1963 - 77

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A wave breaks without regard to presence. It knocks you down and crashes over your head. Force without passion, without need, without concern, raw and untamed. Ships lost at sea, storms, bridges swept away, dikes breached; the sea claims what it touches. Even on a calm day a person can slip below the surface and be swallowed up without a ripple. The sea terrorizes. My earliest memory is of its horror. My hand held as the water rises over me and then a rush of white. Not the cliche where the father lets go of the hand and the child learns that he has only himself to trust. A much more unsettling lesson when the grasp is tight and still he is submerged. A swell starts out at sea when the wind slams against the surface of the ocean and the water is pushed up and then down. The pulse rides away from the blast as the water climbs the face and runs down the backside. The wave descends upon the coast where it drags along the shallows and folds on itself. Inside the impact zone everything moves, large amounts of water, sand, rocks, and anything unfortunate to be caught where they wish they weren't. It is inside this impact zone where waves are ridden.

Our waves were coming from a hurricane brewing below Baja. The pulse was long and the swell consolidated into walls of water about head high. It was not quite big enough to be called storm surf but it was more than I had a need to test at that time. And we were at a place where I was not at ease. As I was standing on the running board of the car and undoing the straps that held our surfboards to the roof, a sedan full of greasers slowly cruised us practicing their evil eye. It was an omen that portended trouble and it reached into my spine and gave it a start. I should have begged off the waves and offered to stand guard over our valuables but I wasn't too keen on being caught alone with nothing for protection but a car that I didn't even know how to drive.

My surfboard was destroyed by their rifle butts. At first I had tried to stop them but they had brutishly pushed me back into the water and my ankles were barked on the rocks planted on the bottom.

"Hey, soldier boys," it was Rallio sailing by with his trunks lowered so that his bare ass stuck out, "kiss this."

The big green gorillas turned away from their work on my board and tried to pursue him but after getting their boots wet they sounded retreat. Although I appreciated Rallio's diversionary tactic, it had a deleterious effect on my surfboard. The gorillas renewed their attack on my board with an increased fury.

"Watch it, your bare ass probably looks good to these fairies." It was the most onerous insult I could have hurled at an American male and they came at me again and I waded back into the water.

We had journeyed into a militarized zone, officially known as Camp Pendelton Marine Base. Unofficially, it was known as Trestles. Apart from the train tracks, the beach featured two point breaks that on any given day are always bigger than any place else in the vicinity. Unfortunately, this superb spot of coast was controlled by storm troopers who patrolled the sand protecting our shoreline against a December 7th-like sneak incursion of surfers.

I was with Damon or Da Man as he called himself and Damon's older brother, Rallio, and his friend, Snake. Rallio and Snake only tolerated our presence because we had agreed to fill the gas tank. Gas was $.25 a gallon so it didn't take much to fill a tank.

Rallio was cool not only because he was older but because he could surf and he had the knots on his knees to prove it. He had been named Ralls after a grandfather but he renamed himself Rallio during a childhood bout with Spanish lessons. He had what then passed for long hair. Strands hung down into his face so that he was alternately throwing his head back or sweeping his hand up to his forehead to brush them out of his eyes, gestures that only added to his aura. He called Damon dickhead, buttlick, shithead, or any other abuse he could heap on his brother but he was always nice to me. Sometimes he even directed a remark my way.

We were trespassing onto the base. Arrest was a possibility, as was the confiscation of your surfboard. Mostly we hoped the soldier boys were busy and didn't have time to bother us. Our hopes had been shot down by the appearance of two MP's.

"Tell your friends to come out of the water."

I was silently glaring at the fiberglass shards separated from the foam of my board.

"We'll go easy on them."

Yeh, I thought, but their boards will be used for target practice.

He cupped his hands to his mouth to form a megaphone, "Okay, fellas, playtime is up. Out of the water."

Damon and Snake were already paddling north towards San Clemente but Rallio was still catching waves and as he slipped by on the face of a wave, he flipped them the bird.

"You're under arrest, mister. Report immediately."

Since it was a familiar refrain, I could distinguish Rallio's response over the sound of the water, "Blow me."

