Emerald Isle, N.C.

If one is waking up in the middle of the night from having fallen asleep on the sofa, a sofa that’s in an eighth-floor apartment in Washington, DC, and the window is slightly ajar because the building-controlled heat is excessive, and the passing of cars on the wet surface below is intermittent, one could very easily think, at least for a very convincing nanosecond, that the “whoosh” of the cars below is a series of waves and everything east of 16th Street is the sea.