Drifting Back to the Ocean

As far back as I can remember, and long into my early 20s, my family and I would spend three weeks of summer in Newport Beach, about an hour below Los Angeles, with my grandparents who lived right on the ocean. Since the early 1950s my grandparents had lived there; we have a photograph, unbelievable in its sparseness, taken from a Cessna of the Pacific coastline supporting only a few scattered houses, modestly built, a small road behind, iceplant-studded sand dunes rolling to a narrow railroad track, and an empty Pacific Coast highway in the background. My father would rouse us at three in the morning, we’d pack and pile into the Buick, and drive the eight hours from Sacramento down old highway 99 to arrive as my grandmother was clearing the lunch dishes. Newport Beach is one of the wealthiest enclaves in Southern California, but I didn’t know it then, too young to practice the arts of envy and disdain used to fashion my ego in college; indeed, the affluence that lined the beachfront and spread thinner and thinner further inland seemed sun-bleached and ephemeral, suburban and charmless. The ocean was real because it whispered and shouted and roared and pulsed and heaved and drenched the briny wind, hurled towering waves that cracked and curled and charged frothy and white like galaxies. And there were bikinis with tanned young women inside. I know now why I can’t leave the ocean, why I return to its razor horizon in imagination and dream and whenever I can get the time. The ocean drew me in like the vast reaches of the universe, silent, infinite, containing all the heavens and me—and I still wonder how and why. And the long summer days and nights beside her established finally that I was not and would never be one of the cool teens, and there was no getting around that.
Early memories on the seashore were of creation and discovery. Refortifying moist, ever melting sandcastle bulwarks against charging waves, finally watching with a mix of amusement and disappointment as a fierce swell overleaps and floods our poor residences, shanties mostly, to refortify again, a task hopeless and endless and therefore ready for renewal. Or we dug tremendous moats around as a first defense. But the seriousness of play was in the building, the creative act. Discovery became both motive and end. Worlds in tidepools, delicate and perfect communities replenished moment to moment with tidal splash; the froosh and hiss and hump of waves heaving under the black rock jetty; the racket and crowds of gulls surrounding my attempts to feed them dry bread.
Alternatively, we’d just dig holes, scooping out handful after soft, wet handful, piling up landfill, digging seemingly for the sake of the hole itself (Zen without the awareness). At the water’s edge we’d dig up meager sandcrabs that squirmed, scurried and burrowed in our palms, wriggled free with the dripping sand to reburrow until another generation wandered to the wave’s retreat. We buried each other in the sand, feeling soft warmth and pressure. These symbolic associations with the grave, digging holes, burial, I’m sure are coincidental, yet unsettling nevertheless.
Reflecting on why we are here—standing at the ocean’s edge as a metaphor for anchored down on a planet hurling through cold black space—occupied my thoughts only later in life, probably when I began having a somewhat regularly fulfilled sex life. Prior to that, I fumbled from one infatuation to another, hoping to be if not loved, then noticed. Handsome enough I suppose I was, as early photographs of my father in uniform offer favorable precedent, and photographs of my mother in her 20s show her to be quite beautiful, so the chemistry was there. I remember my father introducing his two very young sons to a Catholic priest at a local parish in Anaheim. The priest, Midwestern-seeming and balding, shook our hands heartily and bellowed, “Well, what two handsome young men!” He said it for my father’s approval, but I considered this a generous compliment. Coming from a priest, I reasoned, there must be some truth to it. But if pretty girls were not lavishing attention on me as they certainly did in my fantasies, endorsements from priests were worthless. Being conventionally handsome simply meant you don’t stand out in a crowd as a disfigured freak. It also means plain.
Southern California’s beaches have a well-deserved rarefied air of the shapely and beautiful. The supple, tanned skin of teenage girls, warmed from a day in the sun, glowed, radiated a honeyed aura as they lounged and laughed on their towels. They were my first experience with the ethereal nature of beauty, what rises from the world, passes through the world, yet remains indefinable. How to approach them, talk to them, for godsakes make friends with them (forget anything even remotely sexual; you may as well have asked me to fathom Space-Time), was daunting and mysterious. Yet for all that of course I was deliriously attracted to them. Advice from all sides would be as reasonable and empty as a truism: “You just go up to them and say hello,” as though the power of the priest’s conviction and my unexceptional but respectable enough ancestry should puff my chest and sparkle my delivery. Reader, you know what I’m talking about. I only honed my humble talent and acquired the wisdom when I couldn’t use and didn’t need them anymore. The way it goes, I guess.
