Nothing spoils a surf session quite like facing the double-barrel of a shotgun.
It happened many, many moons ago, when I lived in a wooden water tower in Capitola-by-the-Sea where my friends and I often headed north in a single-minded pursuit of waves.
Without the luxury of wave-forecasting apps, surfers back then relied on oceanographic instincts to find the best conditions. Stanford alumnus Ricky Grigg, a famous big-wave rider and University of Hawaii scientist who died in 2014, once told me surfers were some of the best oceanographers he knew.
We’d squint at the horizon, gauge wind direction, read tide charts and monitor the lines of wavelets as they marched toward shore like a chorus line. We weighed the topography and the bathymetry, the depth of ocean floors, to calculate where to go.
My friend had done the homework one evening, so we zoomed along Highway 1 from Santa Cruz to the pasturelands. We pulled onto a dirt road past Wilder Ranch and gazed out at a green carpet of fernlike artichokes.
It’s a private ranch, I protested. No one ever is around, the friend countered.
We crossed the farmer’s narrow artery to a secret cove on the other side of a fence that we had to scale.
Sandstone sea cliffs kept evening gales at bay as army-green waves plunged over the rock-ribbed reef. We slid down the clean-shaven face of wave after wave while octopuslike tentacles of kelp danced below us. We surfed until the orange ball melted into the horizon, casting deep, dark shadows in the cove.
I felt a slight chill in the air and a sense of exuberance while wrangling out of the skin-clinging O’Neill wetsuit. We grabbed our belongings and were retracing the footsteps over the fence, when an angry farmer materialized, clutching a shotgun.
He had us trapped. The gun remained firmly pointed at us while we got a tongue lashing about trespassing. We promised never again to set foot on the property, but the three of us knew better. Surfers endlessly search for the next fix. The irate rancher must have known we’d return if the cove had promising waves in the future. As a warning shot, his farmhands had taken care of our car. We had to yank it out of a ditch.
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Alaska has dog mushing. Colorado has pack burro racing. California’s official state sport is surfing, codified in 2018 by then-Gov. Jerry Brown. The Golden State’s 840 miles of coastline feature world-class breaks where a million or so people compete for waves atop everything from standup paddleboards to surf kayaks, kite surfboards and Boogie boards.
“Sometimes at Linda Mar, it looks like an aquatic version of the Demolition Derby,” said lifelong surfer Roy Earnst, 67, describing his home beach in Pacifica.
This explosion of popularity found its roots in post-war Southern California, which became the staging ground for a blossoming surf industry. Southlanders manufactured a lifestyle through fashion (Walter and Flippy Hoffman’s floral print designs), music (Dick Dale, the King of Surf Guitar) and film (Bruce Brown’s “The Endless Summer”).
SoCal also bred innovation: Caltech mathematician Bob Simmons applied hydrodynamic lift theory to surfboard design, and Hobie Alter and Gordon Clark used polyurethane foam and fiberglass to produce lightweight wave-riding vehicles.
“Being in California, the first thing you think about is surfing,” said Kanoa Igarashi, No. 4 in the world heading into the Tokyo Games this summer as the sport makes its Olympic debut.
Igarashi, 22, grew up in Huntington Beach but credited the times his father took him to San Francisco to gain big-wave experience below the Cliff House at Kelly’s Cove.
The Bay Area scene is antithetical to the Southern California world that cultivated mythology with its perpetual sunshine and proximity to Hollywood.
First of all, NorCal surfers are not perfecting a tan under their neoprene wetsuits. Then there is the rawness of the land. Our cliff-hugging coast and redwood-topped mountains give the frosty winter waves a feeling of wildness that reaches into surfing’s soul.
I wanted to explore the inner sanctum with some of the parishioners who never stopped feeling the Pacific’s pulse. That led to Carmel Valley in the lush outback of Monterey County. Gene Van Dyke was waiting in deep blue floral board shorts and flip-flops.
Did we mention he’s 90?
Van Dyke is the fraying thread of Bay Area surf culture who began riding waves in Santa Cruz in 1950, when he came down from San Francisco. Van Dyke said he slept in his ‘37 Ford flatbed next to Cowell Beach, west of the wharf, and collected abalones to trade for gas or sell to restaurants. Van Dyke took classes on Tuesdays and Thursdays at San Francisco State to allow for more time to surf in Santa Cruz.
Van Dyke’s now-deceased brothers Fred and Peter joined him in the lineup and eventually made history by conquering the big waves of the North Shore of Oahu. The Van Dykes hobnobbed with Hawaiian royalty, including the father of modern-day surfing, Duke Kahanamoku.
When Jack O’Neill drifted down the coast from San Francisco with his glued-together rubber wetsuit tops, the locals scoffed.
“Hey Jack, how are you going to make any money? There are only 15 of us,” Van Dyke said.
Van Dyke’s lifelong relationship with the ocean embodies the essence of surfing that Hollywood’s Gidget could never appreciate. Surfers harness ancient natural rhythms to dance on what amounts to scraps of energy from distant storms in the Gulf of Alaska or Sea of Japan, transformed into waves. This is the definition of bliss.
