A Father’s Search for a Son Who Didn’t Want to Be Found

The trip had been a long shot. Bob Garrison reminded himself of that as he stood on a pier a thousand miles from home. Behind him lay the tile-roofed beach town of San Clemente, Calif., his last stop. Before him stretched the Pacific Ocean, immense and unbound.

Gulls cried. Surf broke. It was Monday, his last day. Mr. Garrison could afford only so much time off. And yet what if he was close?

Listen to this article with reporter commentary

He had spent the last two days following up on leads, scouring parks, passing out fliers. “MISSING,” they said, in block letters over photos of a 45-year-old man from Seattle, 6 feet, 6 inches tall with a beard to his chest, an ice-ax tattoo and a silver cross necklace.

Homeless, the fliers could have said, too, one of more than 180,000 homeless people in California. So many that if they all were to come inside, they would fill San Clemente several times over. But on this June day, Mr. Garrison, an engineer from rural Ellensburg, Wash., was not thinking about California’s humanitarian crisis.

He was just a 70-year-old man on a pier gazing out at an ocean, trying — too late, he feared — to rescue his son.