I was distraught over the loss of my board but the anger welling up in the faces of the Marines was beginning to make me fearful for Rallio's well-being. He showed no inclination to point his board towards shore and the Marines were setting up a bivouac to wait it out. Rallio continued to ride his waves and each time he turned into the crest he risked capture. Rallio had never heard of anything like a leash, no one had at that time. The last thing anyone wanted was to be tied to ten feet of foam and thirty pounds of glass. On a big day it would be like being keelhauled by your foot. Without a leash, reading a wave wrong or finding a place on the deck in need of wax or any number of other missteps means a board floating free without its rider. And the big boards always grabbed the whitewater and headed for the sand. Wetsuits at that time were a scarce luxury. It was summer, the water relatively warm and the afternoon breeze quiet but in California where the water temperature seldom journeys above 70 degrees even in summer, after a time exposed to the elements the heat evaporates from the body and leaves goose bumps playing on the skin.

In the bright gloom of the afternoon bake, I looked once more at my mangled board and slunk down the beach conscious of the sting in the corner of my eyes. When I knew I was out of chase range I called back, "You're assholes," and took off running.

Damon and Snake were waiting by the car.

"The stupid bastards. Did they get Rallio?" Damon was hyper.

"He's still out there but Jesus, if he comes in, they're gonna kill him. The goddamn dumb Marines."

Damon's face betrayed his concern. While Damon and I were running scenes from "Sands of Iwo Jima" in our heads, Snake was busy trying to rein in our fears. "This ain't Russia. Those guys aren't Commies."

He went on, "My father was a Marine."

Damon took little consolation in that fact because Snake was always telling everybody what a hardass his father was and how his old man's favorite saying was, "Just give me the chance and I'll break every bone in your sorry body."

"You know, they have the best song." Snake had a way of planting an irrelevancy into a conversation then watering it until it took root. He could fill you with images of men in their underwear smoking cigars and sitting in an easy chair on top of a palm tree and make you believe it was an everyday occurrence. He continued, "I mean 'Anchors Away' and that flyboy theme sound like commercials for travel agencies. And who knows what the hell the Army guys are talking about, cases rolling along. Cases of what? But the 'Marine's Hymn' says it real straightforward: Don't mess with us. And the tune sounds like it wasn't written for girl's voices, you know what I mean?"

"How about uniforms though? That red stripe kind of looks like they just broke out of prison, doesn't it?"

We argued which style of uniform looked the coolest. Everyone agreed the Navy's Cracker Jack uniform was the goofiest with those pants flared at the leg.

"The guy up the street is one of them Green Berets. I heard his old man talking to mine. He said his kid was some place overseas, some strange foreigner oriental country, being a military advisor. He said it wasn't really dangerous since no one wanted to kill Americans because they're afraid of really pissing us off. His son said they're all squirrely sons of bitches anyway. They hold hands. I'm not making this up. He said the guys walk down the street holding hands."

"Wow, are they homos or something?"

"No, they're just squirrely. Man, imagine if the U.S. military ever did go over there. We'd smash them to pieces."

"I don't know about those Green Berets. Talk about your stupid moves. Why'd they pick a hat like that? Only women and French jerks wear something like that. Why didn't they get something American like a cowboy hat?"

"You can't wear a cowboy hat when you're fighting."

"Why not, the cowboys did? And it's not like a beret will stop a bullet."

"As far as I'm concerned, I don't give a damn about any of them. They're all pricks." I was still brooding over my board and I didn't want to lose any steam. "Screw the army."

Snake pointed to a flag flapping off in the distance, "You can't let one isolated experience change the way you feel. Those guys are defending us. That flag means something. It means even when they're wrong, they're still right."

I begrudgingly consented.

"Those guys, even if they're green slime, say the same Pledge of Allegiance we do. They salute the flag every morning they raise it. They're trained to protect it, to even die for it."

Snake wasn't telling me anything I hadn't heard plenty of times before. Respect. Respect for the uniform. Respect for the flag. Respect for shiny medals, for stripes and stars. Respect for rank. Respect for command. We were schooled to salivate over our icons: the Statue of Liberty, any capitol dome, and of course, the flag. The flag greeted us in the morning at school, it was the janitor's first responsibility, to run it up the pole. It hung in the front of every room we went to throughout the day. And even in church it draped off to the side. We said the Pledge of Allegiance sometimes several times a day until the dirge was branded across our tongues. Maybe by the fourth grade we could at least pronounce the words. They ceased to be the total gibberish we uttered in the lower grades before our naps and cookies but damned if we had any real inkling of their meaning. Who knew "allegiance" or "divisibles"?

