10SUMM66 1966 SUMMER

1966 - SUMMER

Damon and I were off down PCH like two happy jack squirrels. It was early in the summer, right after our graduation and we had enjoyed a good day of surf. One of those days when its screamingly good. We were on Pacific Coast Highway feeling wave satiated and all good about ourselves like the girl of our dreams had just blown a kiss our way which is how a good day can make you feel -- loved. I pulled into the lane, picked up speed, and as I checked my rearview mirror, saw my board come off the racks and rise 15 feet in the air. It was like an airplane wing getting some lift but then being shot out of the sky by gravity. It headed for the windshield of the car behind me. Thank god it landed beneath the right front tire. The car rolled over the nose and the board shot off the road onto the shoulder. As I ran back to inspect the damage, I figured the board was a goner but I was thanking my lucky stars there wasn't blood all over the highway.

"Except for the tire track, it's in one piece."

I have seen boards lying broken on the beach, snapped in two by the force of the surf but here was my board, not only in one piece, but none the worse for having been run over by tons of automobile metal. I should have counted my blessings and strapped the board back on the roof and hit the gas again but for some reason I had to pick a fight with Damon.

"Damn it, Damon. You knew my board wasn't tied down. Why did you let me drive off?"

He just looked at me which made me feel foolish which meant I was bound to try and salvage my dignity which further meant I was bound to lose the little that remained.

"It was your turn to drive, anyway, then you don't even bother to help me out. Talk about being an ungrateful shit."

"What the hell are you talking about? I'm always picking up after you, following you around making sure you don't do something stupid. I'm tired of it. This once I forget to check up on you and look what happens."

I insisted he had it all wrong that he was like a big bed of kelp wrapping itself around me and pulling me down. But he had wounded me. I had not said it to myself out loud because I was too afraid of the sound, but he voiced it most clearly and this episode with the unstrapped board was the emphasis. Damon had been with me since grade school. The prospects of entering the world unprotected by his company gave me a queasy feeling like when you get the thought that something is swimming underneath you. Nothing shakes that uneasiness and the more you tell yourself that everything is all right, the more the shadows in the water take on an ominous presence and the more likely you are to keep your feet above the water line.

We drove home in silence. I was busy bandaging my wound, putting protective coverings around the sore spot by making arguments in my mind about his stupidity and uselessness.

I dropped him off and told him, "Drive yourself to the beach next time."

I didn't surf with him for two or three weeks, didn't see him again until the movie came out. I don't know who made the call but I was more than a little pleased that it was made, first, for the company and then, for the event. We'd all been waiting for the movie to hit town. The word was that it was the surf film to top all surf films and the word was right.

We left the theater totally stoked. Damon was all for getting our boards and racing down to the beach. Nevermind that it was 11:00 at night and pitch black. The movie was the dream made real. An endless summer was possible and with it endless waves. Endless rides on endless waves. It was the promise of youth; that time exists only to push another wave into breaking. We could ride forever. Perfectibility was possible. The world was our playground.

Bruce Brown's barreling narration articulated the missionary appeal of surfing. Robert and Mike brought to foreign lands the great truth that you could stand inside a wave and be free.

Rallio and Snake bought the beer and Damon and I bought the chips and dip and we headed for the pier so we could walk out into the breakers without getting wet.

We talked about next year. Rallio was glad I was heading up north because he wanted some place to stay when he surfed Rincon.

"Damon, if you hadn't been such a screw off, you could be surfing Rincon next winter, too."

"We take a winter swell. I like it here. Besides, who the hell are you to be telling me about scholarly pursuits? You're certainly not going to be my example."

I wasn't looking at either one, I didn't really want to hear it. It wasn't bringing me any warmth. Snake was slumped against the rail on the lookout for any babes that might be coming our way. I figured he'd also been around when their old man was laying into Rallio. I'd heard the yelling more than once and it had intensified when Rallio had graduated from high school. Rallio's old man couldn't stand the sight of him and couldn't see him without telling him he was amounting to nothing. He thought Rallio was just a beach bum, which I suppose was technically true. But if his old man had ever seen Rallio take off and bottom turn into a wave or walk down the deck to pick up a quick burst of speed or drop his knee to cut back against the break and then swing the nose into the feathering white, he'd know Rallio wasn't nothing; he was something, something marvelously graceful. Rallio knew exactly where to place the board in a wave to summon the natural force within it. He didn't fight that power or conquer it nor did he submit to it. He danced with it. It was his partner and the better he danced, the better the wave looked and the better the wave, the better he danced. If Rallio's old man had only followed him to the beach, he'd have known, he'd have seen. At least that is what I thought then.

