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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.