The flag monitor would unfurl the banner and tap off the cadence. We learned the meaning of the stars and the blood of the stripes. The flag is the schoolchild's first lesson. Small wonder a cult of the colored cloth is so firmly entrenched in the psyche. Americans overseas can be brought to tears by the mere sight of the flag flying over one of our embassies.

We believed. I believed. It was easy to believe even when contrary evidence smashes your surfboard. And if someone tried to break through the fog, we were too dense to perceive. Not that we were inclined to listen anyway.

One teacher we had in high school refused to say the Pledge of Allegiance in the morning. A state law had mandated that something be said so she read from the Constitution, the Declaration, the Gettysburg Address, the motor vehicle code, anything but the Pledge. "When in the course of human events...a government of the people and by the people...Congress shall make no law...voiding a right turn on red." A bit much at eight o'clock in the goddamn morning. Normally, no one would give a flying fug what the teacher was doing but the fact that she refused to Pledge and that it grated on her to hear the Pledge meant only one course of action to us:

Our classmate, Hale, woke us up rising from his desk just as she was going to read from one of her texts, "My brother, Sonny, is in the Air Force serving this country and if I can support him by saying the Pledge of Allegiance, then I want to say it." Nevermind the stretch between saying a soppy Pledge and supporting some guy knee deep in the muck; I knew Hale was the only boy in a family of girls. Pretty neat trick getting old Sunny into the Army. "Fellas thars sommthin a bit strange 'bout that new recruit. He likes frilly underwear and wears those weird stocking supporters. Throws grenades kinda funny too." Still, it was not a time for heavy analysis in the face of the enemy.

I was on my feet, "Hale's a good friend of mine and I knew Sonny and I feel the same way. I'd like to show my support for his brother."

Then Hale took the lead again, "I pledge allegiance ... " and we all followed. And every morning we started in. By the end of the year we were saying the Pledge of Allegiance and singing the Star Spangled Banner, America the Beautiful and Amazing Grace. Half the damn class was over before we were done but we'd shown that twelve years of indoctrination didn't go for nothing.

Our schools teach higher math to about 20% of its students, history to fewer, art and literature appreciation to even less but damned if it doesn't teach nationalism. Citizens don't vote but don't go messing with any of those flag songs. You'd have a difficult time ratifying the Bill of Rights but try to open any kind of formal meeting without saying the Pledge of Allegiance and you'd be strung up and cited for trespassing on all ten.

The afternoon light was moving west leaving a dark shell around us that made the beach seem a long way off from where we stood next to our car. Snake was fingering the keys to Rallio's car.

"It picked up after the tide dropped," Rallio's voice came out of the twilight.

We were skipping around him all glad and surprised to see him waltzing in like the Big Kahuna and we bombarded him with questions about his escape. "It got dark and I couldn't see nothing but I couldn't hear their voices either so I stormed the beach. They should have had surfboards on D-day."

"Yeh, but who'd fight if there was surf."

"I guess the soldier boys heard their mommas calling."

"Maybe they couldn't stay out after dark."

We stopped in for a pizza on the way home.

"Nice shirts."

We all looked at each other.

The waitress was attractive but too old to be a babe. "Are you guys in a club or something."

She was just being friendly or maybe looking for tips so we didn't take offense. We weren't dressed any different than usual: standard white jeans, white T-shirts, boat shoes, and Pendleton shirts. There was no similarity in our dress, we all had different plaids in our shirt. Snake asked her, "Where you from?" She had a definite twang to her voice and by her remarks we knew she wasn't from the area.

"My husband's on the base and I came here from Texas. You can tell, uh?" she said as she took our order.

As we fought for our share of pizza I said, "I don't know why those guys had to wreck my board."

"You were on their beach."

"But they weren't using it. If I had waves like that, I'd let everyone enjoy them."