But none of us see anything more than what we are capable of seeing. And most times our capabilities are obscured by our histories. We wear the cataracts of the era in which we come of age. Rallio's father divided the world into them and us. The components of the groups changed and the lines between the groups changed according to the subject but the distinctions of dark and light, good and evil always remained. And his son seemed to fall more and more with the them's. I'd heard him call Rallio everything from a girl to a criminal and finally, because Rallio was disinclined to any kind of a day job, a communist. Communism for Rallio's old man was as far as the line extended, as dark as it got, as weighted with evil. For Rallio it was probably the most meaningless name he could have conjured; Stalinists don't surf.

Besides, Rallio believed in work, he just didn't believe in a lot of work. He picked his employment carefully. It was a trick we had learned from our summer jobs. Ideally, you worked nights which left days free to spend at the beach. Just about as desirable, is to work afternoons. Morning, before the wind comes up and chops up the surface is usually the best time to catch waves, although during the summer, if conditions are right, the evening glass-off, when the wind dies again, can be a great time for a go-out. Finally, working just weekends, or just three days a week (including weekends) is acceptable since weekends are always packed with people and the chance that a swell will hit on a weekend is only 2 in 7 and if it hits on Sunday, it'll often hang around till at least Monday when the crowds have thinned. A lot of figuring goes into being a beach bum.

In those days, there was no real percentage in being a healthy contributing member of society. If you were caught out alone with just a job, it could be hazardous. You see, the press gangs were out and about. It was the same old crew from long ago in a different guise. They use to work the waterfront bars and backstreets looking for their quarry. They'd find some unsuspecting sap on his way home from a drink, then they'd sneak out of an alley, club him and bag him. And they were still at it. Oh, they developed a degree of finesse but the results were the same. The finesse is a product of our docility, not their refinement. We've made it easy for them. Young men use to go kicking and screaming if they weren't unconscious from a blow to the head. Not any more, a simple letter suffices. Who would have ever believed that free men could be so cowed that polite greetings would be all it took to relinquish their independence. If the old salts were alive today, they'd grab their timbers howling with laughter hearing about us being shanghaied by mail.

Rallio was attending the local junior college. A byproduct of attendance was that he stayed out of the draft. Although his student body card indicated he was a student, that was about the only corroboration he had to the story. Neither his attendance nor his grades were going to be witnesses for the defense. He had taken enough laughers to make adequate progress in units but that was about it. California maintains a hierarchical structure of education. Not all the courses at a JC are acceptable at a four-year institution and without the required courses, even if he wanted to go on to a four-year college, which he decidedly did not, he couldn't.

Education was the wall that separated us. Those that managed to stay in school could stay behind the wall. Those that didn't, didn't. Educational systems and their results are not coincidental. Mandarins guarding the keys to their required civil service tests so that only the sons of mandarins had access, the cloistered monks of the dark ages and their libraries protecting the world against the secular word, the elaborate cultural schooling of the Japanese that prizes the corporation, and the compartmentalizing of the Soviets where the sorting and ranking is immediate so that the child becomes a product of the state are all systems that serve to uphold the mores and wants of the ruling classes with a nod and a wink to the select few who wander upward. The sons and daughters of the policy makers and those who produced the fuel for the policies were in colleges and universities across the U.S. learning how to further their parent's designs. If those policies and designs were going to be protected, then those children would have to be protected. Service to the imperium can take many forms, from the ranks of the legion to the ranks of the senate.

In California, you can fail high school and still end up with a Ph.D. It's a commendable system. Reality, however, is a pragmatic and practical administrator. No kid by the name of Rip Van Winkle ever enrolled in Harvard. It isn't particularly likely that a student sleeps through all 12 years and then suddenly awakes to Shakespeare, quantum physics, and Kant. And the system can absorb the small number that might. More likely, a kid will try to please his parents and be the kind of student his parents expect. And parent's expectations usually stem from their own ambitions. Hence, those that aspired to professional school expected their children to do likewise while those that aspired to hard and steady labor expected their children to have those same values. The suburban schools from where the professionals commute were geared toward college bound students. The poor, the working class, and the inner city youth got what they had coming, military service. Southerners had a tradition of military service. So did many smalltown rural communities. Their fathers or uncles had left for the good war and seen the world and then come back to live out their lives in the towns they preferred to call home. The military was the ticket into the world, not the university. No state ever lacked for kids who could be killed because of who their parents were or were not, or where they were born, or even because of their own small failures.

Surfing is the most momentary of activities. It is completely in the present. The duration of a ride is rather short. It is measured in seconds. To a surfer, of course, those seconds are quite substantial. It is only for that duration that the surfer's role has essence. He can not scrimmage or otherwise practice for his encounter. He may maintain a physical conditioning but fitness can in no way approach performance. So when a surfer is not surfing he is waiting to surf and when he's finished surfing he is back in the state of not surfing calculating how long the swell will hold and what the tide's doing and when he will surf next, when he will next exist. It was probably fitting that Rallio could not conceive of the forthcoming, that he could not plan beyond the small duration of a swell. Our society gives preference to those who can defer, who can live on the promises of the future. Rallio was not an eminent member of society.

