Claudia Sims Black is a former landscape architect and management consultant whose writing explores the friction between ecological and cultural systems. She is currently working on a speculative novel about California, fem-tech, and capitalism.
They started making their annual sojourn to Big Sur the same year they met at Chevron, not pumping gas, but getting buttoned up every morning to put their chemical-engineering degrees to good use at the refinery in Richmond, the one that...