Nicasio's apartment was across the San Francisco Bay in the downtown district of Berkeley. It was considerably more pedestrian and modest than Daniela's stately home, but a brusque bicycling distance to the UC Berkeley campus. His flat on Addison Street was comfortable, convenient, and not much more. He had lived there, alone, on the top floor with a spacious balcony covered with plants since becoming a graduate student at Cal.

Proving himself worthy as a history honors student in Early Modern European studies, focusing on the Spanish Empire, he was now in his third and critical year as a PhD candidate in History. And having spent the last years completing his coursework with emphasis in the Age of Global Voyages, he was beginning the writing phase of his dissertation.

For the past seven years Nicasio's had been a life of maintaining scholarships, writing sporadically for academic journals, and tolerating demeaning, part-time campus work which helped to defray the costs of his tuition, his rent and a meager student life-style. Much of his efforts had been in procuring a recent hard-won fellowship as a teaching assistant and lecturer for an undergraduate course at UC Berkeley. This victory he deemed only as temporary, however, until he completed his doctoral degree through the final writing of his thesis and sought a tenure-track assistant professorship at any of the system's nine universities. The teaching assistance post was an honor but still provided hardly enough income to survive well in the expensive sphere of San Francisco—and one of the top four research institutes in the nation.

Nicasio's historical journal writing and critical reviews in his research areas—Early Hispanic California, and California Coastal Exploration, had served him well academically over the past years. It gained for him recognition by the faculty members of Berkeley's prestigious History Department, and particularly a full professor who was involved with postdoctoral research for the California Studies Center, Dr. John Simons. This elderly man was a seasoned professor, teaching courses in Modern European Studies and himself was a specialist in California Coastal exploration and the Spanish Mission Period.

Nicasio, by the requirements of his department also had to be language proficient in Spanish, for which had had fortunately grown up bilingual in the Bay Area. A number of his elective graduate courses, by requirement and his own choice, were from the Department of Spanish and Portuguese—specializing in romance literature of the Medieval and Renaissance Period. Currently he was making ends meet being a lecturer for a lower-division course which satisfied the American Culture requirement of the Berkeley Undergraduate Department. It was a history class designed and mentored by his graduate adviser, Dr. Simons. Its title was History 128 AC, California's Mission Period: Enterprise and Extermination.

Like just over one-half of the entire state of California's population, Nicasio was of Hispanic origin, sometimes called 'Latino,' though in his case, along with a unique and serendipitous mixture of immigrant Russian, German and Castilian colonial blood. The Spanish heritage of his family dated originally back to the historic Ornate expedition of original Castilians who colonized Santa Fe, New Mexico in the late sixteenth century. His father had settled into the 'Golden State' of California just after WW II with the boom in the aviation industries. As well-built and athletic of stature, Nicasio was also of a mild disposition and wore his Spanish pedigree handsomely.

The graduate's student's bilingualism and academic prowess in Spanish and English had advantaged him both in high school and at Cal, where he was on a full scholarship based on merit and need. Nicasio was proud of his Hispanic roots and took delight in excelling within an ethnicity which had been disenfranchised for so many generations—particularly in California, where the landscape for generations had become overpopulated by illegal immigrants from Mexico. The USA itself had become a country where the 8th and 9th most common surnames—Garcia and Rodriguez had quickly and silently risen from 18th and 22nd place nationally in only a few decades.

This young man, surrounded in his apartment by open books and magazine articles, might pass on the streets of any city in California as a Latino, Chicano, Mexicano, "gang-banger-homeboy," Hispanic, or even a "Southern Mediterranean" in the more European social milieu of San Francisco. His Castilian blood heritage, astute academic record, and family's meager economic status, all factored in to secure the recognition he would need for a scholarship at the flagship of the UC campuses—Berkeley.

