When I received an invitation to speak at Pepperdine University, set in the hills of Malibu overlooking the ocean, I jumped on it as a suitable pretext for a road trip. 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 counterdiscourse is strongest, 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 predawn darkness, consumed to a soundtrack of Journey. (Why am I not listening to this every day?!) As your radio scans for stations on the sparsely populated spectrum, you may find yourself listening to the “Ag Report” from the Salinas growers, who want you to know about an equipment auction to be held in Sacramento later this month. You may also hear an editorial about a legal requirement that farmers first try to find citizens willing to work as farm hands before hiring migrants. I didn’t know about that.
On US 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 sandpipers pecking at the ground in search of sand fleas, but in slow motion and without the desperation. The derricks 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 the California coast also has an aspect of memory and return to it. I mean the Central Coast, in particular. That is where I once put in real time and miles, hope and disappointment, sublime moments and brutal beatings, in the daily hunt for waves. This was from 1984 to 1989, 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.11xIf you could afford it, there was also a new service called 976-SURF, using the same billing machinery as the phone sex industry. Started by Sean Collins, this service 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. I was in my late teens and early twenties in those years, a student at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Because the Channel Islands block swells coming from certain directions, 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 saltwater draining from our sinuses onto our desks at random moments, then a dash up to a spot north of Point Conception, another hour away, hoping for light winds as evening approaches. The westernmost promontory of that stretch of coast, it is a wild place exposed to wind and swell from every direction, so it is fickle. The Chumash, who settled the area nine thousand years ago, called it the “Western Gate” to the afterlife. Many times, caught inside as a thundering set imploded directly in front of me, the place indeed seemed like a portal to the afterlife. Once, at a quieter moment, I sat in the water there 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 of the bases have not. A treasure 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 rumbled behind me as I surveyed the scene. The train 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 (originally 26,000 acres) awarded to José Francisco de Ortega for cattle grazing in the mid-1700s by the Spanish crown (as a reward for his scouting services), it was acquired by Colonel William Welles Hollister in 1866. In 1850, Hollister had driven four thousand sheep from Ohio to California with a plan to sell mutton to the forty-niners, though what eventually made him a rich man was the increased demand for wool (and resultant high prices) during the Civil War.
The parcel was subdivided into hundred-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 the world-class Cojo Point and Government Point. Coastal private property in California extends to the mean high tide line. This 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 Hollister Ranch’s private security force used night vision goggles. I once tried hiking in from Gaviota State Park with a friend at lowish tide, but we didn’t get very far. At one point, as we struggled against the knee-deep tidal water, someone threw rocks at us from the bluff above the railroad tracks.22xIn poking around the Internet to learn more about the Hollister Ranch and its history, I learned that in 2019 Governor Gavin Newsom signed Assembly Bill 1680, which mandated that public access to Hollister Ranch be provided by 2022. The bill names the ranch specifically, as it had somehow evaded compliance with the doctrine, in force in California since the 1970s, that landowners must provide coastal access. I wish I had known that the last time I was there!
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 the 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.
I have been reading novelist and essayist Paul Kingsnorth’s chronicles of 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. I don’t use the term flippantly. At Little Rincon, there’s 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 one-day symposium in memory of Ted McAllister, a philosophically minded professor of public policy who seemed 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 moving to see a community rally to his memory. The symposium was titled “Coming Home,” which (it occurs to me now) provided an apt theme for my road trip of memory and return. It is also the title of one of McAllister’s books. Another is a volume he coedited with Wilfred 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 predawn dimness, with the air temperature hovering in the mid-forties, I saw something special. It happens sometimes: an invitation from the ocean, written out in a fine hand, nontransferable. 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 forty-five minutes of paddling. By that point, the cold, my seized upper back, and my spasming hip had me paddling 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. In a change from the 1980s, you now see women surfing, often middle-aged, 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 speaks of chronic bad vibes at a surf spot called Linda Mar, near San Francisco, which he attributed 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 such as Ventura that aren’t at the frontlines of cultural revolution and accelerated demographic upheaval. The parking lot at C Street is the kind of place one can still come home to.33xThe very term “localism” may be a coinage of surf culture. 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) are 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 control access to the waves on Oahu’s North Shore (meaning, you don’t get any), rival skinhead factions were said to demarcate Oxnard’s surf spots in the 1980s. I didn’t know what to make of such claims until the time a bunch of Oxnard skinheads 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.