Surf City, USA

I expect you have heard The Beach Boys sing inspiringly of surfing and perhaps you even know that Huntingdon Beach is the capital of surfing and Jan and Dean created Surf City in 1963, the start of surfing as popular culture. And so on and so forth, the myths, the need to own the stories, the arguments and the claims and the nonsense.

Huntingdon Beach in Southern California claims to be Surf City and in the sense that surf movies show a warmer climate and more skimpy beach bunnies that may be true, but Santa Cruz is the place where Hawaiians first brought their boards and rode them on mainland waves. Unfortunately Santa Cruz, as photogenic as it is, suffers from cold; cold air and even colder water. The truth rarely coincides with the myth.

Unsightly kelp floating in the water, misty ocean air hanging low over the coast and beach bunnies actually surfing while dressed in cold clammy neoprene do not Hollywood fantasies make.

So if you want the real Surf City, not the faked up, over sexed one with lesser waves and lesser surfing you should not head to Huntingdon Beach. Let me say right now I never had any interest in learning to surf.  I wore neoprene to scuba dive and it was disgusting. Jack O’Neil invented the wet suit because the waters here will give you hypothermia but that is not my kind of swimming.

Steamer Lane was relatively subdued yesterday but I had the day off so Rusty and I wandered out to enjoy photographing the marine inversion foggy air and the surfers and the people watching the action around the Mark Abbott Lighthouse, a structure housing the surf museum built by his parents in his memory. Surfing kills lest we forget. The only Beach Boy who actually did surf ended up drowning at a young age. And he is not alone.

People take to the water with the swagger of the idolized but the fact surfing is dangerous I find quite surprising.  I recently read a book recommended to me by a traveler I met in Mexico and if you want to find out about surfing, especially if you think it is of no interest to you, I highly recommend this memoir.

It’s available electronically and it charts the author’s life as a youngster in Hawaii to surfing around the world to old age in Northern California. Most of the book will sustain your interest with the odd patch of excess surf (!), and you will learn more than you ever thought necessary about the surfing life! I should have liked to recommend it to this little guy strutting while under observation:

Rusty was far more interested in the ice plants than the surfers or the seagulls. I wandered and stared over the railing pointing my 120mm telephoto at whatever took my interest. I was wearing my vest only and it was not too cold. Perhaps I’m getting used to Surf City’s weird moods. Maybe I should take up geriatric surfing? I think not.

Surfing is not just the preserve of the young and feckless lest you be fooled into the thinking this isn’t a sport for real people. Anyone you meet in Santa Cruz may lay claim to be surfers. Lawyers get up at dawn and catch a few waves before court. Titans of industry too find themselves leveled by the wave culture,  barristas and van lifers all mix it up on the water.

Much of this surfing stuff I find as interesting as watching paint dry, sitting on a plank waiting for god knows what. There again I say the same about watching dolphins swim and surface to breathe. I have a low tolerance for sitting around waiting for something to happen. It turns out surfers feel the same way about each other and the stories of wave rivalry are legion.  Surfers are very insecure and hate intruders, scorn new comers and mock the less able. Frankly I’d have been mad to try surfing in the 80s as the native board  riders were arrogant shits.  I hope that’s changed but in case it hasn’t I’ll stay well away on the margins.  They won’t miss me or you.  

I remember years ago someone interviewed the then Mayor of Santa Cruz Mardi Wormhoudt and asked about her son the surfer. She defended him memorably pointing out the health benefits of the outdoor life not sitting on the couch not taking drugs and instead catching a few waves before school. I have held onto that image half a century later (she is long since dead) and it’s the picture I like to hold in my mind about surfing.  Wormhoudt herself was the city’s valiant leader in the catastrophic days of the Loma Prieta earthquake that leveled a third of downtown in a couple of minutes in the summer of 1989. Layne ran barefoot from her law office to safety on the street. I was in Florida watching a space launch at Cape Canaveral and glad to be there.

A footnote: Layne and I are to be interviewed on my old radio station KSCO.com at 10 am Pacific time Saturday morning to discuss retirement in the van. I doubt a reader of this page will learn anything new that I haven’t written about here but my former boss who will be interviewing me is an unpredictable character so who knows where we shall end up.