Kate has been to the bay dozens of times, but hasn't been to the ocean in her functional memory; it's been over a year, maybe a year and a half.

This morning, we drove around Lake Merced towards Ocean Beach with Kate perched in her car seat behind me, looking out the windshield. I asked Kate what color she thought the ocean would be.

She thought for a bit. "Red," she said. "I want a red one."

I said the ocean was made of water.

"Oh," she said.

Silence.

"What color is the ocean?" she asked.

"It depends on the color of the sky."

"Oh."

We rounded the Lake and turned left onto the Great Highway and climbed the hill and suddenly the ocean spread before us, bright and hazy in the morning fog. "There's the ocean!" I said.

"And that's a whole lotta water!" said Kate from the back seat.

Kate loved the sandpipers and gulls, was initially unsure of the dark basalt sand, and did not like how the water rushed at her unexpectedly. I stood as a marker, assuring her that the water would not pass where I stood, but she didn't believe me and took off running whenever a wave looked too close.

The ocean fills your senses, miles of surf crushing, crushing, crushing. No matter how many times I come to the ocean, I don't tire of the endless rush of water. The sound blunts out every sharp edge I have.

"What color is the ocean?" I asked Kate.

She squinted. "White," she said. "Sure, the foam is, but what about behind it?" Pause. "Kinda green," she said.

Kate ate lunch and then another lunch again two hours later, both times hanging over the railing of the observation platform built atop a derilict sewage outlet. The waves overwhelmed her, too, and she was silent, always looking out and ignoring the pedestrians and dogs that passed under us.

After we had built sandcastles in the black sand, I stood in the surf and grabbed a bucketful of water to bring back to Kate. She dipped her hands in the bucket and rinsed the grit from her hands carefully. "I won't drink it," she said seriously, and I nodded.

"It's very salty," I said.

Then she looked at the water, then looked at me, and then said, "Should we put it back there?" and pointed at the surf.

I laughed. "No, we can just pour it out here, sweetie." Kate looked surprised.

"Let's pour it on our sandcastles," I suggested, and we did, until all our holdings were washed away.