"Yeh," Damon said, "I`d build an amusement park, a gigantic surfing playground. And maybe only invite the best surfers."

"Good idea," Snake said, "we could charge. Man, that's the American way. I could make a fortune. Maybe when the surf came up, I'd charge more. What a racket."

It was Rallio's turn and we waited. "I'd get to know it. Visit the wave twice a day. Watch its moods. Maybe live on the beach. Yeh, that would be a gas. Live right there on the sand, right next to the curl."

We mused over Rallio's suggestion, each with his own particular construction of the way the image was laid out until Damon broke the reverie. "If I'm only gonna let guys who know how to surf onto my beach, Da Man will be out there but what are you guys gonna do?"

"Damon, you won't even be allowed in the state when it's overhead. Stick to what you do best, ride the soup."

One of the kids in the booth next to us borrowed a dime from his parents and put it in the mini-jukebox stationed on the table and "Surfin' Safaris" started playing out of the speaker. It wasn't at our table but the four of us could hear it well enough to sing along. When we had finished rocking out Snake pronounced, "The Beach Boys are the greatest band in the world. Man, that music is as good as it gets." Snake was turning serious. "Say what you will about some things in the country, but America has the best rock 'n' roll bands and the best cars. No country can even come close to either. Who ever heard of cars as good as Chevys or Fords? And where are you gonna find as good a' sounds as 'Jan and Dean' or 'The Beach Boys'?"

"And surfers," Rallio added.

"Does any other country even surf?"

"There's Hawaii," Damon put in.

"Oh, yeh, the country of Hawaii, as opposed to the country of California or New York, uh dumbshit? Don't they teach you kids nothing in school?"

"Look who's talking Mr. Vali-DIC-torian. You came this close to spending the summer in summer school." Damon was holding up his thumb and forefinger with not a whole lot of space between them.

"If you're so goddamn smart, figure how you're gonna pay for the check." Rallio and Snake were out of the booth and heading for the door even before their words cleared their throats.

Damon was measuring the distance between himself, the door, and the guy at the register. I dug into my pocket to help stabilize the situation. "Here Damon, I'll split it with you." I had no wish to be the last one out the door with the check screaming on the table that it was left unpaid.

Rallio took the long way home which was fine by me. Nothing was freer than ambling along the streets with boards on your car, pizza in your gut, and a good laugh as near as the person next to you. We passed the high school. Two guys were out on a stroll in letterman's jackets that were the colors of the school across town and we didn't like the looks of them. Rallio slowed the car and pulled onto their heels and we followed them so they got the message that they weren't where they should be.

I was glad we weren't tearing up the road with speed because I knew that when I got home we'd be playing twenty questions.

"Where's your new surfboard? . . . Why'd you go there? . . . Don't you think they had a good reason for doing what they did? . . . Weren't you trespassing? . . . Weren't you thinking of us? . . . What if you'd gotten arrested how do you think I'd feel? . . . Don't you'd think we'd be ashamed?"

And on and on until I ended up in a fit of rage and started in feeling guilty even though I knew I had nothing to be guilty about. Whether it was a cop who hated kids, a teacher with an authority problem, or the U.S. military picking on a poor surfboard, I was at fault. I could concoct a good story beforehand but that would require putting my energy into storymaking and while a glimmer of hope existed that I might sneak past them, I wasn't going to waste my energy.

After Snake sprang his board from the car and we had headed towards my home Damon said, "Ralls, how about you let us use that old board of yours?"

Rallio turned my way, "It needs patching but Damon's pretty good at fixing dings. It's dried out enough so it won't weigh a ton. It'll at least get you through the summer." He turned back towards Damon. "I got some new resin. Try not to use it all in case I need some later."

Even though I appreciated Damon looking out for me and Rallio letting me use his board, I'd seen the yellowed slab of fiberglass propped against their garage wall and it was a shipwreck compared to what my board once was.

Damon's intensity was kicking in and I was going to be shangheighed by it, "We'd better get on it tonight, tomorrow that swell is gonna still be pumping and we want to let the resin cure overnight. I want to leave early and beat the crowds. What do you say we're the first in the water tomorrow morning? There's waves out there waiting for us."

And once upon that time there was.

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