Two Surf Poems

These are two poems I wrote eight and thirteen years ago, respectively. I had pretty much forgotten about them until recently when I stumbled upon them in an old folder on my computer. I read them at Acres of Books last Friday night. The audience seemed to like them. Hmm, maybe they're better than I thought ...


surfing the seal beach pier, may 10th, 2000


taking off on one of the bigger ones (a foot or so overhead off the mark) … catching
air on the drop, but still making it … deep-dish bottom turn, sticking it hard in the
pit, getting a good angle coming back up the face,
coming off the face hard …

the thing’s sucking out on me now, though: I can’t get down
into the next section … stalling it at the lip, in the white water, hoping it will
just float me down … but it just sucks out harder …

the feeling of being slammed into the bottom, of my
back hitting the sand … of being pulled along the bottom as my board gets
driven into me, driven hard into my left hand and forearm
which are instinctively up protecting my face …

popping up, examining my hand: a couple of big chunks of
skin are missing from the outer side of my pinkie … salt water-diluted blood
is spreading across my hand, running down my arm
as I hold it up …

I grab my leash and drag my board back to me … checking
it out, flipping it over: there’s a big crack in the
glass right on the rail …

now I’m pissed:
cuts and scrapes heal,
boards cost money



Wave Vision


fiberglass slippt silent
sound
thru
green-marbled water
chasing me
and white fall
sun

like warm-naked breasts
pressed against your
skin
on a cool day

Open Post for David Rensin - Dora Lives!

Hey DR,

I Know you've haunted this blog (as well as my posts at the Guardian). I need to get into contact with you. I'm writing a review of your Dora book for the Long Beach District and would love to talk to you before I submit. Also, I've been told that an interview with you for the Burning Shore Press website would definitely be welcome ... If you're interested, of course ...

Either way, could you contact me at bsp@burningshorepress.com. Just put "To Rob Woodard" or something similar in the subject line and it will get forwarded to me.

Sorry to bug you in such a public way, but I get the feeling that those of us who truly "get" Miki are few indeed and I need your help.

Thanks,

Rob

Blog Rant #21: Miss Traci Lords

This is third and final section I'm posting from What's Left of the Sun. Looking at this work after all these years has been very interesting. I now both see flaws in it I couldn't before, but also some strong points I didn't understand back in the day. Overall I now view this piece as an apprentice's prologue to my later work.


Coming out of this fantasy again, consciously noticing my scenes of lush family life drifting away. “Goodbye France! Goodbye Brigitte! Goodbye Ethan and Muriel! You made a wonderful dream family – I promise I’ll love and remember you all forever, …” Laughing at myself again. I’m such a dork sometimes (allot of the time). It’s kind of cool being a dork, though. I mean, “normal” guys don’t get to have these kind of fantasies; they’re stuck dreaming about boinking famous actresses or something, really pedestrian shit like that (not that I don’t have my own mental list of starlets I would do in a second if the opportunity ever arose). Trying to figure out what this particular fantasy means, what I’m trying to tell myself thru it. Nothing profound is coming to me, though. Just seeing it as a basic kind of counterpoint, an antidote: simple idealized love as the polar opposite of sitting in traffic, of being strapped into a loud metal box, of being forced to drive down roads in whose construction I never had a say …

Feeling a little depressed now. Maybe even a bit pissed off. Southern California is over, I’m thinking. It’s nothing but a mess of freeways, concrete, and pollution – all created by a locust-like population that can’t stop believing in its own propaganda, that’s too stupid to realize that this field has been destroyed and that it’s time to move on. No wonder I transferred my domestic bliss to France. I mean, I’m sure if I actually lived there for any length of time I’d start having to deal with all sorts of stress I couldn’t know as a traveler, but I felt rhythms there that I’ve only rarely felt here, human rhythms, rhythms of a daily life based around hearts beating instead of wheels rolling, instead of pistons plunging …

Realizing also that I’m slightly full of shit in regards to this French fantasy, in regards to the way I’ve been interpreting it. Southern California constantly pisses me off, but I don’t really feel like fleeing the place. For the most part, I like it here. I mean, Southern California is insane, but its also a truly amazing event in human history, an event that I feel lucky to be living thru, to be living in. And when I say Southern California, I basically mean Los Angeles – cancerous Los Angeles spreading in all directions, its frightening size only slightly disguised by the fact that we’ve chosen to call parts of it Long Beach, San Pedro, Santa Monica, Thousand Oaks, San Clemente, Simi Valley, Riverside, San Bernardino … Feeling being infused into me the raw power that comes as a by product of living in a predator city: a city that swallows up surrounding municipalities, that eats the strawberry fields, orange groves, and dairy farms that once separated here from there, that once helped seal off individual identities and conflicting views of what this place could and should be … Yep, feeling the power within me: the power of the foolish conqueror building empire for the sake of empire, the power that says “San Diego, you’re next. Someday Pendleton will fall, someday Pendleton will fall …”

