Darmok on the Ocean

I was an avid beachcomber when I was a boy. There is hardly a stretch of sand from Point Loma to Encinitas that I haven't walked, a distance of some thirty miles, and I've explored every nook and cranny of La Jolla countless times, some of them underwater. There are many access points to the water's edge between the houses there, not necessarily hidden, but so unobvious from the street that outsiders rarely stumble onto them, even today when every such thing can be found online. I know them all. The tourists still congregate where they have always gone, leaving other areas to the locals. I can usually find somewhere comfortably uncrowded, whatever the day and season. I have my favorites. For some open space, there's always the trek from Scripps to Blacks, assuming the tide is low enough to make it around the rocky point separating the two beaches. It's easier on a warm day, because you don't mind getting a little wet. Just leave your shoes behind. No one will take them. Hiking onward to Torrey Pines is always an option, and it's amazing how isolated it feels, the city out of sight and sound atop the cliffs there. I've done it so many times I can still walk it in my mind on a January night in Minnesota. Thirty winters have gone by and the ocean remains a visitor to my dreams. I can feel myself swimming in it, rising and falling with the swells.

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You can't really understand some beaches until you watch them year round. The beaches I know best are subject to constant change. Drastic changes can be observed over the course of a day. Tides rise and fall eight feet in twelve hours. Sometimes tide pools extend far from shore and shallow reefs are exposed further out. Other times the beach is covered by water, and waves smash against rock and seawall. Even larger changes occur over the course of the year. Winter storms carry away the sand that builds up over summer. The level drops ten feet in places, turning a soft, sandy beach into an unforgiving rocky shoreline. Exiting the water becomes infeasible in many places, so you need to pick your spot well and time your dash for safe ground perfectly. Even where it remains sandy, there can be a large shorebreak to get through. Squeezing under a big one isn't too hard if your hands are empty, but getting a surfboard under one can present a challenge. I once watched some guys try to get through the shorebreak at Marine Street wearing scuba gear. It was a pretty huge day, breaking hard on a bar fifty yards offshore, with a cauldron of backwash on the inside. Two of them managed to get through and I bet they were beat to hell, because it didn't look easy. The third guy barely made it past the backwash, then simply got destroyed on the bar, taking one big wave after another on the head. He couldn’t get his fins on and then he lost one. Eventually another bystander, a real waterman like Mike Nelson from Sea Hunt, swam out and lent this hapless fellow a hand returning to shore.

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You can't really know the beach until you go there at all hours of day and night. On dark nights, water splashing against something—your hand, the hull of a boat, a jetty or pier—imparts a stress to microorganisms in the water. These organisms respond by emitting a short burst of blue-green light, much like a firefly. This bioluminescence isn't always going on, but sometimes the microorganisms are there, and you're there, and it's after dark, and your footsteps are sparkling on the sand. If you're walking on wet sand at night, something good is probably going on, otherwise there is no reason to be there. Either you're with your girlfriend, or your buddies, or you're there just because it's really nice out. If you're Lisa, you might be heading to the water for a night dive. She will tell you that's when the animals come out. The plan is simple: wait until dark, kick out two hundred yards, drop down 150 feet. I'm not particularly endorsing this idea, I'm just saying that some people do that kind of thing. No matter your reason for being there, it seems more magical when this bioluminescence is going on.

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The range of atmospheric phenomena in Minnesota is remarkable. Powerful weather systems march through the region year round, riding on the jet stream. Dramatic changes occur day to day, and season to season. The sky takes on an ominous appearance and the air feels electric when storms approach. The weather in La Jolla is more subtle, but it's there if you look for it. First, go down to the beach where you can find an unobstructed view of the horizon. A sky that might not seem so interesting looking up from your back yard often looks a lot more interesting when you can see clouds along the horizon over the ocean, especially at sunset. There is a lot going on in the clouds out there. Fog is common near the shore, and it can do interesting things when it intrudes over land, gliding up ravines and over mesa tops. Red sunsets always draw the crowds, but it pays to admire the countless shades of gray that make up the sky under the heavy clouds that dominate May and June every year. If we extend our notion of atmospherics into the water, a drama plays out daily in the intertidal zone comparable to anything we see in the sky in Minnesota. Several tiers of a rich and varied ecosystem are exposed to everything from baking sun at low tide to complete submergence in salt water at high tide. Large surf pounding on rocky reefs under a leaden winter sky creates an ominous mood around the intertidal zone—the danger there feels palpable to someone who knows the beach. Yet on a calm, sunny day it feels like the Garden of Eden. The enormous canvas of sky and water is repainted hour by hour, day by day, year round. It never stops changing.

