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Surfers live in a boundary between elemental forces, land and water, where two dimensions meet in alternating cycles of chaos and calm. When we leave the water and feel the sand and rocks getting dryer walking back to our terrestrial lives, onlookers not so vested sense something different about us. But the moment we come ashore the surfboard we carry becomes a symbol at best and a burden at worst. Like everyone else we have to get in a car, drive home and sleep in a room surrounded by four walls. Perhaps the hardest part of surfing is solving an infinitely complex equation of aesthetics and physicality--our relationship with the ocean--unfathomable beyond our endorphin-riddled enjoyment, living in a society that limits and overwhelms us at the same time, a society that requires an existential leap to achieve anything that compares to our lifelong passion.

Unlike our counterparts in Southern California, where beach culture is cushioned and isolated by vast track housing, warm weather and an industry built around it, surfers in the Bay Area deal with cold water and a social morphology that changes rapidly from the smell of salt and eucalyptus to the stench of human detritus, exhaust and urine, where artists and businessmen try to create meaning under the shadows of skyscrapers, the black dust of the freeways and the echo of police sirens. Some bay area surfers hide close to their favorite haunts in the foggy outer avenues of the Sunset or the coastside hills of the Peninsula and Marin County. Surfers are intrinsically fringe dwellers. But others try to find out what society has to offer.


Moving mountains must change your perspective on life. My brother recently told me he may be retiring his 9'6 Mavs gun. He cited the crowds, said that it's turned into a circus. This potential hand-me-down makes me nervous. There's no surfboard design that tests your skill more than this that doesn't require a motor, stirring the bile in your stomach. Surviving an elemental force makes normal life seem absurd. And when waves are over twenty feet, the absurdity increases exponentially.

Jim Kibblewhite lived this in the late eighties as Jeff Clark spread word of the dragon in his backyard, Mavericks, at a slow pace. Clark's Ocean Beach invitation to Santa Cruz kingpins Vince Collier and Richard Schmidt wouldn't happen until 1990. Ben Marcus's Surfer Magazine article on Pillar Point was released in 1991 and Maverick's place in surf lore took care of itself from there onwards. The days of empty, glassy Maverick's with just Clark, Kibblewhite, Matt Ambrose and the rest of the crew from Pacifica and the coastside was relegated to "Golden Days" status. After having it good like this, where do you go from there?

June 2000

I wouldn't meet Jim in person till we crossed paths in Kuta Beach. Two years before its demise, Paddy's Irish Bar was DJ central on Legian. Jim was in his element on the dancefloor, dressed low-key and stylish in a sunburned sea of boardshorts and Bo Derek braids, hanging with a pretty Italian girl. I'd only seen him in the water at Rockaway Beach when the swell was over twelve feet, so it was telling that we'd meet in a mystical place like Bali. A ragtag group of misfits from the bay area was in Kuta at the same time: Curt Myers from Half Moon Bay, Shawn Rhodes, Joe Grochowski, Andy Anderson and others from Pacifica had just returned from a two week boattrip in the Mentawais. Andy Olive and some of the "groms" from the City, as everyone was calling them at the time, were spotted at McDonalds, the cave at Ulu's and Sari Club. For a wind-down a group of the Pacifica crew ended up on a week-long tour of Lombok and western Sumbawa. Though the swell didn't cooperate outside of a tiny low-tide pulse at Scar Reef on day two and our last day at Desert Point, Rhodes put on a backside tube-riding clinic. with fishing, spliffs donated from a trio of Spaniards from the Canary Islands, and one night of debauchery in the Gilis took up the rest of our time.

Three years earlier, Jim went into the desert in northwest Nevada. Burning Man was in its seventh year on the ancient dry lakebed, the Playa, as it's called. Although the underground scene that pollinated the world with house music from Detroit, would fade with the advent of coliseum-filled commercial raves, the feeling dispersed to different places. The water brings the silt to the desert floor in a perpetual cycle.