Laughing and smiling inside, suddenly feeling as if the soul of Jack Kerouac has dived into my body and is now swimming around in my brain. Images of my Los Angeles pouring out of me like John Coltrane spewing spark-like notes into some long-ago jazz night that happened long before I was born but still hangs in the American air as a now misty milestone of expression we must somehow strive for even though we know that if we achieve that kind of radiance it will seem like nothing more than smoke running thru our fingers. Having trouble capturing these images, though. Brief flashes of understandings of this place. Something to do with old stucco houses, pink or very pale green, with palm trees swaying near courtyard entryways and residential streets traveled by huge 1950s Dodges and Plymouths while Chet Baker’s trumpet offers a perfect pastel soundtrack for it all; something to do with Charley Chaplin coming here to become the perfect artist for his time, even though he’s really an internationalist and we were just lucky to have gotten him at all; something about my grandfather coming here from Michigan because he’d joined the Navy and was stationed in Long Beach, but deep down knowing that he was really coming here to fall in love with my grandmother, a native Long Beach girl (born in a house on 10th and Termino), whom he’d never even imagined but whose red hair was calling him in his dreams thru long Michigan winters he had to bear but was never really built for because he was actually a Southern California boy who happened to be born in very much the wrong place; something about the descriptions of this place in John Fante’s novels: dewy nights in Bunker Hill, red cars, beautiful young Mexican girls, damaged older women living in sad interchangable court apartments, sun percolating thru the wide spaces between the buildings – thru the sad dreams of Midwesterners who had moved here searching for a new life but who were already far too old to change, who really still belonged in places like Wichita and Iowa city where purse-lipped protestant America still had a chance, was still taken seriously; something about Walt Disney’s squeaky-clean mustache and how it never really belonged here, about how should have been grown in some facist Florida county from the start; something about 1920s surfers carving their boards out of huge redwood planks, most everybody leaving them alone, thinking them harmless crazies as they drove from break to break; something about tan muscular young men with blond hair and Hawaiian shirts looking out over the vast pacific while standing on wooden decks jutting from houses built on impossibly expensive real estate, frighteningly sure of the rightness of their actions, of their place in the sun …

Realizing that a big chunk of that last thought, the last part of that vision, came right out of Jack Kerouac’s Lonesome Traveler, the first story, the one set in San Pedro. Maybe his soul is inside of me. Coming to a new view of Southern California today, digging it in the way Kerouac would dig New York, San Francisco, Mexico City and the Denver of his Neil Cassady myth: trying desperately to understand eternity thru an understanding of the eternal moment. Starting with the traffic lights in front of me. No longer seeing them primarily as obstacles, but as flashes of luminous wonder, beautiful jewel colors made even more sweet by the fact that those shades of red, yellow, and green could never really appear in the wild, but are a by-product of our current chemical genius. I mean, thousands of generations of hunter-gatherers could never have seen these colors. Neither could have Genghis Khan. Charlemagne either. But I can. I can love the green and hate the red (and be annoyed by the yellow). I can take them for granted too, If I want. Trying to take this further. What about the roads, the freeways? Not longer viewing them as only as congested time traps designed to destroy clutches and patience, but also as sensual functional sculptures leading me to the places I want to be, both phallic and vulvic: plowing thru the city, creating pathways spread out wide and willing before me …

