When I got an invitation to speak at Pepperdine, a college set in the hills of Malibu overlooking the ocean, I jumped on it as a suitable pretext for a road trip. From which I have just returned. Conservatives love to gripe about California, and I have done some of that myself. But beneath the chatter, the fact remains that California is simply… a miracle.
The dyspeptic, conservative interpretive lens really does bring certain elements of experience into focus. But it is like a pinhole camera that focuses by refracting the world through a narrow aperture. Outside one’s tunnel vision, and outside the metropolitan centers where the Matrix of discourse and counter-discourse is most strong, the Golden State teems with rude life.
A road trip can reacquaint you with that, first by breaking your patterns. You may have a breakfast of gas station potato chips in the pre-dawn darkness, consumed to a soundtrack of Journey. Why am I not listening to this every day?! Your radio’s scanning for stations in the sparsely populated spectrum may have you listening to “the Ag report” of Salinas growers, who want you to know about an auction of equipment to be held in Sacramento later this month. You’ll also get an editorial about the legal requirement that they try to find citizens willing to work as farm hands before hiring migrants. I didn’t know about that.
On 101 south of King City, I drove past the San Bernabe oil field, which comes right up to the edge of the highway. Some derricks were pumping, some were not. It is a steady and graceful movement -- like sand pipers pecking at the ground, but in slow motion and without the desperation. They suck at veins as old as the dinosaurs, which, unlike sand fleas, do not scurry away. (It so happens that there is a cinematic masterpiece based on the history of the California oil fields, There Will Be Blood, starring Daniel Day Lewis.)
In my own case, a trip down coastal California also has an aspect of memory and return to it. I mean the Central Coast, in particular. That is where I put in real time and miles, hope and disappointment, sublime moments and brutal beatings, in the daily hunt for waves. This was from 1984 to1989, before the age of reliable surf forecasting. You had to be a prospector, always looking for the main chance as best you could make it out from looking at tide charts and dialing in to listen to the robot voice of the National Weather Service’s buoy reports on your landline.[i] I was 18 to 23 years old, a student at UC Santa Barbara. Because of the swell shadow cast by the Channel Islands, a typical day had me and my roommate “Phlegm” heading an hour south to the Ventura Harbor for dawn patrol, then back to Isla Vista for a day of classes with salt water draining out of our sinuses onto our desks at random moments, then a dash up to points north of Point Conception, another hour away, hoping for an evening “glass-off” when the wind dies and the water goes smooth. The westernmost promontory of that stretch of coast, it is a wild place exposed to wind and swell from every direction. The Chumash, who settled the area 9,000 years ago, called it “The Western Gate” to the afterlife. Sometimes, caught inside as a thundering set imploded directly in front of me, the place did seem too much like a portal to the afterlife. At a quieter moment, I sat in the water there once and watched a missile launch from Vandenburg Air Force Base and arc over the Pacific. It was terrible and beautiful.
As strange as this may sound, the military bases of California, like the Spanish missions, are an archipelago of tranquility. The dominions of mighty (or once-mighty) powers, both shelter the land from the onslaught of the New and the erasure of memories tied to places. San Francisco’s Presidio has fallen to the developers, but most bases have not. Treasures largely beneath the radar of the preservationists, they are accessible only to the bold: the railroad track walkers, the prospectors of waves, the trespassers.
Amtrak’s Surfliner train rumbled behind me shortly after I took the video above. It runs right along the coast and will give you views of otherwise inaccessible places. Of these, most shrouded in mystery is the Hollister Ranch, just beneath Point Conception. A vast tract of land (originally 26,000 acres) awarded to José Francisco de Ortega for cattle grazing in the mid-1700s by the Spanish crown (as reward for his service in scouting), it was acquired by one Colonel Hollister in 1866. In 1850, the Colonel had driven his flock of 40,000 sheep from Ohio to California, hoping to sell mutton to the 49ers. What happened instead was the Civil War, which increased demand and prices for wool. The Colonel got rich.
