You stay on the slide-path. Fog-lane first: cold mud talking under boots. Then a stranded spar like a bridge nobody planned. Then pickleweed, a hallway of salt-leaves that still lets a body through if the body is polite.

This is not a road. Roads are for carts. This is a corridor—the kind of path a haul-out animal uses to stitch rock to water. Cover on the inland side. Depth in reach. A place to vanish if a dog barks.

To the south, the kelp beds keep staring, dark even when a wavelet shows their blades. Not empty. Never empty, Pell says: young fish in the kelp, older fish after the young, seals after the older, and people last if they have any manners.

The seals’ slides do not cross the open bar. They hug the north rock, then the lane, then a strip of wrack that still has shade. Animals do not vote, but they vote with their bellies.

You can stop and study those kelp pastures until the lesson sits in your bones.

Or you can refuse the bar’s theater and stay on the animals’ own hallway until the white shape is more than a rumor.