“When surfing came along, I dropped everything,” Van Dyke said. “I wasn’t selfish, but all I wanted to do was surf. Surf, surf, surf.”
When Van Dyke and his first wife, Betty Van Dyke, taught school in the Dominican Republic in the late 1950s, they surfed the Caribbean before others had even thought of it. They lived in a hotel with Argentina’s deposed president, Juan Peron.
On one trip to Mexico City, Van Dyke said, his plane had to land in Havana because of a maintenance problem. Van Dyke arrived on Jan. 1, 1959, the day after the overthrow of President Fulgencio Batista. Van Dyke said he watched Fidel Castro, Che Guevara and Ernest Hemingway ride in a truck, firing rifles into the air. Then he went surfing.
Van Dyke eventually stopped surfing at age 83, after returning to California from the Big Island in Hawaii. He tried his old stomping ground at the Hook at the end of Capitola’s 41st Avenue, but donning a wetsuit proved too cumbersome — he needed to visit a chiropractor, he said, every time he took it off. He gave away all his boards, keeping few mementos of the past, and now spends his days meditating, painting and playing electric guitar and bass.
One of California’s ceiling-breaking women surfers, Rosemari Reimers Rice, 82, no longer bothers with wetsuits because of the hassle. She stopped surfing at age 70 after jumping over a beginner who got in her way on a crowded day at famed Santa Cruz break Steamer Lane, a five-minute walk from her house. The last time she paddled out was in 2016 to honor a surfing friend who had died.
I met Reimers Rice on her porch one windy afternoon, with sea lions barking in the background.
Reimers Rice, Earlyene Colfer and Betty Van Dyke, who died in April, were the vanguard of Northern California’s female surfers. Artifacts of surfing history can be found throughout Reimers Rice’s home where her late husband, Johnny Rice, shaped his custom boards in a shed out back.
The couple married in 1989, decades after dating at Mira Costa High School in Hermosa Beach. The spring ceremony took place during a kayak festival at Cowell’s, with Reimers Rice paddling out on a new board Rice made as a wedding present, the bride in a white wetsuit borrowed from Jane McKenzie, a top Santa Cruz surfer in the 1970s. The couple’s pastor had no issue with the aquatic chapel. He surfed, too.
Rice made his wife promise not to store away the board as a keepsake, and his bride was happy to oblige, because she wanted to surf more than almost anything else.
Colfer hung up her boards at age 75 because of bad knees, she said, but enjoyed her final session five years ago while attending a granddaughter’s wedding in Oahu.
Earylene met her husband in 1957 when Jerry Colfer and Johnny Rice paddled out at the Hook to join the only two surfers in the water, both of them young women. Colfer, then 17, got smacked by Earlyene’s board after she fell. When the two teenage surfers resurfaced, it was Colfer who fell — in love, he would later recount.
They were together for 63 years before Colfer died in January, and the sea was never far from their lives. Their three sons, their wives and grandchildren surf. Great-granddaughter Aurora, 3, has started paddling, too.
“All of us revered the ocean like it is something holy,” Earlyene said.
The Bay Area pilgrims share so many fragments of surfing history. But it strikes me that they are the exemplar of something grander that all of us need as the days pass.
Pacifica gerontologist Roy Earnest has tried to define this in psychological terms. He said many overburdened adults suffer from “nature-deficit disorder.” Earnest, who started riding waves in the early 1960s in New Jersey, said people need an elemental connection to nature.
They also need to stay active because kinesthesia, or sensory experience, might be Ponce de Leon’s magical fountain of youth. Earnest, the filmmaker of “Surfing for Life,” tries to Boogie board twice a week to fill his quota, but begrudgingly acknowledges any form of physical activity will do.
These lifelong surfers spent hours with me trying to define what it means to ride waves. Reimers Rice finally gave up.
“You really can’t explain it to anybody,” she said. “You have to go out and feel it.”
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The closest I’ve come to tiptoeing across nature’s sanctuary was president’s weekend in 1983 on a trip to Isla de Todos Santos, west of Ensenada, Mexico. A massive swell had slammed the West Coast, turning the voyage on a fishing trawler into a stomach-churning episode.
The fishermen dropped us off on the wind-battered, barren rock where every reef fired. We surveyed thick walls of water rising 50 feet before thunderously spilling into the bay. The break is now called Killers, and it rivals Mavericks as one of North America’s heaviest waves. I picked a left-breaking wave on the other side of the islet. The groundswell wrapped around the cay and sent waves jacking up overhead.
On the morning of our departure, I went out for a final dance. A wave as blue as the winter sky charged at me as I paddled furiously to intersect at its peak. I quickly swung around, took two strokes and stood. Instead of sliding across the shimmering face, I stuck a trailing finger in the wave to stall.
The wave spun into a circular bowl. A tiny escape hatch down the face beckoned with a blinding white light. But I felt a dark force drag me back toward the jagged rocks.
I slightly shifted my weight forward for propulsion as a curtain of water rained over me. The mouth of the tunnel opened. Bigger and bigger as the brightness bathed me with a celestial glow.
I came out flying.
Forever free.