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If you hang around the beach long enough, something interesting is bound to happen. One day in winter I was walking our dog Brook, back when you could do that without a leash and get away with it. We came across a seal pup sitting in a gap between some rocks at Little Point. Brook came to a stop, waited for me, and we took a wide berth to avoid conflict. She was a sweet dog. A few hundred yards ahead we encountered a man carrying a large net. He asked if we had seen a sick seal pup reported by a resident. Occasionally some of them will come ashore from exhaustion, hunger or sickness, especially during stormy conditions. It had been Victory at Sea for a few days, and he had already picked up another pup that afternoon. It was waiting in his truck for a ride to Sea World where it would be rehabilitated and released back to the wild. He asked if I would help catch this one. Sure! It sounds like fun. Brook smartly hung back while I chased the seal into the man's deftly handled net. We carried it to the truck, he thanked us, and we were on our way to another adventure somewhere on the sands. Let's go look under some seaweed!

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More often than not I left the beach exhausted. Home was a mile uphill, so my pedals often made their way instead to nearby Mithras Books where I could sit and read awhile. On a lucky day I had a dollar in my pocket, enough for a three-scoop sundae at Baskin-Robbins next door. Then I could stay longer before pedaling home. The interior had the eclectic feel of an antique store. The arrangement of bookshelves and tables created nooks and crannies where a chair and reading lamp could always be found. Classical chamber music often played in the background. One could stay for hours without the staff making the slightest suggestion to purchase something or leave. It seems from articles I've read that turning a profit at the store was a low priority for its owners; they also owned a commercially successful publishing press. The bookstore, well known around the city, no doubt helped raise the profile of the press. Above the bookstore was The Unicorn, a tiny movie theater reached by a staircase at the back of the store. Its audiences were as fascinating to me as the avant-garde films shown there. The bookstore was a magical place for me. I wandered around looking at things until I found something to read. Usually it was science fiction or fantasy, but I was also fascinated by a large tome written by Buckminster Fuller. What a great name! It was full of interesting diagrams and pictures. It seemed offbeat, and it seemed smart. I wanted to understand stuff like that.

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Urban beaches in California are a churning cauldron of humanity. The marvelous and farsighted California Coastal Act guarantees public access below mean high tide line throughout the state. Historical access points are granted permanent easement for public use. This could be anything from a cement-paved walkway snaking between $20 million houses to a rugged dirt path passing through a culvert under a roadway. Whatever it takes to get there. The classic place for people-watching is the boardwalk, which stretches for miles in some neighborhoods. But when I was young the most epic scenes could be found in the parking lots where the locals congregated at popular surf breaks. The difference in atmosphere between the shoreline (near chaos) and one block inland (staid and stoic) was remarkable, especially in wealthy residential areas. Things seem to have settled down a lot, especially since alcohol was banned from the beach some years ago. In the 1970's it was different. Back then the Windansea parking lot was an epicenter of the beach bum lifestyle, and it could get pretty crazy down there. A decent sunset on a warm summer evening was excuse enough for an impromptu street party to break out. I remember Mac Meda Destruction Company putting on some pretty huge keggers, no special reason, just rolling up to the beach with twenty kegs of beer and selling plastic cups in front of the pump house made famous by Tom Wolfe. Usually the police would show up, study the situation, see that nobody was killing anyone yet, and exercise discretion by not getting involved. Unfortunately, in 2008, a riot between revelers and police in a heavily touristed area of Pacific Beach prompted the city to ban alcohol at all beaches in San Diego. You can be fairly certain those responsible weren't locals. Anti-social behavior was common enough among the locals, but it was more nuanced than that. The reality is that Mac Meda was more about order than destruction. Those guys loved the beach—starting a riot there would be like taking a shit in their living room.