Damon picked up where he had left off, directing his voice at Rallio. "As I see it, there's only two real choices for you. You could become a priest," understand that Damon was entirely serious, "Or you could join the army. And of the two, the army seems to be the less permanent in its unpleasantness."

"Good idea, Damon. But I've got a better one," Snake fired, "Why doesn't your brother just shoot off his dick. Then he's as good as a priest and the army won't take him because they make sure you've got a dick so they can shoot it off themselves. Great idea shit-brain." Apparently, the topic clamped pliers on dangling nerves.

I sided with Damon, "Maybe you could join the Navy. My father was in the Navy." I didn't think it important to tell Rallio what my father learned while he was in the Navy. Some guys learn to be divers or captains or submarine crewmen. My father learned how stupid people were. I didn't tell Rallio because it didn't seem information such as that would bolster my argument and also because I didn't really understand what my father meant. Many times he'd told me, "I learned one thing in the Navy and that was just how stupid people are." But stupid how? That they'd follow orders or that they wouldn't follow orders? And who? The brass or the common swabie? I continued to make my case to Rallio, "You'd be on the water. Who knows, maybe you could pilot a PT boat like Kennedy did in that movie."

Rallio answered me in a tone very near Snake's. "I'll tell you the movie it's like. It's not PT 109. Remember that movie, "Time Machine?"

"The H.G. Wells story."

"Yeh. It's like that. The siren blows and all the humans turn catatonic and follow the blare into the cave. Then the Morlocks..."

"The subhuman creatures with the hideous faces."

"Those green ape monsters with terrible overbites work the unlucky ones to death below a torrent of whips and kicks. Someone calls and into a coma we go."

Neither Damon nor I understood anything of what they were telling us. We didn't see anything wrong with joining the service and doing your duty to your country and we both told Snake and Rallio the way we viewed it.

"It's not a coincidence that all the community leaders wave flags in the July 4th parade." Rallio was more than a little cynical in tone. "Those are the same bastards who tell you to be quiet in church, raise your hand in school, show respect to this asshole or that asshole and then they can't wait to send you off to get your head blown off. Tell me when they ever had our best interest at heart. The most they've ever said to me was 'sit down and shut up'."

"Maybe you should have listened."

Snake was beside himself, "If any of us listened to them, would we be surfing? But now, when it comes to our destiny, they speak golden words. I don't think so."

"The army might just build your character. It's like our old man says, 'A little discipline never hurt anyone.'"

Rallio answered his brother back, "Regimentation is another form of suicide. And if you two are so keen on it, why don't you join up."

"If we were called, we'd at least report for the physical. I wouldn't mind it. It's just two years and then you're done."

Rallio began again, "Yeh, just two years. Like the 12 years of school you have to do and then your life is your own. Or the 2 to 4 years more for college. But it's not enough, it's never enough. So you spend 2 years in the army hoping that's what it takes. You get out and you've got 45 more waiting for you. Forty- five more years of work that leaves you blind and crippled until that pine box looks mighty good. Just set yourself in the old casket then you'll really be free. Let that dirt cover you and freedom will come and take you away with it."

Snake put the capper on it, "They can take their freedom and shove it up their ass."

"Well, there's a price to pay for enjoying what you've got."

"Bullshit. That's what they teach you in school? No one can make you pay for it. No one can give it to you. It's yours. You take it." Rallio pointed over the railing of the pier toward the shore below. "They want you to believe that there's a price so they can chain you up and whip you until they finally let you wiggle your toes in the ocean. Like you finally earned that right. Give me a goddamn break."

"We're no better than dogs or horses. The master whistles and here we come with the leash in our mouth or the harness strapped to our back."

"Don't flatter yourself, Snake. I'd sooner send you off to any shithole before I'd let my dog go on the easiest tour of duty."

I'd had enough of their heresy. "All I can say is thank God for people who were willing to pay the ultimate price for our freedom or we'd all be speaking German."

"There's never a shortage of patriots who will massacre other like-minded patriots."

We might have gone on nipping at each other if Rallio hadn't finally sunk his teeth into us and said, "You two think you're really radical, that you're out there all alone, the nonconformist rebels. Well why don't you tell me then why you're so quick to don the uniform and join the parade?"

I know I flinched and I'm pretty sure I felt Damon do likewise. It was too long an interlude and too unconvincing an end to our argument when I said, "You'll never have to worry about that until they have dorks out on parade."

Rallio and Snake went on ahead down the strand while Damon and I rested on the side of the pier wondering how'd they'd ever gotten so far afield.

The four of us went home, no one talking, each staring ahead, all looking with unseeing eyes.

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