Childhood Dreams at Old Man’s Beach: San Onofre

I had a free morning so I drove to San Onofre State Beach. The internet told me they have beach camping there, the kind where you can pitch your tent right by the sand, but I couldn’t get anyone on the the phone to answer questions about availability, so I checked it out with my free day. I did not find what I was looking for. I found something different entirely.

When I was ten I did not know much, but I did know I wanted to surf. I had just discovered complex math and the associated reality that meant I would never be an astronaut. I had always known I would not play in the NFL, so the only dream I had left, at ten, was surfing.

I grew up inland, but on the side of the Mississippi that flowed toward LA, not New York, so cool was all T&C rather than CBGB. We knew we were posers with our long bangs and neon shorts, but I wanted to move past that. After years of begging, my parents let me go stay with my aunt in California the summer before 8^th grade. It was a step closer to my dream and I was planning my path in my head. I figured I would have to start out with a boogie board, but if I got good enough I would advance to standing up. I would need a board. I was ready for the breeze and splash of salt water. What I got was dirt and cactus because Aunt Nancy lived in Palmdale. It was a lesson on the dangers of mobilizing in ignorance.My last hope was college, because I had been trained to know that I must go to college, but I didn’t know anyone who had ever been to school in California and everyone told me I could only afford in state. So I stayed home. Eventually jobs, kids, and adulthood squeezed everything childish, like the dream of surfing out of my head. I moved on. I grew up.

I gave little thought to my childhood self when I took a job an hour east of LA. I was just thinking I needed a job.

Then I made that drive to San Onofre.

There was no paved parking lot and no packs of families lugging coolers canopies and beach chairs. There was no pier and no one renting out tandem beach cruisers. There were only surfers.

“Great morning right?” a leathery grey haired man asked as I closed my car door. He was sitting on a log facing the water. Next to him sat another old man wiping down his glossy red board. “Uh… yes. Sure is.” I replied awkwardly. The two men both smiled and went back to chatting with each other. I looked out at the water and it was bustling with people bobbing up and down just past the breakers, some paddling up and over the waves, and then, out there and everywhere, people were surfing. They stood up on their boards and shuffled out to stand on the nose. They popped up, cut left, then right, then pumped the board to stay out ahead of the whitewater. I loved seeing it.

I looked around on the rocky sand wondering when Anthony Keidis and his band of hooligans were coming to tell me to go away. They weren’t there. In their place were happy people who looked me in the face and said hello. There were men and women, old and young, and they all looked happy. I knew they were surfers, and only surfers, not because they were blonde or said “stoked” but because they all had boards. I saw a wrinkled bald man covered in tattoos chatting with a woman who looked like my frumpy mother. I saw a white guy with dreadlocks playing paddle ball with a child while a boisterous group of ZZ Top beards came lugging giant boards out of the water. There was what looked like an Abercrombie model chatting with some little guy who was wearing what looked like a beret, and a striped shirt that matched his striped board. It was some sort of intergenerational utopia based on a shared vision of riding on waves standing up.​

 

​My childhood aspirations came flooding back and I did not like it. It made me loathe myself.

Here I was standing right in front of what I had always wanted and the thing I felt the strongest, was that I did not fit. It looked like everyone was welcome, this feeling wasn’t coming from them- it was coming from inside me. My mind defaulted to this excuse making checklist of practical reasons why I could not join in. Not just right then, but forever. I live more than an hour away, I do not own a board and do not have any extra money to invest in a hobby that I could reasonably only think to dabble in, and I am fat. I am a poser. I remembered that I always wanted this and I do not belong. The list came so quickly and so naturally that I disappointed myself.

I am grown and capable. I can find solutions. I can learn. I have lived a life standing just outside closed doors and have nearly a half century’s practice of picking locks, borrowing keys, or kicking the door down. If I really want this, I can have it. Knowing this made me tired. I felt lonely.

I could save up money and buy a board. I could set my pride or awkwardness aside and ask someone to teach me. I could make some arrangements and over a period of time, maybe years, I could carve out a schedule allowing me some beach time. If I want it I can do it.

So the question is always whether it is worth it. Do I want to be on that side of the door bad enough to do the work? What will it cost? What will I gain? When you pass through previously closed doors, you inevitably leave something back on the other side. Often you leave someone. What if I am not trying to leave anyone? What then?

