LOOKING out today from our Wan Chai apartment toward Happy Valley, you see a blanket of fog over the hills. They are all over Hong Kong after a squally downburst around noon. It was like seeing the Oakland hills. Hong Kong often reminds me of California. When you take the ferry over to Macau, the coastline—with little crescent beaches, a light dusting of condominiums, and hills rising behind them—is like no place so much as offshore Monterey, heading up to Santa Cruz.

Landscape memories with attached microclimates stay in your mind. The sawgrass waving in the wind on the midwestern plains, the surprising thin waterfalls in the Italian Alps, the mirages glistening on a Trans-Pecos highway, the bright dusty haze over the vineyards west of Capetown, the jagged Lord of the Rings mountains grabbing the sky in Torre del Paine. These are filed away like a personal stock file.

If you live long enough these vistas start overlapping. You see a sharp rocky inlet in Maine and think, Norway! And I look out at the fog clinging to the Hong Kong hills, and think, California!