All that Taoist and Buddhist thought I studied in my twenties is roaring back into my head and heart now. Feeling myself a holy Bodhisattva with a reasonably late-model Ford serving as my temple, my meditation chamber. Thought, vision, and physical existence merging, simply becoming different aspects of the same thing. I’m now dreaming Los Angeles as it dreams me. Neither of us could exist without the other. Yes, I could exist as a biological unit somewhere else, but I wouldn’t be the me that’s existing at this moment; I’d be another Rob Woodard dreaming a different city-universe, fitting into the same legal parameters of that Rob Woodard as defined by his birth certificate, but in reality a different being, not necessarily better or worse, just not this me, this me being this. And this Los Angeles wouldn’t exist either. Or course a place called Los Angeles would still be found on the map, would still be found expanding along this coast, but it would a Los Angeles devoid of this being’s dreams, or at least this particular dream of this being. Realizing that I’m as important to this place’s existence as the ocean, valleys, buildings, and the point at Malibu on a perfect sunny day, that I’m as good a definition of Los Angeles as any other; realizing that I’m the canyons and hills and the cars and neighborhoods and the new Getty Center perched so arrogantly atop its hillside location; realizing that I’m the ghost of Tom Bradley and the memory of Rodney King; realizing that I’m Steve Garvey standing at first base for the Dodgers in the year 1974; realizing that I’m my grandmother working in an ice cream shop at the Long Beach Pike in the late 1930s, unknowingly (but in a way still knowingly) waiting for my grandfather to arrive to change the universe by creating a new family on this shore; realizing I am the film industry in the years before sound: I’m Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford showing off Pickfair for the news reel cameramen, I’m Buster Keaton, not as brilliant as Chaplin for sure, but holy, profound, and deeply funny in my own magical way, I’m my great great grandfather George Humphry Lasley landing a job in Hollywood playing bit parts, one day dressed as a cowboy, another an Indian, another an Arab Sheik …; realizing I’m thousands (millions?) of surfers and beach combers who have stalked this shore looking for peace and thrills and a more profound way of being; realizing I’m Charles Bukowski still working the shit post office job even though I’m no longer young and by all accounts a great poet who deserves much better; realizing I’m the polluted sky and the rare clear Santa Ana day at the same time; realizing I’m the ancient ever-changing course of the Los Angeles River, of the San Gabriel River, of the Santa Ana river, now thwarted by cement and urban need, but patiently waiting for my time to again arrive … and it will arrive …

* * *

But now it’s just the traffic – me in the traffic, like I always seem to be … So I’m a creature of these rivers of cars? – I just need to accept that, I guess (born in Anaheim, only a few miles down the road literally [just take the 22 to the 405 briefly, then back on the 22 until it turns into 7th street and my beloved Long Beach lays stretched out wide and familiar before me …]) … Mine is a nervous system that has co-evolved with this predatory flow of traffic that constantly moves thru this place. Not surprisingly, my personality is often just like this flow: sometimes its smooth and open and capable of dream-driving from here to Seattle at least without a hitch; but it also can be the exact opposite: constricted, angry, and unable to go anywhere at the times I most desperately need to be on the move … existing dangerously close to the breaking point because paradise constantly seems to be only a few car lengths away and I know that there’s nothing I could ever do to help me get there …

Thinking about how weird it is that I’m of this place, that anyone is of this place. I mean, according to the mythology that’s been laid upon us (both by others and ourselves), nobody is actually from here: we’re all just transients moving lightly thru this sunny Southern California landscape, a place that by definition has no culture of its own, but instead features only an inefectual watered-down mélange of those brought with them by the droves of immigrants from more tangible places like Ohio, New York, London, Mexico City … And even the landscape seems unreal in this view. Southern California as a place created entirely out of diaphanous sunlight filtering thru row after row of palm trees (themselves imported from places like Florida, Hawaii, and Australia) and then reflecting off the HOLLYWOOD sign to illuminate an endlessly growing cast of pretty tanned extras … a place at this point just waiting to be animated by the words of the screen writer … hacks in MGM and Paramount back offices … but also imported “high” culture in the form of Faulkners, Fitzgeralds, Huxelys, and later Vidals … though it all somehow just ends up being Gidget in the long run anyway …

Suddenly getting into this vision of Southern California as nothing but Hollywood, enjoying it. I mean, Gidget really isn’t all that bad a place to be if you think about it. It was a totally stupid movie and all, but at least Sandra Dee was hot. Plus you could just tell she was way horny – even that chaste-in-the-end persona that the1950s forced on her couldn’t come close to hiding that fact. Seeing Sandra Dee as a kind of low-rent archetype of the ultimate Southern California girl: blonde, bubbly, free from any overt ethnicity or underlying sadness left from all the difficult decisions she’s had to make and all the horrible things she’s seen … Understanding also that I’m not on a nostalgia trip with this one either. I mean, Sandra Dee’s still with us – she’s simply evolved. Conceiving of this evolutionary line as going something like this: Sandra Dee into I Dream of Jeannie (Barbara Eden) into Charlie’s Angels into … I don’t know, Traci Lords? Seeing allot of truth in this. Thinking about how guys in Sandra Dee’s era probably jacked off to thoughts of her doing the kinds of things Traci Lords would later do in her films … except that guys back them probably could never have imagined of allot of the things Traci Lords would later do in her films … I mean, it was the late1950s, early sixties …