October 24, 2010

Ten years later I got an invitation on facebook from Jim for a full-moon party. He'd been neighbors with the Keating clan, Pacifica royalty, for a good part of the decade on the rustic boatdocks at the south end of Lindamar Beach. Rain had been in the forecast all week, but the plans for the party went on undaunted. I lived less than a mile from the docks across from the Quikstop on Roberts and Crespi. The first rain of the season was unrelenting. As the San Francisco Giants had just won the National League Penant, I was content listening to some records and calling it a night. But around three in the morning, as the rain was blowing sideways, with a mellow high, I went to the balcony and heard bass thumping through the rain. I threw on my shoes and a snowboard jacket. I had to go.

The tent that covered Kibblewhite's house was visible from the highway. It was a parachute moored to the docks. Walking in the rain I saw a young couple making their way back to the valley. There weren't a lot of cars on the highway and the south wind pushed the rain in my face. I stepped in some puddles behind the surf shop and made my way up the levy getting closer to the house music.

A carved chest sat at the top of the stairway down from the levy. Along the wooden fence were a string of lights. There were lanterns posted atop wood pilons and the red parachute was lit from the inside. Though the party had peaked earlier, there were committed revelers chatting and dancing inside the house and on the docks. When the tent flapped open, it revealed the moonlit swell combing Lindamar while a beautiful raven-haired Russian girl finessed the ebb and flow of the pulsing electronica. The tent contracted and expanded in the wind, opening and closing while the fire pit exhaled glowing ashes.

I'd missed the peak of the party, but the tribe was still going strong in a late fall celebration.

rites of passage

either way, it arrived. The age of aquarius was marked by something as random and unforeseen as the San Francisco Giants winning the world series. The smallest big city in the world would be overrun by a feeling of 700,000 people all making the existential leap into possibility where none exists. Relationships were rocky towards the end of the era of Pisces, the fish. But this was everything in the new package. Everything was brought to the surface in Aquarius through arguments, body language and a return to another accepting era of consumption and an accelerated fashion show getting its ridiculous speed in direct proportion to how many eighties movie stills were available on the internet and how many delay altered songs used samples from the eighties to dance to redundant 4/4 rhythm using a kick on every eighth note or a Roland 404 sampler.

That's how I know that's the Clash. I was there...in the nineties. Motherfuckers. Ha ha.

I'm glad that "ha ha" replaced "lol". Sometimes I don't even laugh.

My only knowledge of the age of Aquarius comes from three Aquarius friends.

1) Jane: Broke my heart, but remained a distant siren in my life because our friendship was true and she had ridiculously hot lips. I made fun of her chicken legs but in truth they were worthy of an adjective in a Prince song. I wrote a story and named her Rhiannon. She could read me like a book. She reads the world like a book.

2) Perry: painted over paintings I had done of waves while we collaborated on two eight by five foot pieces of plywood at the Decompression while on mushrooms while the Mermen channeled electricity through their surfed out guitars in a confluence of (a) painting in front of thousands of people (b) surfing since childhood and (c) seeing my life written before me as the world sped up and I slowed down, all in weird coincidences that centered around my going to Black Rock City. It was collaborative so the hallucination must have tripped Perry into what seemed like a fit worthy of Jackson Pollock. Water was thrown with paint and rubbed on the canvas. Everything was graffiti. My waves were gone. We laughed afterwards. The world is absurd. Why does it matter?

3) Mariah: After I got of the bus I bombed down Castro. The cute girl with the knee-high socks, a sideways hat over her long blonde hair and cutoffs went straight down the hill to 18th. "You beat me!" I said to her at the 33 bus stop.

"This fuckin sucks," she said. "The bus isn't coming for like an hour."

"Where do you live?"

"Twin Peaks."

"C'mon, I'll give you a ride." I said, walking up the hill.

She's drunk and nineteen.

We talk about life for a good twenty minutes between the walk and the drive.

A few weeks earlier she fell skating and blacked out from a concussion.

She has pictures of her black eye on her iPhone

I saw her on a train. She gave me a hug goodbye on Clayton and 17th. Then she yelled, "Did I leave my sweater in your car?"