"Talented, motivated, personable and diverse," his high school university counselor had written of him prior to entering Cal as a freshmen, some seven years previously. Over these years he had matured well physically and intellectually, yet to pursue the highly competitive UC graduate student track, he had found little time for anything other than his studies, and that had been wearing thin on the love of his life, Daniela from the City across the Bay.­

Nicasio's own native California, which evolved robustly out of its Spanish Colonial history, was to become over a matter of two and a half centuries, America's largest bilingual territory, and currently the most populous state in America. In terms of genetic representation by the vast numbers of those who occupied the state during the new millennium—some thirty-five million, there could be no better representative example than the young American who was now pacing nervously in his humble apartment near one of the most distinguished research centers in the world.

A thick academic binder had been tossed on the coffee table of his flat, brandishing a warn-out and soiled label. It told in the most succinct terms exactly who Nicasio was—at least in the scope of the past critical years:

  Nicasio Carvajal

  PhD. Candidate: History Department

  University of California, Berkeley Campus 

  Junior Fellow: California Studies Center

Nicasio passed by the small table for the second time, adding open books to the pile near his laptop computer. At twenty-six, he still liked to lounge around shirtless in his home, barefoot, and sporting only faded jeans for comfort. This night, however, he was presently irritated by a seemingly endless day of unwarranted multi-tasking. It was compounded by the anxiety he felt for a future event which had plagued him for months—a final vetting of his research project by his history adviser. The meeting in the morning was to finally clear the way for the writing of his PhD theses.

Nicasio glanced at himself in the reflection of the dark television screen across the room. Over the past months his hair had approaching shoulder length, not because he followed any fashion trend, but merely because he had not had the time to cut it. Switching on the TV with the remote, he tried, haphazardly, to find a professional basketball game in progress to calm his nerves. While it blared with intermittent cheering and chanting, he began reading over some notes he had made to himself about his meeting with Dr. Simons in the morning. In progress on his laptop computer was a PowerPoint presentation he had been preparing since the day before. It was his week's lectures covering the California Mission Period for his freshman class at Cal.

He eventually gave up on the TV and got up, stretching his back and shoulders. He passed by the refrigerator and took out one of his only luxuries, a thick-bottled, Mexican Corona beer. He opened it and sliced off a small wedge of lime he kept on the counter top. Shoving the piece of sour fruit forcefully into the bottle automatically, he returned to the table and pushed his computer work off to the side. Taking a long drink of the beer, he looked at his battered diver's watch, cursed under his breath, and removed a thick packet of papers and photographs from inside a faithful back pack. It was the breadth and scope of his work to be shown to his Dr. Simons in only a matter of hours. That meeting was scheduled precisely after the lecture for which he had been preparing with PowerPoint.

Nicasio's meeting with the professor had for weeks taken precedence over all else in his life, as it was intended to finalize his past two years of research, now loosely written into an outline. Sitting down on the carpeted floor, in front of his sheath of papers, he looked at the title page of his précis in the light of a table lamp:

Doctoral Thesis Final Prospectus:

The Pacific Coast Landing Site of English Explorer, Nobleman, and Privateer

  Sir Frances Drake (1579):

Topographical and Ecological Considerations of the "Drake's Bay" Location

  by

  Nicasio Carvajal

Nicasio once again began reciting phrases of the oral presentation he would make the following day. He leafed through the pages nervously. The work before him was a detailed summation of his information gathering—amassed through exhaustive fieldwork north of the city at several of 16th century Francis Drake's possible coastal landing sites.

The locations had been suggested over the years by eminent Drakeologists and early Spanish Colonial Period historians as to just where the English explorer had come to land on his historical voyage past the North American continent in 1579. The body of Nicasio's work specifically featured a remote sea inlet some forty-seven miles north of the Golden Gate Bridge, within a region known popularly as 'Drake's Bay.' For years this location had been one of the possible contenders for the legendary pirate's coastal landing point, though it was never conclusively established, nor unanimously accepted by historians.