The parcel was subdivided into 100 acre plots in the 1970s and sold to gentleman-ranchers. The mystique of the place derives from the fact that along this stretch lie some of the best surf spots in California, including Cojo Point and Government Point. Coastal private property in CA extends to the mean high tide line. Which means that if you don’t have a coveted “Ranch pass,” the only way in is by boat or by hiking in at low tide. Or a night raid. Rumor used to have it that the Ranch’s private security force used night vision goggles. I once tried hiking in from Gaviota with a friend at lowish tide, but we didn’t get very far. At one point, struggling against the knee-deep water, someone threw rocks at us from the bluff above the railroad tracks.[ii]
I needed to keep moving to make it to Pepperdine in time for dinner, though I did permit myself one more stop on the southbound journey, at a spot called Little Rincon. The water looked too delicious to resist.
I rode a few knee-high waves, but what I really wanted was simply immersion. I glided on the surface, my face lapped and kissed by stray bits of ripple as I paddled a surfboard. When I got out of the water, I was arrested by the sight of tendrils of white foam fingering the dark kelp where it broke the surface. The sun glistened on the wet rocks, which seemed to shimmer. I had to pause and stand there for a while in the ankle-deep water, marveling at the love of the Creator.
Paul Kingsnorth has been chronicling his visits to the holy wells of Ireland, as a way into the meaning of memory and place and holiness.
For me, a road trip down the coast of California likewise has an aspect of pilgrimage to it. I don’t use the term flippantly. In the picture above, which I took just before paddling out, you can see a long pier that ends at a little island. I remember one day as a young man being caught in the impact zone as an approaching set of waves nearly scraped the bottom of that pier, feathering maybe ten feet above me (a freakish size for this particular spot). Not far from the rocks, I dove deep. But there is no escape from a really meaty wave. The sensation is that of a 360 degree body slam, like that endured by a hockey player up against the boards but omnidirectional and sustained. Your limbs make contortions no yoga master has yet conceived of, tending toward dismemberment. It is pitch dark, and you have no idea which way is up. In water that is sufficiently aerated, you don’t float.
Endure enough of these and you learn that the important thing is your mind. Panic consumes oxygen like nothing else. Eventually, you will be released to find your way toward the sky. On this occasion, one of my early encounters with the savagery of the Pacific (there is irony in that name), I surfaced with just enough time to draw a single breath before a second onslaught.
The next time I tasted oxygen, I tasted life anew. A sort of baptism, perhaps.
After that, I had less fear.
The occasion for my trip to Pepperdine was a day-long symposium in memory of Ted McAllister, a philosophically-minded professor of public policy who seems to have inspired real love in those who knew him. Students and colleagues gave testimonials, and papers were delivered on topics close to his own concerns. I never met the man, but it was inspiring to see a community rally to his memory. The name of the symposium was “Coming Home,” which (it occurs to me now) provided an apt theme for my road trip of memory and return. It is the title of one of McAllister’s books. Another is a volume he co-edited with Bill McClay, Why Place Matters: Geography, Identity, and Civic Life in Modern America.
The symposium finished, I left Malibu in darkness on Sunday morning and made it to Ventura at first light. Through the pre-dawn dimness, with the air temperature hovering in the mid-40s, I saw something special. It happens sometimes — an invitation from the ocean, written out in a fine hand, non-transferable. It is only for a few: those who have the distinction of being here, now.
I was early enough that I’d beaten the crowd, with nothing standing between me and glassy, point break perfection but my own limitations as a middle-aged, inland-dwelling man who surfs only occasionally. This cashed out in meager terms: one wave in the course of 45 minutes of paddling. By that point, the cold, my seized upper back and my spasming hip had me proning in to shore. But I still felt deeply privileged to have been present, even if only to stroke upward, nearly vertical, over the tops of waves about to break as the rising sun glinted off their mirror surface. The air was quiet.