Traffic made the trip home take 2 ½ hours. Sitting in my car in my long pants and wingtips, thinking all of the things I just typed out above, I came to the conclusion that I think too much.

I should knock it off and just surf.

As I Slept

Last night I dreamt about the Ocean.

We were preparing to launch our various vessels from underneath a pier. Mine was a barrowed paddle board. I had hoped for a kayak.

The venture was proposed by someone else in our group, all of us men, but I cannot recall any faces. They were friends, some brothers-in-law, and all of them new relations to me. I was new to the area, knew nothing of the water, but this was all brushed off as old hat to them.

“Let’s go out on the water. It will be fun.”

It was to be a simple day of floating and paddling about on the blue. I have been wanting some of that since I moved here. Not the floating and paddling per-se, but just some doing. I don’t do enough; mostly I sit, read, and settle.

As we approached the shore I was surprised by what I saw. The beach and sand sloped steeply down from us, but the waves as they rose and rushed out, were ten stories tall. Yes, the waves were going away. They were tall and rough and strangely headed out to sea and not the shore. From my vantage up above I watched the arched backs of the breakers with little people bobbing about, looking like ants.

The water and sky were a blackish blue, lined with hard shadows like an HDR landscape run amuck. As I stood and marveled at what I thought looked quite severe, the others quickly and jauntily unloaded their two, ten person row boats and moved quickly down the slope to a pier jutting out into the heaving mass. I shouldered my borrowed paddle board and followed.

We did not go out onto the pier but under it instead. I hopped from rock to boulder watching as the well drilled crews in front steadied their boats and began loading up the oars. The dark water bubbled around, pushing and pulling like waves do, spitting foam and spray, not white but grey.

They were happy and busy and paying me no mind.

I was afraid.

So What Exactly Do You Want to Do?

So what exactly is it you want to do?

When asked this question, honesty is likely not the best tactic.

I am usually a complete supporter of honesty as the best policy. For instance if I ask someone to watch my children I would much rather have an honest, “I do not like your children,” than to have one think that sentence silently but only say, “sure”. I appreciate the disingenuous individual’s intent to be nice and do a favor, but the end result is normally a resentful friend and my children subjected to an evening with an individual who does not like them. In such an instance, just say no. I appreciate an individual who says no; it means I can trust them when they say yes.

Sitting in a chair before a person of some power, evaluating me for possible employment or maybe just assisting me in gaining employment, I have been asked, “So what sort of work are you looking for exactly?”

Were I to be honest I would reply, “Anything that provides a paycheck and does not require me to perform tasks I despise.” That would be shallow truth. Make no mistake, it is truth. I have had one of the jobs I say I do not want and all involved would agree it was a mistake.

Deeper truth would be me expressing my desire to achieve some tangible but  unnamed greatness that I have fooled myself into believing I am capable. Somewhere deep inside I have this nagging idea that I am capable of contributing to society in a way greater than a blip in mid-management or humbly bringing checks back to my wife and children after a day’s toil in cubicle fields.

I want to shove American society toward racial inclusiveness and crush the obstacles standing in the way of poor people’s pursuing opportunities for self determination. I want to write the next great American novel, paint a work of art worthy of a museum or maybe just mass popular consumption, and I want to play middle linebacker for the Bears.

I want to see every world capital. Istanbul, Jerusalem, Rome, Buenos Aries, Rio, Delhi, and Cleveland. I have this idea where I throw a dart at a map, where the dart hits becomes my starting point. Me and my friends then fly to that point spin a bottle, and hike 100 miles in that direction making  as straight a line as possible, just for the experience of it. I also want to spend a month in Tonga playing rugby on a local men’s club. That one may need to be last on my list.

I have no desire to ride motocross, which for some reason makes me think I should at least try it, but do want to jump out of an airplane. I want to sail from Maine to Miami. I want to learn how to sail. I want to spend evenings at cafe tables having great conversations with my wife and Saturday mornings going out to breakfast with the whole family.

I don’t really want to be famous or rich, but I do want to live free from financial restrictions and be able to influence greater society.

That is what I want to do.

Sitting in a chair in front of a potential employer I can’t say all that. I have to say, “sure I’d love to watch your kids.”