My wife is from California. As a little girl she saw The Wizard of Oz, where, as you might remember, the plot is driven by a tornado’s direct effect on an impossibly sturdy wooden cabin. Zoë didn’t like that much, and decided that she’d never like to visit there, that was crazy, clouds attacking people was not the kind of thing that was supposed to happen, that was really bad.
I am from Kansas, and as there are many more films and television shows about the edges of our landmass than the middle, I saw a great deal of California based entertainment. I saw “Earthquake”, a movie about an earthquake, filmed in a technology they called “Sensurround”, an early version of multitrack audio where the sub bass was separated and the speaker POINTED INTO THE FLOOR of the theatre to make a kind of rumbly rumbly feel. In Brooklyn some people seem to have this installed in their cars now. It was nearly deafening. One could barely make out what Charleston Heston was shouting.
In any case I decided, much along the same lines as Zoe did, that California wasn’t right, the ground attacking people was not the kind of thing that was supposed to happen, that was really bad, I shouldn’t ever go there.
I did, of course, and I was in an earthquake, which didn’t ruin California for me because the true appeal of the Golden State for any midwesterner lies firmly in the mysteriously shifting topography of The Beach.
BEACH.
Land, meeting water,
with NO LAND VISIBLY ON THE OTHER SIDE OF IT.
Wow.
The beach was a perfect place to dance, according to the Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello week of after-school movies on local tv. You could have a cookout, or hang out, or lay out in the sun for hours. I didn’t understand how the sun worked on fairer skin, past the dubious science presented on the Coppertone commercials (which was Jodie Foster’s first job, if you didn’t know…she was 3: she was the little girl with the dog on the bottle). Anyhoo, on TV, beaches were a magical place where folks fell in love.
I eventually went to a beach, of course.
I did not fall in love there.
My coastal friends said that the beach was like a midwestern park, but in the park there is shade, from trees. I had thought there might be palm trees on the beach, like on Gilligan’s Island, but that was a different kind of beach. Most parks also have suspicious yet existent restrooms, which were lacking, along with their sketchy water fountains. And the sun was super fun, up until the moment I discovered that it was the one having the cookout: I, was on the menu.
I liked playing with sand, even burying myself in it, but that was ruined by a tv commercial for a horror movie called “Blood Beach”. The commercials were, quite famously, better than the movie: a no-budgeter about the invasion of a hungry creature beneath the sand - an idea later cribbed by George Lucas for The Empire Strikes Back, when the bad guys tried to feed the good guys to a big toothy sinkhole in the desert.
Even before that, there was JAWS. But the funny thing is that movie wasn’t even set in California, it was Martha’s Vineyard. The nerve. The true horror was the drop in property values. As iconic as that original film (and poster) was, it was the by-line to its sequel a few years later that struck home for me:
“Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water.”
My mother thought that was hilarious. “When was that supposed to be? Safe in the water! Who even thinks that?” she scoffed, mocking the newspaper ad from the kitchen table of our landlocked apartment.
Yet beyond both experience and cautionary tale exists my true beach-based obsession. The nexus of extreme sport and high art: surfing.
They called skateboarding “sidewalk surfing”, but I knew that I wasn’t shooting the curl or hanging ten as my wheels ground over the pavement, teeth rattling, legs vibrating at a frequency high enough to produce sound.
Surfing was smooth. Effortless, yet a display of mastery over both gravity and bravery. There was a reason that the James Bond theme sounded like surf guitar; roundhouse cutbacking into a tube ride and ending safe and sound on land, board beneath your arm, one hand casually pushing your hair from your eyes (which was, incredibly, still dry), surfers were earthbound astronauts, navigating the rhythm of the planet itself.
I have not been surfing. Maybe it’s that thing about never meeting your heroes, but also I haven’t lived long enough in places where there was great surfing, and haven’t ever been on that style of vacation where you snorkel and pay with beads and have time to learn things like that.
Instead, I watch The Endless Summer, a movie about surfers literally following summer around the globe, enjoying worldwide waves for a year. There’s also Step Into Liquid, and Riding Giants, and this summer I think we’ll add Blue Crush.
Oh of course I’ve seen Point Break, but that’s more of a crime cupcake with surf frosting. And I can’t forget Frankie and Annette: ooo, here’s a little something, if anyone ever asks you, “What’s the connection between Boris Karloff and Stevie Wonder?” tell them they were both in the movie “Bikini Beach”. (On second thought, if somebody ever asks you that specific question, you should probably just quietly walk away.)
The freedom of the beach is, for me, the majesty of the waves, and though I’ve never been on a surfboard I’m in awe of the spirit of surfing; navigating the unknown and ever changing with grit, balance and focus. I can’t accomplish that in the water, but every now and then, after a long day of work, I get in the empty elevator, take my hair out of its band, and push it back from my eyes with one hand, imagining Dick Dale guitar riffs as I’m taking the subway home.
The Beach.