By the time I got out of the water, the parking lot was full. The vibe was buoyant; everyone seemed to know one another. Unlike in the 80s, you now see some women surfing, often middle-aged women who must have taken it up during my decades-long absence from the state. There was a lot of joshing and catching up among the locals. I was happy to take it in and receive the occasional nod of welcome as I struggled to peel my wetsuit over my petrified feet.
Writing recently in the New Yorker, Jay Caspian Kang talks about the bad vibes at a surf spot called Linda Mar, near San Francisco, which he attributes to the spillover of internet culture into the lineup. That may be, but there is also still a lot of love up and down the coast. Perhaps there is more of it in places like Ventura that aren’t at the front lines of cultural revolution and accelerated demographic upheaval. The parking lot at C Street is the kind of place one can still come home to.[iii]
Thanks for reading. In my next post, I’m going to tell you about the Spanish mission I encountered on the way north. If you appreciate this stuff, please consider becoming a subscriber and hit the Like button.
Matt
[i] If you could afford it, there was also a new service called “976-SURF” in the late 1980s, using the same billing machinery as the phone sex industry. Started by Sean Collins, this would eventually become the worldwide Internet behemoth Surfline, bringing cutting-edge oceanographic modeling to surf forecasting and transforming the world of surfing for better and for worse.
[ii] In poking around the Internet to learn more about the Ranch and its history, I learned that in 2019, Governor Newsome signed AB1680, mandating public access to Hollister Ranch by 2022. (The bill names the Ranch specifically, as it had somehow evaded compliance with the doctrine that land owners must provide coastal access that has been in force in CA since the 1970s. I wish I had known this last weekend!
[iii] The very term “localism” is a coinage of surf culture, maybe? That is the setting in which I first heard it, at any rate. As in “don’t even think about surfing Oxnard, it’s heavily localized.” Meaning, you (or your parked car) is likely to get the rough music if you trespass against the resident surfers’ sense of owned space. Just as the black-trunked Da Hui enforce deference and police access to the waves on Oahu’s North Shore (meaning, you don’t get any), Oxnard’s surf spots in the 1980s were said to be the redoubts of rival skinhead factions. I didn’t know what to make of such claims until one time a bunch of them showed up at a Ramones show at a tiny club (no kidding) in Santa Barbara’s east-side barrio and proceeded to beat the crap out of a couple of people. I’d never seen violence like that, and hope I don’t again.
California has a strange allure. A combination of the final frontier mindset and spectacular scenery and weather. And for a long time it was the land of the new and boundless opportunities. No wonder people refer to Hotel California. I also often thought that Californians were permanent expats of a kind, they may reside in America but simultaneously it's not the America of the rest of the United States, so they're a permanently unanchored people in a state that attracts unanchored people, a refuge from the normality of the rest of the country.
I had a moment of reflection walking in a local semi-wild park enclosing a reservoir and old railroad tracks in my eastern suburb that I'd known ever since a child. The woods were riddled with bike paths for teenagers and a few cave-like spots where they could sneak cigarettes and beer but it's now been taken over by the environmentalists and made properly pastoral with ecologically approved trails and wetland restoration and teenagers these days jog and abstain from everything. But it was early spring, the land was coming alive once more, just it had always done every year regardless of joggers, dirt bikers, the railroads, the Indians. Nature is real. Mankind perhaps is not. We are ephemeral, here today and gone tomorrow meanwhile the surf will still crash onto the shores of California and the trees will still bud and the ferns begin to unfurl, year after year, and will do so long after the last human has disappeared. When you admire a gorgeous scenery, you cannot help but be reminded of man's ephemeral status, just as you cannot help but feel there is a truth in the beauty and power of nature that we humans deny with our civilizational angst over what should be is true and just. It's a strange feeling and typically for humans, we don't let it last long.
This was great. I’m intrigued by the Kingsnorth reference. I’d love to listen to a conversation between the two of you and see if anything fun and novel emerges between his critique of “The Machine” and your obvious love of machines and motors.