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San Diego's neighborhoods are defined by its topography of mesa tops broken by canyons. Before my family moved to La Jolla in 1972 we lived near Tecolote Canyon. Later we moved to a new development on the edge of Rose Canyon. These were great places to explore. In 1967 you could hike all the way from Rose Canyon to UCSD across undeveloped land. In autumn, Santa Ana winds brought hundreds of tumbleweeds from open lands to the east rolling through the neighborhood. Our street extended like a peninsula into the surrounding canyons. Our back gate opened onto a small ravine that connected with the main canyon around the cul-de-sac. The gate was like the magic wardrobe imagined by C.S. Lewis—more often than not some sort of adventure waited behind it. There were rattlesnakes and coyotes and bleached animal bones and poisonous plants in the canyons. Truthfully it was pretty wild down there, and learning to hike on its steep trails would prove useful later on. We spent a lot of time there stretching our minds and bodies in unsupervised activities. It was a lucky time and place. Now most of those canyons have been filled in by roads and houses, and kids stay inside their houses to play, or they ride in a car to a sports field somewhere flat and sterile. I think they are in greater danger than we ever faced.

* * *

I was in 7th grade and my brother was in 9th grade. We attended the same junior high school. I thought he and his friends were pricks, a totally normal situation. But when it mattered most, he gave me some good advice. The prestigious Bishop's School had offered me a scholarship. My parents tried to get a full tuition scholarship, but half was the best they could do (the story of my life). Anyway, they offered me the choice to go there. With a family of seven children and finances that were badly stretched, it was generous of them to do so. I said no and they respected my decision. I'm glad I saved them the money, and I'm glad for other reasons, too. The public school I attended had excellent academics and my friends were all there. But the crux of the matter was simpler than that, and my older brother explained it to me in no uncertain terms: I would be uncool. Those guys wore uniforms. They didn't surf, and half of them weren't even from La Jolla. I understood exactly what he was saying and it was all true. Two years later I advanced to the public high school where I hung out with a bunch of academic all stars. Most of them have achieved greater success than I have, so I can't blame the public schools for my failures.

* * *

Our house was on a main street that headed straight towards the beach, and it was mostly downhill getting there. The junior and senior high schools were conveniently located along the way. In high school I always scheduled physical education (mandatory then in California) immediately before or after the lunch break. This cobbled together just enough time to run to the beach and surf for an hour, grabbing my board from a friend's back yard along the way. Consequently, I got an F every semester in physical education, and the high school wasn't going to let me graduate without doing something about it. In the first semester of my senior year I became aware that these F's might pose a problem. I didn't have a plan. Then a friend told me that California had started administering a GED exam. Bingo! So I made an appointment with an admissions counselor at UCSD, who assured me that I was guaranteed admission if I could pass the GED. Well that wasn't gonna be hard. Three days later I dropped out of high school and started working full time as a restaurant line cook. Free time and some money in my pocket. It wasn't long before I was driving my own car, a '68 Chevelle Malibu. I had a new girlfriend, too, and she was as smart as a whip. Good times.

* * *

There were warning signs in high school, and I should have heeded them. In 10th grade I took regular biology instead of advanced biology, because it was the only way I could schedule physical education consecutive to the lunch break. Since 7th grade I had always taken the advanced classes. The regular biology class was an eye opener. The attitude of the students was abysmal. No one seemed to care about learning. Assignments and tests were easy, yet half the students didn't seem to learn much at all. I aced the tests without much effort. Then something strange happened. The teacher concluded that I must be cheating. He was new to the school and had trouble identifying his students. He chronically mistook me for another student from one of his other classes. I knew this other student; he was a poor academic performer, and we both looked like dumb surfers to the teacher. My test performance seemed incongruous to him. So one day I take my usual seat in the classroom, and I see that a chair with a tablet arm has been placed at the front of the classroom, facing into a corner against the wall. It is test day, and the chair is for me. There was some hootin' and hollerin' from the spitballers in the classroom about that—they knew I wasn't cheating—and this weird scene made me an outlaw of sorts to them. Naturally I aced the test, then I aced another a few weeks later sitting in the same chair. Then I told my parents about it and my mom phoned the principal's office, which put a stop to that practice.