Realizing that this leaves me in the interesting place of having cast Traci Lords as the perfect flower of Southern California womanhood during the era of my early twenties. Realizing also that I’m completely cool with this situation, that I can’t think of too many other locales where I’d rather have ended up in regards to this subject (I mean, if I’m honest with myself)… Oh to be fucked by Traci Lords in a North Hollywood apartment on a perfect summer night in 1984 while the camera is rolling and a forty-five year old balding director with a pony tail and a shiny open shirt (revealing a hairy chest and at least a couple gold medallions) shouts out orders: “More moaning, more oohs and aahs,” more saying “Fuck me you stud! Oh God, fuck me you horny bastard! …”; and all the while Traci making those silly-beautiful fake orgasm faces where her nostrils flare while she’s throwing back her slightly-bleached blonde hair and playing with her own intensely-nippled tits as her hips grind her darker pubed pussy onto a professionally rigid cock that’s been inside a thousand girls of this general type but never one quite like her … Oh Miss Traci Lords, Oh Miss Traci: pouty-mouthed open-legged dreamscape of a young woman … Sandra Dee with a cum-smeared face and glinting eyes that show no repentance at even their greatest depth …

Self Advert #11

For anyone who's interested I have a new Guardian post out today on surf writing. I hope
you get the time to check it out.

Blog Rant #20: France Calling

Since my last post I've been looking thru What's left of the Sun, the old piece of writing from which I pulled the "Surfing With John Muir" section. Though I'm still not convinced of the piece's worth, I am finding it more interesting than I'd remembered. Because of this I've decided to post further sections of it. I hope at least some of you find them interesting.

The protagonist is still driving home from surfing. At this point his mind had just drifted out of a sexual fantasy centered around a taqueria waitress he knows.


The sky’s almost black now: only soft shades of purples and pinks are hanging on at this point, reminding me that the sun has just set and that the night is new. Noticing the red of the brake lights in front of me, noticing how they seem so bright at this time of the evening when it’s just dark enough for them to take their full effect. Brake light-red is a beautiful shade of red, I’m deciding: bright, yet soft and diaphanous, giving the traffic – at least at these moments of final transition into full evening hours – the feel of some Southern California translation of a French Impressionist painting. Like Monet at night far from home. Like Monet on speed, tempera, and beer … Insane Monet, Monet moving way too fast … but still the deep understanding light, though …

Laughing out loud again. Where did you come from, Monet, and what did you do with Marla? Disturbing hilarious images now. Monet and Marla having sex. Big gray-bearded old Monet mounting her with same confidence he approaches a canvas, each stroke containing a universe of meaning … “Come my water lily,” he says, “the master needs the inspiration of your golden flower …” Yes, my great one,” she says back to him, “paint me with your love, immortalize me with every inch of your brush …” Enough! This is too weird and stupid and disgusting. I must force these thoughts my mind, think about other things, the houses I’m passing on my right, the traffic light I’m about to hit … But the brake lights of the car in front of me are just bringing it all back around: tubes of paint and scattered brushes, the smell of turpentine, visions of the great master in his studio, at his easel, golden sunlight shining thru a huge open window, shining thru his tangled beard . . . Now Marla on her back with her legs up in the air and Monet’s naked backside pumping away: white, hairy, flaccid, jiggling …

OK, I’m officially grossed out now. But it’s pretty cool too, being able to come up with this kind of shit out of the blue. I mean, how many people invite long-dead French painters to replace themselves in their own sexual fantasies? Probably not too many, I’d guess. Suddenly envisioning the tragedy of this: thousands of dead French painters roaming the sun lit fields of the French afterlife, their brushes and paints in hand, horny and desperate because their only sexual outlet is in the fantasies of the still living who only very rarely allow one of them in for a quick romp; and the ones who do are usually lonely old spinsters who hang out at museums and purchase coffee table books of the masters’ works, fingering themselves as they finger the pages of these colorful tomes … No kind of afterlife for man, especially a French man, a French painting man …

