Santa Cruz is Christine Blasey Ford’s summer escape from Palo Alto: a place associated with wide beaches, a free-spirited atmosphere, and surfing. In the account of her uncertainty over whether to intervene in Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination, the coast becomes a setting for weighing how to act while trying to keep the matter private.

A Summer Refuge

Ford was a serious surfer. She and her husband had met through a website that matched people with a shared interest in riding waves, and their second date was spent afloat off the San Mateo coast. The book also recalls a great white shark rising beside her in the water, an encounter that thrilled her so much she did not sleep for two days. Surfing was not merely an activity: Ford drew on its analogies in her classroom and longed for Santa Cruz’s beaches and atmosphere as a contrast to her home in Palo Alto, about an hour to the north.

The Coast as a Place to Weigh a Decision

During the summer, Ford and her friends gathered on the sand, looked out over the Pacific, and took long swims. They also watched their children train in the California State Parks Junior Lifeguard program. Amid these familiar routines, Ford considered whether to pass along her account of an incident from high school before Kavanaugh became the nominee.

She had not called a lawyer. Instead, she wondered whether to contact Kavanaugh herself and ask him to withdraw from consideration, or to reach Mark Judge, who had also been in the room, and ask him to convey the message. The possibility of intervening quietly gave the coastal gathering a second purpose: alongside swimming and watching the children, Ford and her friends were considering how she might act without immediately making her account public.

Narrative Significance

Santa Cruz places a high-stakes political question in an ordinary summer setting. The beach is Ford’s chosen refuge, but it is also where she tries to decide whether private information should alter a nomination to a lifetime appointment. That contrast gives the location its narrative significance: the decision is not yet a public confrontation, but it has entered the spaces of her everyday life.