* * *

In the 1980's Ocean Beach was still a tough part of town. It was a hangout for outlaw bikers and assorted bad guys. Cheap, rundown rental properties surrounded a sketchy business district. Drugs were easy to find. One morning a friend and I pulled into the parking lot by the pier to check the surf. It was dawn. The place seemed deserted except for a few other surfers. I parked the car behind a bench facing the ocean. As we studied the surf through the windshield, a head, then shoulders rose up on the bench. The head swiveled to look at us. He came over to my window and tapped on it. I lowered it an inch. He asked if we wanted to buy some Vicodin or Seconal. Great. I said no and rolled up the window. No doubt he spent the previous night sleeping on that bench. That was Ocean Beach. My brother-in-law tended bar in Ocean Beach. He was young and had just gotten his license to practice law. He built a successful criminal defense practice that is still going strong forty years later, and his first cases came out of that bar: DUIs, bar fights, and drug busts. He needed experience, clients, and court time. He would take cases for a hundred bucks in those days to get it. Over time it paid off and a few years later he opened a storefront office on the north side of Pacific Beach, a big move in the right direction. When I first met Goodwin after he left the Navy, he lived in Ocean Beach. Right on Abbott Street! Talk about humanity. His new bride moved from Tennessee to live with him there. She had never been to California before. What a place to start.

* * *

If you want to solicit help from someone, find the right kind of person for the job. Say you are traveling abroad and want to query someone for directions or advice, but you don't know the local vernacular. Look for a young person, perhaps recently in high school or college. It is more likely they will speak English than an older person. Occupation matters, too. Police, hotel employees, taxi and bus drivers are likely to speak some English. Wherever you are, people like to help with small things when they have something to contribute, be it local knowledge or some special skill. I've helped strangers change a tire or free a car from the snow, and strangers have done the same for me. One day I asked for help when I found myself locked out of my car after a surf in Mission Beach. This was boardwalk country, where Interstate 8 unloaded its guts from all points inland onto the flat, sandy beaches that stretched from the jetty in South Mission to Tourmaline three miles to the north. It was a hot summer day and the boardwalk presented a wide cross section of slightly scary people to choose from. It might have been one of those sketchy parts of Diagon Alley visited by Hagrid. Avoiding the obvious bikers, I ended up asking a guy who looked the part to help me break into my car. He knew exactly what he was doing. He retrieved a wire coat hanger from his psychedelic panel van, fashioned a long hook from it, and showed me how to fish for the latch. Soon I was on my way.

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More than half of all bird species in North America can be seen in San Diego County. The diversity of habitats near the coast is remarkable. Cliffs, bluffs, sands, marshes and bays all attract their own mix of birds. Inland there is chaparral interspersed with riparian canyon bottoms. Oak and pine woodlands are found at higher elevations to the east. Over the mountains, an hour from the beach by car, lies the harsh and beautiful Anza Borrego desert. I never gave much thought to the birds until I met Lisa. Birdwatching didn't cost much, just a few bucks in gas if we drove somewhere to do it. There was always something to see at the estuaries. The lagoons at San Dieguito and San Elijo, and the Tijuana Slough, were prime spots. But those were special outings. Any day of the week, the tidal marshland at the north end of Fiesta Bay was a short bike ride from our first apartment. The marsh is fed by a small creek that runs behind some businesses along a major street. The foliage gets thick back there, isolated enough that homeless people camp there, but that means birds can be found there, too. I would loop around the creek and marsh on my bike in the late afternoon, stopping here and there to look at things. I was in graduate school and I had a lot of free time on my hands.

* * *

We were poor, so we had to look for ways to have fun without spending much money. It was a big deal to go out to dinner, even if it was just pizza and beer. Our special treat was gelato; it wasn't cheap, but it was extraordinarily good, and we could walk there from the ramshackle lean-to Lisa rented in Hillcrest. When truly bored and completely broke, we would drive down the hill to watch the planes land at Lindbergh Field. This was long before 9/11, so you could walk right up to the fence at the end of the runway. Behind it was a large barrier to block jet exhaust from blasting the city street. Planes came shrieking overhead, perhaps a hundred feet off the ground. It felt like twenty when you were directly underneath one. It was best to do this at night. We would hang out for half a dozen landings, then go back up the hill, stopping for gelato if we had a little money.

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To be continued...