At first glance, San Francisco looks like Eden, but I was soon to find that in the midst of all this beauty, this city is closer to Gomorrah, a place of evil, deception, pain, and loss.
I grew up in New England, where I originally developed a love for skateboarding and was later accepted into one of Vermont's early snowboarding ratpacks in the 80s. When I moved to San Francisco it seemed natural to begin what eventually became a chronic obsession with surfing. I now know that New England surf spots can deliver waves that rival some of the better days in California, even producing double-overhead waves when all conditions are right, and head-high+ with some regularity. I've also learned that dedicated East Coast surfers develop a genuinely hardcore, friendly stoke for good waves -- proabaly because the conditions are so fickle. Back in New England, where the water temperature dips below 40 degrees F, you're sometimes the only one out there. You're wearing a 5mm wetsuit, 7mm boots and gloves, and a hood, and still you're suffering a screaming ice-cream headache and a frost-nipped nose. All this with a clear and dischordant view of snowbanks on the rocky shoreline. At this point, you're happy just to see someone else paddle out and share the frosty, clean overhead waves. You want to share the glow, warmth and good cheer. It's this kind of thing that makes the chest-thumping NorCal hellmen, they're often called, and their thick water and localism -- and to be clear, I'm not talking about the real chargers at Mavericks and the Lane, but the crowd who has only be at it for a few years, and naively thinks their spots are the be all end all -- almost seem lame in comparison. An innate New England heartiness, combined with great waves after Nor'easters in the winter and hurricanes during the summer and fall, makes New England surfers especially tough, yet without the overly macho bravado that can mar some of their counterparts in California.
To translate my board riding skills onto the liquid stage that surrounds San Francisco, I promptly began to surf under the tutelage of my roommate Carl, a good-natured carpenter with a unique and hilarious sense of humor. I consider him a lifesaver of sorts for getting me on a surfboard for the first time, and thus rescuing me from the banal existence of the terrestrial creatures around me most of the day. I got my first board from Carl. It was a blue-marbled Aitken "pop-out," plastic and hollow. It was a great learning board because it was bouyant, stable (a 7'6" tri-fin, about twenty-one and a half inches wide and three inches thick), and virtually ding-proof. I had one three-inch piece of grey duct tape on a two-inch slit in the bottom (it resembled a scar), instant ding-repair.
(Later, my girlfriend painted a Haring-esque design on the base. It's important to state that she didn't recognize her own prodigious talent for producing, in the wink of an eye, abstract mini-masterpieces with colored acrylic paint markers. The one on the bottom of the Aitken contained, embedded in the swirls and zig-zags in yellow and green, the word "Tchuss," German for both "Hi" and "Goodbye," like the Hawaiian greeting "Aloha.")
How could I have known when Carl sold it to me that my beloved first board, the innocent and harmless Aitken, would one day become little more than a cheap hooker, available to anyone, whether teen or senior citizen, who could cough up the one-hour rental fee. For now, I was an ingenue' with my first love, completely unaware that she would later rest under the arm of any taker with a little cash in his sweaty palm.
As for Carl, despite the fact that he was a "cheesehead" from Wisconsin, he ripped. Carl had moved to San Francisco a few years before me, and he too had learned to surf there. He was mellow and friendly, and he became my best friend soon after I moved into a shared flat with him near the Park. He always seemed to be a bright light shining through the fog that blew in every afternoon like clockwork to bathe the handful of ragged homeless people that lived in the park. His friendship distanced me from the strange, scary trolls I sometimes saw silhouetted against the impossibly vital green of the park. The fact that he was almost fearless helped Carl at Ocean Beach, the famous three-mile long beachbreak which lines the Pacific shore of the Sunset and Richmond Districts. He knew Ocean Beach surfing well: the channels, the heavy waves, the rip tides, the cold water, the sharks, and the psychedelic Pacific sunsets.
The first time Carl took me surfing, I used the Aitken, which at that time he had lent me. The waves were small, about two to three feet, and rolled in as if timed by a metronome. Although I was no stranger to the ocean (I grew up in New England afterall), since I was a surfing novice my endorphins were dancing like they were on steroids.
One thing I learned is that there can be something surreal about the people you see when you frequent a surf spot. You're never quite sure who they are, or who they could be, especially if you never got to know them on land. That first day Carl took me out at Ocean Beach, we happened to be walking out to the waterline in lockstep with a big guy with long black hair, who seemed to refuse to look in our direction. Carl made a chuckling comment about the small waves, with a smile, and then looked at the darker figure who walked like a mirror image across the sand with us, a little way to our left.
"Hey what's up Neville? I hope you're as hard up as we are. Looks pretty small," said Carl, glancing toward the other surfer, as he walked beside us to the waterline.
The dark figure finally looked our way. He sort of laughed -- or was it a cackle? -- but said nothing. When I looked into his eyes I couldn't see his pupils because his irises were so dark. "Weird," I thought. In fact, his whole face was dark, even more so because of the shadows cast by the explosion of long, jet-black hair on his head. Carl looked back at me and shrugged, muttering something about a surf shop down the beach a ways and how it was strange to see Neville this far north at Ocean Beach.
I quickly shook off the chill of the encounter, and once we waded into the frigid Pacific, Carl had me walk out with the Aitken until I stood chest-deep on the perfect sandy bottom of Ocean Beach. This was the kind of beach that if it were in Florida or some tropical locale would be good for tourists. But this wasn't one of those locales: people drown here annually drown in the rips and cold water and size. Carl instructed me to paddle my ass off toward shore in the chest-deep whitewater, get up to my feet and ride in for about 25 yards to the beach. The rush of the speed and the little wall of whitewater were incredible, magic, and gave me a first taste of what I was eventually to drink like an alcoholic sucks down his booze.
The first time I tried to paddle outside of the shorebreak, I remember Carl paddling beside me on his 6' 4" Hawaiian Island Creations chip. When the first wall of whitewater came at me, about three feet high, I froze like a deer in headlights, not knowing what to do. Then Carl instinctively looked my way and said, "Push down the nose! Head straight for China!" I did, and sure enough, I popped out the other side like a freshly-cleansed harbor seal. I chuckled when I came up, and then I attempted to duck-dive again at the next whitewater wall, paddling in between as I'd seen Carl do. But then, there he was already sitting outside, fifty yards ahead, waiting with a knowing smile. Before I had time to think too much, I was paddling my Aitken over the four-foot faces, a little nervously. Soon I was in the calm of the outside, bobbing and tired, saying "Hi" to Carl and feeling a bit like the harbor seals I often now see pop up not twenty feet away from me when I surf in New England.
Like any friend who also becomes your surf teacher, Carl became a good friend for life from that point on. He was, after all, my surf mentor. In that role, he was the provider of my most cherished possession, my first board, the Aitken. As the patient teacher who helped make me a waverider, he was also the bestower of countless magic memories.