I was content enough, at times, simply to look at these sunning maidens. But who actually met them, chatted them up, even (so I imagined) touched them? The surfers. Southern California surfers at that. Behold them, sitting on their boards, rising and falling with the swells, flashes of sunlight flickering on the water around them like paparazzi, waiting patiently as gods with their eyes resting on the shimmering horizon for the coming set. You couldn’t get up early enough to catch the ocean without them (I tried once). You lost sight of them as night finally flooded the waves, leaving only the muffled sound of heavy crashing. They were serious in their passion, but reserved. They spoke little, and not very often. They drifted in and drifted out like the tides they monitored. They were self-contained, necessary and sufficient, and that was their victory. I used to love to bodysurf and boogieboard—still do—but when I joined a pack of surfers they always regarded my presence with cordial yet guarded territorial suspicion, as noblemen must when an affable peasant strolls through the palace courtyard. Besides their inevitable bronze color they had the physique which these sunny maidens admired: shoulders and chests pumped with years of powering their boards under, in, over, and through waves, and a tanned physique, not the reptilian sheen of bodybuilders. Once more, their brawn didn’t look as if they worked at building muscle (more to their credit, you see, modest saints). They didn’t know what combs are used for, and their hair was always perfect. Reader, have you ever seen an unattractive surfer? Neither have I.
We couldn’t afford surfboards, and it wasn’t worth buying one just to use a few weeks in summer. I was also a little afraid of learning, faced with the failure that accompanies new endeavors. So I bodysurfed. Then my parents purchased boogieboards and swimfins for my brother and me, and my great love for the ocean began in earnest. In the ocean, within its cold, mineral, dark emerald fold, I felt borne up by forces greater than myself. Swimming, I was allowed buoyant play. I was also given moments of aesthetic joy: floating nearly alone in blue twilight waiting for waves, the orange sunset skimming the water to my right, moonlight whitening the water to my left; floating nearly alone during a light gray rain, the ocean turning jade green and soft as glass. In the ocean I encountered the wild. From my grandparent’s balcony one New Year’s morning I spied to the south a pod of porpoise trawling just beyond the wave break. I hustled on my wetsuit, grabbed my fins, and charged into the water. I swam hard, looking up to catch their distance, dug in and swam, then paused way out to find eight or ten large shiny dark gray beautiful porpoise gliding by on either side of me. As they rose and glided, their black eyes regarded me, and I trembled.
But after the night closed the swimming and tanning, there wasn’t much else to do after dinner, which was early and then lengthened with bottles of wine and conversation, which we wanted no part of. So my brother and I would launch our skateboards, rolling down the cement strand fronting beachhouse rentals crunched side by side all the way to the Balboa Pier a few miles south. Destination was the Balboa arcade, where hundreds of sun drenched youths gathered and wandered, see and were seen, flirt or fail, and hoof the long skate home. Those Newport summer nights at the arcade was the ever-recurring home to connect, and we’d remain ever vigilant to maintain cool as bevy after bevy of California girls drifted by (it occurs to me that my brother, three years younger, always did pretty well with women, and perhaps he may have had better success then without me tagging along, but whatever). I remember a few summers going where every single dude wore Izod shirts sporting the little green alligator. You swear you looked the coolest with yours, unique. One night we skateboarded down the promenade, met up with three other skaters, befriended a few more, more joined, until we reached the pier, a sunburned horde skidding to a stop. One of the guys, probably the oldest, took stock. “Okay,” he said, looking down the row of us sitting on a cement wall rounding the parking lot, “let’s see, we have to get pussy for one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen guys. I mean sixteen,” pointing to himself. We all forged on, our number whittling down as night dragged on. We scattered. Walked up and down and around. Attempted at eye contact with the lovelies. But Southern California girls just sailed by like nymphs, or sirens who, far from drawing you to the rocks, pay you no attention at all.
At one point my brother and I veered away, heading home, then paused, entertained by a water balloon fight. Up on a rental’s second floor balcony were three teenage girls still in bikinis. Besides a few balloons, they’d employed a hose to jet water over the strand and onto the sand, and plastic buckets. Down below on the beach were four guys, three well built and good-looking, shirtless, and one who was a little pudgy around the waist, but probably came in handy because he had a car and could drive the others around. The boys dashed between rentals to refill balloons to the size of small pigs. The girls whipped the hose around to fire in every direction. Civilian passersby would either duck and rush through, or give wide berth outside of the hose’s range. I noticed the pudgy kid duck with a full balloon behind a large trash can at the edge of the cement, peering around for his chance. But suddenly the strategy changed: evidently one of the boys found a door unlocked, and all three rushed up the stairs and ambushed the girls, pelting them on the balcony as they screamed. One of the boys grabbed the hose, cut the supply, and their battle was won. Gallant in victory, the boys found towels to wipe down the maidens, who accepted graciously. I don’t know if the boys knew the girls before, but they were in, and the night was still young. As they all stood on the balcony, the forgotten pudgy fourth one, outside and unpaired, emerged, hiding his filled balloon behind his back. This was his moment. Attention was on him. He wanted the game. But as he took another step, the others high on the balcony in unison waved him off, shouted discouragements—the game was, after all, finished—and at that point I saw him gently but firmly begin squeezing his balloon, tighter and tighter, until it burst and soaked into his shorts. The others didn’t know it, though. So with the attention riveted on him, he made a faltering show of throwing the flabby balloon. The balcony gasped, but the torn piece just floated, then dropped. The others immediately turned to drying off and getting along. The pudgy one remained alone, for he wasn’t invited up. Casting for sympathy, he turned to my brother and me, witnesses. But we turned away and rode off into the night, tired ankles angling us home to sleep with the soft ocean crowarsh and the wind feathering the salt-rusted window screen.