Remembering my trip to France now, my arrival in Paris. Bright July sunlight illuminating gray streets, gray buildings (I never knew that the color gray could shine); taking a cheap room in the Maurais district (the grayest district of all, from what I saw); hours and hours in the Louvre until I couldn’t stand it anymore and became angry at painters and paintings; taking the Metro sometimes but walking as much as possible because I didn’t want to miss a thing, because each step was my destination; having my picture taken in front of the Allee Marcel Proust sign; wandering thru that big park (what’s it’s name?) that same day looking for the bench where Chet Baker sat with his trumpet and a French newspaper in that famous photograph now used on the inside of the Chet Baker in Paris CDs and not being able to find it (all the benches looked the same); eating dinners in cheap Italian restaurants because that was all we could afford; my friend Derrick knowing only a few words of French and my two years of college French classes vanishing before me every time I tried to say anything; remembering how much I enjoyed Paris and how I wished I could have spent more time there – but the rest of France was calling, the long drive to Lyons (like Paris, but smaller and not as good), then the south-central French countryside; pulling over to the side of the road from time to time in fits of awe, just to drink in the beauty of it all: old farmhouses nestled in fields of yellow grass interspersed with big green leafy trees, endless fields of golden sunflowers, the play of light showing me that light could nourish, not just metaphorically, or even spiritually, but physically (it would satiate my mid-day hunger like a well-cooked meal), understanding that the “Impressionists” were actually realists and everything they painted was true and accurate down to the smallest flicker; arriving in small medieval towns in the middle of no where; churches still in use dating from almost Merovignian times (OK, maybe not quite that old); no language other than French to be heard; making purchases in town markets thru my broken French from farmers amused and surprised to run into Americans so far off the tourist track; camping and hiking in the Pyrenees; peering down on Spain one day but not actually going there; hanging out in Cauterets with those mean (but hot) Danish chicks who teased cruelly but ultimately wouldn’t put out even a little bit; then a few days later hooking up with those German girls from Düsseldorf who did put out, joyously, aggressively, without regret or further expectations for five days straight; then the golden shores of the Basque coast; not being able to afford anything in Biarritz; camping illegally on the beach; picking up some boards and trying to surf the legendary Le Barre but failing because the surf had gone flat; being blown away by how much the area looked like Southern California, like a warmer, more touristy Santa Barbara; thinking about how at home I could have felt in this place if I only understood the language (either French or Basque) a little better; remembering flying home – Biarritz back to Paris then to St. Louis before L.A.; remembering coming out of customs into the main terminal area at the airport in St. Louis and seeing all the shops selling Cardinals hats, jerseys, T-shirts, coffee mugs, and Mark McGwire posters and knowing that I was (almost) home; then drinking Starbuck’s coffee in the terminal while waiting for the plane to L.A. to board, amazed that everyone was speaking English, amazed at how different the airport in St. Louis was from LAX (or even Charles de Gaulle), mostly white people it seemed, some blacks (allot more if you counted the people working there), almost no Asians or Middle Eastern types at all, the melodies of spoken Spanish no where to be heard …

* * *

No melodies to be heard here at all now, not unless you count the sound of car engines blending in with the commercials on the radio. Nothing even remotely musical except the frustrating anti-rhythms of traffic lights changing to red just when you’ve picked up enough speed to feel as if you’re actually getting somewhere. I’m dealing with all this stop-start bullshit pretty well at the moment, though, am too tired and generally satisfied with my day to get pissed off like I often do. Still, fantasizing now about moving away from this place, to one of those typical stuck-in-traffic dream destinations: Brookings, Oregon; New Mexico; coastal Maine; Kauai; New Zealand … Anyplace open and clean with a reasonable amount of space between the cars … Thinking that I maybe should have stayed in France, that I should have just cashed in my return ticket, bought a surfboard with part of the money, and then carved out a life for myself somewhere on the Basque coast. Picturing myself wandering from surf break to surf break, scrounging to find food and clothing and shelter, struggling to learn a new language and culture, dodging both the tourists and police … living some beach town version of Henry Miller’s years in Paris: hungry, desperate, but also clear-headed and deeply alive … having given up completely the raging ghost of California …