As Nicasio was assured his fieldwork would yield such agreement on the merits of his evidence, it all hinged now on Professor Simon's agreement for him to proceed with the writing of the thesis. It would be his approval as a full professor of Cal's History Department and official sanction to clear the way for the disertation to be published. At that point he could begin his long-awaited final writing phase. The gravity of this meeting the next morning suddenly overwhelmed him as he stood nervously and switched back on the TV to try and make out the basketball teams in conflict. He quickly abandoned this effort and paced the room once more, beer in hand, reciting passages of his text from memory.

Nicasio's dark brown hair and five-day's growth of beard made the young scholar particularly Bohemian looking, perhaps even characteristic of the men he had spent the past three years studying—those adventurous Europeans, mostly Spanish, who came to the farthest coast of America in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to explore whatever it had to offer to them and their monarch in wealth or resources. These young men had been lured by adventure, rumors, myths and the early hints of tremendous riches which the Western territories promised.

The young scholar stopped and absently mused at the wedge of lime now floating aimlessly near the bottom of his bear. He drank from the bottle again and then shifted to a printout of his PowerPoint note pages on the California missions. He turned and leaned over his laptop computer screen. He suddenly realized he must add in the images for the morning's lecture on the Mission San Diego de Alcala, but his thoughts were now fragmented and sketchy. He automatically went back to the presentation for Dr. Simons and the stack of papers on the table.

An uncharacteristic negativity began to arise in his mind. He was keenly aware of the consequences if the professor was not completely satisfied with his body of research. He knew his thesis was ambitious and had the potential to remain controversial to some scholars who had made up their minds about Drake's landing site and would no doubt stubbornly defend their own theories. His work however, would present new environmental evidence, substantial and empirical. It would pinpoint the very landing site which confirmed the contention that Sir Francis Drake, of Elizabethan Age fame, following a successful pirating raid on a Spanish treasure ship off Ecuadorian waters in 1579. It corroborated that he had sailed northward to seek out a safe haven on the North American coastline.

Historically, Drake's options after resting his men and gathering supplies at their site in question were to either begin the long journey home, southward around the tip of South America and eventually a long run across the Atlantic Ocean, or to take a chance that he might eventually sail into the mouth of a fabled sea passage through the American continent known in legend as the 'Strait of Anian.' This mythical water passage was believed to connect the two oceans, passing somewhere, as yet undiscovered, though the indeterminable land mass of North America.

Drake, of course, never found this non-existent strait, and after making his cursory inspection of the uncharted California coastline, returned back to England by sailing west via the Philippines. His phenomenal return to Plymouth England in 1580 assured his placement in the history books as leading the second only expedition to circumnavigate the entire world following Magellan's earlier expedition in 1522.

Drake's own ship and pilot logs claimed that he opted northward and did find a small bay of refuge where his crew spent nearly a month escaping high winds and refitting his ship. It was there somewhere on a sandy spit of protected beach that Drake and a party of his men made it to shore and dramatically claimed the entire coast as "Novo Albion" ('New England') for his Queen, Elizabeth I.

This bold declaration was in direct contention to England's greatest rival, Spain, which had already "discovered" and claimed the new territories in 1542—and the future California—for it's king, Charles the V. This had been accomplished during the bold journey of Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo, contracted by the Spanish Crown some thirty-seven years earlier. As a result of poor navigational methods—specifically no existing knowledge of taking readings of longitude, the actual site of Drake's phenomenal maritime feat—crossing both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans to land on the western boundaries of the New World, had never been fully corroborated by positively matching the reported landing site in Drake's logs with any exact locale. This was precisely what Nicasio's efforts of two years was to establish once and for all.

By empirical matching of the distinctive physical attributes of the location with the descriptions of the place in Drake's logs, Nicasio used new satellite technology never before employed in their debate. His research and dissertation attempted to establish as historical record Drake's exact landing point.

