One summer, when I was ten or
eleven, my pal Scotty and I left home
at 3:30 in the morning to begin a 50 mile bike ride to Doheny Beach. When we
left home it was pitch black outside except for the stars and our puny lights. Dogs barked as we passed. We shared city streets with milkmen,
paperboys, and night janitors getting off work. Outside town, the road was empty; a river of inky darkness. Scotty had his bedroll tied between ape
hanger handle bars. Mine was lashed to a
pannier rack which weighed as much as a modern bicycle. We pedalled across the San Gabriel Valley,
over the Coast Mountains at La Habra Heights, and rolled down old Route 39 to
what was then called “Tin Can Beach,” an unregulated strip of the coast now
sanitized as Huntington Beach State Park.
In my imagination, rogue
Japanese submarines lurked just beyond the breakers, ready to lob shells at
nearby oil fields.
Highway 39 was mostly rural, truck farms and orange orchards punctuated by ramshackle hamburger stands and beer joints. Franchised fast food hadn’t been invented. Knott’s Berry Farm, now an amusement park, still sold homemade jams from a roadside stand. Next door, the Hollywood Alligator Farm hid behind a high, gaudily painted, but impenetrable, wooden fence. I imagined veteran Hollywood alligators in Hawaiian shirts and sunglasses at poolside, sipping Bloody Marys and tanning in the morning sun.
The Korean War was history, but sailors
and marines still haunted the ramshackle towns which peppered Highway 101, the
north-south corridor along coastal California.
Scotty and I saw our first board surfers that day. There weren’t many, only a hardy
handful. None wore wetsuits, these being
things of the future. Most of the surfers
had fragile varnished balsawood boards.
Some old timers still rode gigantic redwood boards. I watched a big surfer astride one of these boards
gliding down a wind crested comber. It
was like seeing a Rolls Royce on Main Street.
This board, this surfer, were regal to me, royalty from a far different
world and life.
We camped that night at Doheny State
Beach, pitching our army surplus pup tent on the bluffs behind a thick hedge
overlooking the ocean. We dined haut
cuisine, canned beans, cold franks, and chocolate crème biscuits. Although we went to sleep at sundown, I woke
later when a courting couple went laughing by our tent on the path to the sand
dunes. I smelled perfume and heard the
familiar clink of long neck beer bottles.
A girl’s baby powder voice cooed,
“Bobby, honey, you didn’t forget the blanket?” After they passed, I crawled out and stood
hugging myself in tee shirt and boxer shorts, a skinny kid shivering in the moonlight. I thought maybe I’d look where the couple
went and, if I were really lucky, see a
girl naked.
Looking down the bluff, I saw instead huge waves building about
three hundred yards off shore. As each
breaker crested, phosphorescent plankton flashed in rippling neon surges of
blue-white light running down the wave’s spine for hundreds of yards in each
direction. The surf was alive with
colour and light. I smelled jasmine,
bougainvillea, and the salt green Pacific Ocean. In that lost summer night, that very moment,
I knew what I really wanted in life - a surfboard and a
girl whose voice sounded like cotton candy.