Going deeper into this fantasy now, imaging that I did stay in France, that I’ve survived those challenging first years and now have a home of my own. It’s a crumbling old little cottage sitting on top of a cliff overlooking some near-empty beach somewhere. Imagining it being surrounded by fruit trees, oranges, lemons, pomegranates, or whatever the hell grows well in that part of the country, that part of the world. There’s also a really big tree in the front of the house (not a fruit tree, but an oak or something) that has a tire swing hanging from one of its sturdy lower branches (I mean, what’s the point of having a front yard and a big tree if you don’t have a tire swing?). Picturing myself pushing the tire swing now, pushing my little son Ethan (named after my grandfather), as he squeals with delight, egging me on to push harder, in an irresistible combination of French and English … And as this is going on, my wife is sticking her head out of the kitchen window, admonishing me in French to get in there because its my turn to cook dinner. What’s her name? I don’t know, Babbette or Brigitte, or something stereotypical like that … Who cares? OK, Brigitte. The point is that she beautiful in a simple way … long dark hair tied back, but still little wisps hanging against her face, just a hint of makeup or maybe even none at all, aging with the stunning dignity and grace I’ve noticed time and time again in French women … At this point my daughter Muriel (named after both my wife’s mother my great grandmother) sticks her ten-year old blonde head out of the window and seconds my wife’s demands, only in English. “Yeah Dad, we’re hungry and you haven’t even started the pasta yet!” Realizing that they’re both right, I give Ethan one more big push and then head off into the house, ready to cook a good meal for my family, to show them how much I love them, to remind my wife once again that she was right to take a chance on that vagabond American she met on the beach over a decade before …

Laughing at this fantasy, at how dopey and sentimental it is. But also deeply moved by it, tears almost coming to my eyes. Filling in the picture a bit more now. What does the house look like? I’ve already established that it’s old, a bit ramshackle (it looks like its leaning a bit to one side), but it’s sturdy, has been around for hundred years at least and could easily last a couple hundred more. What color is it? White. It’s got to be white, or maybe off-white, with a red tile roof (with a tile missing here and there). Trying to picture what the front door looks like, the size of its windows and how they’re arranged. Old wooden door, painted bright red (I like red doors), half open, to let in the cool ocean breeze. There’s the kitchen window. It’s big, opens out from the center, lets tons of light in. One large window in the front of the house, must take up three quarters of the of the wall in which it’s nestled. It’s wide open and has no screen. Peeking in to catch a glimpse of old comfortable furniture, a green corduroy couch, maybe a matching chair, a huge bookcase overflowing with volumes … Sun glinting off the reds and golds of a big oriental rug … A large colorful painting on the back wall I can’t quite make out …

Imagining that I’m in the kitchen of that house now, cooking my family that dinner. Slicing cucumbers and tomatoes for the salad on an old wooden cutting board. The sound, the smell of bubbling spaghetti sauce on the stove behind me. The taste of the red wine I’m sipping while I work. Cool-salty evening air drifting into the kitchen thru the open window, causing my arms and face to tingle a little bit, to get little goose bumps. Now the smell of some sort of pastry or pie in the oven. Dessert for tonight. Deciding that that’s my wife’s contribution, that she’s the baker in the family. The sound of the sharp knife hitting the cutting board as it slices off the last few pieces of cucumber, (or maybe of an onion at this point). Now hearing Brigitte calling Ethan in from the tire swing for the third time to wash up. The sound of Muriel’s bare feet slapping against tile as she walks into the kitchen, wanting to help, hoping I’ll let her toss the salad or stir the sauce like I always do …

Blog Rant #19: Surfing with John Muir

My last blog post on Miki Dora got me thinking about What's Left of the Sun, old piece of writing of mine that I never could quite figure out what to do with. Here are the opening sections of that work, which I'm presenting as a companion post to my last rant. I don't claim that it's great writing, but I think it's pretty fun.

Though Southern California has a reputation for having a very transient population, there are many of us whose families have been here for generations, many of us who understand and love this place. This is for those people. It's also for David Rensin, who was nice enough to comment on my last post. I think he might get a kick out of this ...

Sunset over east Long Beach, California, July 26, 2000. It’s an intense red-orange at its heart, but as it splays out over the horizon, great smears of smog-generated purples and pinks become the colors of note. I’m driving my wine-red 1994 Ford Ranger pickup down Westminster Boulevard, staring into these wild colors, noticing how beautifully they hang over the nearly dried-up wetlands, over the patchy brush, stunted palms, chainlink fences, and the barely-pumping old oil rigs that still somehow manage to dot this town, that seem to exist only as strange bobbing reminders of a past boom-town prosperity: roughnecks, blue laws, dreams of even better tomorrows …