The guy behind me honks and yells at me, something I couldn't hear. I hand her her sweater and as I flip an illegal u-turn in a five-way intersection I catch a glimpse of her, skateboard in hand (not a longboard, a legitimate hardcore skateboard with 55 cm wheels and a blunted twin-tip), with her sideways hat and knee socks.

Where the hell am I right now?

Too bad she has a girlfriend.

Ha ha...

Explanation

What is this mirage? Sometimes you wish life could be more. That's what that was. It was more. A party under a freeway overpass. We are alive and moving, swirling schools of fish, out of the pathways of timeclocks and street grids, we are pulled by gravity and follow a pulse.

This is why I am addicted, to this crowd, to the shopping mall. Coral reefs have patterns similar to human patterns of migration. The migratory fish swim away in the deeper water leaving the bustling activity of the reefs, these cities of integral-symbiotic organic relationships that hold life and death, within close proximity, triumph, getting by and drifting.

I need to sleep.

She knew her friend was getting off at the Church St. station. She came over to my side and stood close to me as I was standing, holding the handle. I had to leave as well. My head hung down leaving her. What just happened? Fate only goes so far.

Mysterious Brew

They're now faint facsimiles of people, flesh and blood.

That's all. It sounds like family and a lot of f's. Damn alliteration. Can't help it sometimes. A bad writer follows his mistakes to the grave. Nothing happening. The economies bad. It's just so hard to start something new. She says I write like a fourteen year-old girl, sometimes. At other times I'd come home to her, and now she's gone.

Back to the electronic database, where so quickly I can catch up and feel in the loop, while I can't wait to leave an exciting city, a fun occassion, the adventure of my life, because I had to go home and stare at a screen, sometimes typing. That's where she is.

Another...

To your bottom left is a purple butterfly. You don't notice the rectangular cuts of the sidewalk but you've imprinted them in your brain with the slight flutter.

That's who she was. Four flights up a random building on 16th Street where the security guard asks you what your business is and you say, Oh yeah, umm, yoga graduation with a slight hint of guilt in your eyes because you were just kind of goin' with the flow on this one and after a few beers at a late lunch watching beautiful women graduate from yoga school isn't that bad an idea. Right? But you kinda feel like your girlfriend is trying something on at Forever 21. Your friend invited you anyway, so no biggie.

But she got you, instantly. Right when you crossed sixteenth someone was reprimanding a thief, then there was brick wall, then you saw a line of people and you assume that's where the event is. Your friend's girlfriend Tiffany is there. Wait, Tiffany is friends with that girl. I met her a couple months ago, maybe two at a friend's going away party, weirdest thing to have two women with the same name who made some impact on your life despite your hermetic seal go away at the same time. She was in the corner, quiet, observing, bending the room to her presence, she had too much room around her, yet she was circled with eye contact. I said 'wow' quietly. She's out of touch. She's amazing. Gone. Nothing but a name on a database. Then she cancels her account.

And usually if you're around, that means that...

The purple butterfly on the sidewalk. My stomach tenses and I pretend like it doesn't. "Hey, how are you," you say to Tiffany. It's small talk. You catch up. You look over at Tiffany's friend, a princess, thus her danger. You love alpha females, but you're sensitive. But she seems really mellow.

And now she remembers me, don't give her credit, keep smiling. Four flights upstairs behind cowboy boots and a black dress. No shoes and polished wood floors inside the studio, slippery socks. Where am I? This building is beautiful, Am I spiritual, athletic, intellectual? Where do I go with this? If I've seen her twice does that mean I'll see her a third time? She's constantly in line behind me, first by the guacamole, then by the red wine. We smile. Will she be marrying a yuppy, dowsing me with regret for being so scared of being happy and not acting on the moment that could've changed the lives and direction for a thousand people dazed by insomnia and the eternal return seeking only things that weren't that bad? One moment at a time.

"I'm a Leo, and I'm quiet and laid back," she says. "but don't ever stop looking at me."

"I won't."

The room went quiet. Our friends have walked away. No one says a word.