The biggest ones are about six inches long.”

In spite of the bad blood, even Phillips’s detractors give him credit for making progress in ranch construction, jarring the property from its ghostly standstill when he went to work there in 1985.