The smell of sage released by the coming evening dampness drifts through my open driver’s-side window. A warm-weather smell, a summer smell. A strange scent that never quite ceases to amaze me in this place – it just doesn’t seem to belong amongst all this concrete and car exhaust. It reminds me of surfing down in San Onofre, Trestle, up in Santa Barbara County, places that can still prick cultural memories of pristine coastlines: hillsides of tangled chaparral, crumbling cliffs, course clean brown-white sand, virtually empty surf from Santa Barbara to the Mexican border … Dreams of an old Southern California, where silent film stars drive spoke-wheeled cars through still-dusty Hollywood streets, and Miki Dora has yet to surf Malibu, is still many years away from even being born …

* * *

… rolling to a stop, hitting the light at Studebaker, just before the really big intersection at PCH. Looking in my rearview mirror, I can see the cars piling up behind me; to my right is some ancient-crumbling Volkswagen Bus that’s rattling away like it’s gasping for its last breath (though it’s probably sounded like that for the last twenty-five years or so at least); to my left is a cement road divider; in front of me there’s an endless arc of cars turning left. At least I’m in the front of the line, I’m thinking; I can see daylight, an escape route … I can just slam it into gear the second the light changes and … then hit the light at PCH sixty seconds later … Shit, if I hadn’t had to go inland to take my friend Brandon home I wouldn’t even be on this street, I’m thinking. I know that that doesn’t really matter, though. If I’d have gone my normal route I’d just be hitting lights on PCH instead. Same difference …

Suddenly I’m feeling sad. Well maybe not quite sad; it’s more like I’m in a state of proto-sadness where true sadness could be just around the next curve and I know it. Thirty minutes ago I was surfing down at the cliffs in Huntington. The waves were pretty good, not too big, but really clean and well shaped; the sun was just beginning to hit the water with an explosion of dissipating oranges and reds; when I’d paddle back out after catching a wave, my fellow surfers existed only as moving silhouettes against this backdrop, as angelic apparitions in a Southern Californian’s dream of heaven … Sure, the late rush-hour cars were whizzing by on PCH just a hundred yards or so away, but they were no match for what was going on with us in the water: we were defeating them with our purity, with the inexhaustible beauty of our cause …

Now the cars are winning. They haven’t completely defeated me, though: I’ve still got a reserve of stoke and mellow vibes from three stunning hours in the water to draw from. Car engines are loud; but my car stereo can be turned up. The air flowing into the cab is dirty; but at least it’s warm. I run my fingers thru my hair; it’s still damp from the ocean. A small drop of water rolls down my neck and then the center of my bare back, finally disappearing into the material of my shorts. I catch a glimpse of myself in the rearview mirror. In the dim light of the cab my skin looks a dark reddish-brown (or is the red part just a by-product of the sunset I’m under?). My hair and eyebrows have been bleached almost white by several straight weeks of sun and salt water. I look healthy, feel a little tired, but good. I finger my small well-trimmed mustacheless goatee. I’ve noticed lately that it’s beginning to be filled with gray hairs; but they still just blend into the blond unless your looking for them. Letting my muscles relax. Sinking deeper into the seat, leaning my head back into the headrest. The light’s turned green. Abandoning my plan of flying out of the blocks, sliding the truck gently into first …

* * *

Laughing. Shit. Hit the damn light at PCH. The Volkswagen Bus is loudly pulling along side of me again. This time people are going straight thru instead of turning left in front of me (that’ll start again soon enough). Letting my mind drift. John Muir didn’t have to sit at traffic lights, I find myself thinking out of the blue. John Muir! John of the Mountains! Thousand-mile walker to the gulf! Geologist, botanist, writer, thinker, dreamer, grower of citrus … full-bearded and free…. What would John Muir be doing if he were here today? He wouldn’t be standing for this traffic-light bullshit, that’s for sure. He would use his small but strong frame to rip the lights out by their roots. Thru nothing more than the strength of his spirit he’d cause all the internal-combustion engines from here to San Diego, from here to Santa Barbara to fail simultaneously. With one mighty breath he’d blow all this concrete and frustration into the blue-green Pacific where it would form a series of amazing reefs, creating the perfect habitat for near-shore marine life as well as thousands of new surf breaks along the entire length the Southern California coast….

