Didion flashes back to her sophomore year at UC Berkeley. It’s an autumn day in 1953, and Didion compares her time at the California university to the conflicts that took place in the 1960s. Didion is a part of the “Silent Generation.” She notes that they were quiet because they considered social action deceptive—a cover for the lack of inherent meaning in life. Didion’s generation believed the trouble was with people. People are flawed, so the societies and institutions they build have flaws, and there’s not much an imperfect person can do to change that. Each person must confront the world in a personal way, and Didion has tried to make the world as personal as possible.

It’s the 1970s, and Didion lives in a close, quirky beach community in Malibu near the highway. One Thanksgiving morning in 1975, she meets Zuma Beach lifeguards in Malibu. She admires how this job choice entails saving people. She absorbs their vocabulary and systems and compares them to soldiers. She goes with the men as they try to retrieve a small part of a rescue boat propeller from 20 feet of water. Didion and the boat lieutenant, Leonard McKinley, watch a diver retrieve the tiny part.