Earlier explorer Juan Cabrillo's 1542 California points of landing, on the other hand, as the first reported European to make landfall on the new continent's western coast, were indeed confirmed later by researchers. His descriptions of the present features of San Diego Bay and the Santa Barbara Channel Islands were all named and mapped, meticulously by the Portuguese captain sailing under the Spanish flag. Yet, for centuries scholars had debated the veracity of the claim of Drake's English crew and pilot stepping onto a California beach, and the unprecedented nautical feat of Drake's ship, The Golden Hind. Based on his own records and eye-witness accounts of those on the journey, it was reported that the English mariner and fugitive pirate did just that somewhere presumably north of San Francisco Bay.

Nicasio's research, using geographical and botanical descriptions extracted from these original logs, linked new satellite images of the coastal terrain with projected weather cycles. His thesis presented quantifiable evidence of such an identical sandy region described in the ship logs, which he was certain made the latest and most convincing evidence for the verification of the Drake's Cove landing site. This location was, according Nicasio's work, at a small inlet located in the present Point Reyes National Seashore preserve.

From not eating all day and his intense worrying, Nicasio felt dizzy from the second beer he had finished. His lack of sleep the night before also contributed to his general feeling of disorientation and moody distraction. Nevertheless, he sat back down and began to whisper his presentation to himself in the manner he would finally report it to the professor.

Suddenly his cell phone, lost somewhere in his back pack, began to ring, breaking his concentration completely. He managed to fish it out of a side pocket on the fifth ring.

"Yes?"

"Nicasio? It's me. . ."

The comfort of Daniela's voice would have normally elicited a smile on his young face, but his expression remained frozen and distant.

"So what's going on with our plans tonight? Are we still meeting at Rafael's at nine? You haven't sent me a text all day, Nicasio."

Daniela was presently in her room. She had also been pacing up and down, deep in her own concerns. She walked on the soft blue carpeting which connected her bedroom to her adjoining spacious bathroom and study. She wore a white robe with a turquoise towel wrapped around her wet hair. She was fresh out of a hot bath and had already tidied her fingernails and covered her body with a moisturizing lotion. Her face was a bit more relaxed now, showing some of the glow she had when the couple met five years before on this very night.

As she looked into the mirror while passing in front of it, her reflection seemed more alive than in the mirror of the riding club—it was somehow more enthusiastic, hopeful, and a bit flushed from the long exposure outside on the mountain top with Baylor. Her fair features were projected regally in the glass, an image emphasized by the turquoise headdress and terrycloth attire. She looked and felt queenly from head to toe.

"Oh, yeah . . . that," Nicasio lamented.

"What?"

Well Dani . . . listen. It's just that . . . it's going to be super difficult tonight . . . to see you, that is."

"What? Nicasio?"

"I know we had plans. Dinner . . . a special one . . . but I'm just buried, Dani. You know what's going on tomorrow with me and Simons. Right?"

There was no response.

Come on. You know what this means to me, right? All the work? The worrying about this?"

Daniela tried to remain stoical, not wishing to destroy her hopes for a romantic evening. "Yes, Nicasio, I know. But it's also our anniversary . . . doesn't that count for anything with you?"

He knew she was going to be angry with him for wanting to stay in for the evening. He had unconsciously prolonged the inevitability of this by not calling or telling her.

"Look, Dani. After tomorrow afternoon, things will be better, I promise. More relaxed."

Again, silence.

"I'll just be much calmer . . . after the meeting, OK? Able to focus on . . . us, I promise . . . Dani?"

". . . I'm here, Nicasio."

"Look, angelina. I just know this night . . . I can't . . . I won't be myself. I'm too freaked about this meeting. I have to still prepare. Just not until then, OK?"

More silence.

"Daniela? Hey, mi novia. Come on, I promised, I know. You've got to know how much you mean to me. . . Right?"

There was only another momentary pause.

"Yes, Nicasio. I'm beginning to see just how much I mean to you."

The phone quickly went dead.

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