Laughing out loud at my silly vision. Taking it further, though, with a new scenario. John Muir in blue and red tights like Superman, a big JM emblazoned across his chest, a red cape blowing in the wind behind him. He’s standing on top of a ridgeline overlooking the entire Los Angeles Basin. His hands are resting on his waist. His chest is thrown out. His back is straight. His frame is no longer the wiry one of old, though, but one which is rippling with muscles that press against his tights as if they’re trying to escape. The wind is sweeping back his longish gray hair and his longer chest-length gray beard, revealing a face which is lined, chiseled, brimming with wisdom. He’s staring out over the Basin, seemingly at nothing in particular, but of course seeing all, hearing all …

What’s he looking for? Eco-criminals, of course. Soulless men with black hearts who live off of toxic waste, who revel in the clear-cutting of forests, who spread asbestos on their toast in the morning … Men, who in an earlier time, would have tied beautiful young girls to railroad tracks while twirling their long mustaches…. Suddenly, without warning, Muir’s out of there. With a deep bend of his powerful knees he pushes himself off the ridge, shooting himself into the sky, thru which he then flies like a silent rocket. On the ground below people are pointing up at him in wonder; children drop their baseball bats and jump-ropes and wave at him; and the mighty Muir waves back, always having time for children no matter what the
situation …

Then he spots them: two men in black trenchcoats and fedoras dumping paint thinner into the San Gabriel River, right before it dumps out at Seal Beach. The men see Muir, suddenly stop what their doing, and try to flee. They only make it a few steps, though, before Muir has them by the scruff of their necks, one eco-criminal in each of his powerful hands. The men know the jig is up at this point and don’t even put up a fight, except for one of them who pathetically quotes a few lines of Henry David Thoreau in the hope that Muir will be lenient on him. Muir of course doesn’t buy it for a second; and with a mighty throw, launches both of them into the air … And as they go flying away, Muir just stands there on the bank of the river with a satisfied look on his weathered face, watching as these evil men get smaller, watching as they disappear into the horizon, to eventually fall somewhere in the middle of the endless Pacific….

Now I’m really laughing, out loud and quite loud. I try to take it even further: John Muir as Aquaman, swimming up and down the coast, saving endangered sea otters from poachers, while along the way, releasing porpoises who have found themselves entangled in fishing nets; or Muir as the Incredible Hulk, all green and angry, smashing the corporate headquarters of various oil and mining companies and sending the polluter-executives within fleeing his wrath. It’s not working, though; the inspiration is gone. I brush a few stray hairs off my forehead and lean back into my seat, still chuckling a little bit. “Muir rocks,” I say out loud to myself. “Muir definitely rocks.” What would John Muir be doing if he were here today? He’d be sitting right next to me in this cab, all surfed-out and salty and sunburned, talking about that killer little right barrel he managed to duck into or that endless left I picked off when we first paddled out…. Yeah, Muir would understand all this, he’d know what I’m talking about … The Southern California coast is my Yosemite …

Blog Rant #18: Miklos Dora So Far...

For the last several days I've been reading All for a Few Perfect Waves, David Rensin's biography of Miki Dora. For a multi-generation Southern Californian such as me this book is an incredibly fascinating and painful read.

Miklos Szandor Dora was without a doubt a thief, liar, selfish prick, and asshole extraordinaire--but he also held close to his heart the white flame of what it meant to be a Southern Californian. Miki Dora was a surfer and that was it--he rode the waves of this region as well as anyone back when abalone choked the mainland intertidal zones and before cops thought they had the right to tell anyone where they could park or how they could act once they hit the beach. Was Dora the best surfer in the world at his peak (roughly from the mid-fifties to the late sixties)? Perhaps, but I can't say for sure because I wasn't there. What he was for sure, though, was the one surfer who never gave up on the Southern California Dream in his heart.

What was that dream? Oh man, how many hours do you have to discuss such a seemingly contradictory and opaque topic? Let's just say that it revolves around an ecological and social integrity that cannot possibly survive the millions that now foolishly think they have the right to call this basin home just because they paid the fare to get here. What is Southern California in this dream? It's an ecological understanding of society and wave, of beach and population, of space and meaning ...

Shit, I don't expect very many people to get this, but it's about optimum carrying capacity--it's about belonging to a coastal ecosystem,while never taking a job that contradicts the reality of a sunrise six-foot south swell rocking everything from Imperial to Malibu, clean and perfect that no agricultural-based government could ever understand ...

Fuck! This is all too big, too crazy. I plan on reviewing this book for the BSP website. Check back with me then--maybe I'll be able to explain it better at that point ...

The writer broods, staring at the surfboard standing in the corner of his writing room , white and and knowing ...