The C-Street Pursuit by Jeff DiNunzio

by Jeff DiNunzio, Kurungabaa, Volume 1, Issue 3, December 2008.

I can’t see him, but I know he’s here. The winter sun behind us on the 126 from Valencia ignites the dawn fog from the east; cloudless blue sky opens in the west. I know Nick’s there because we haven’t wrecked yet. We’re pushing to the coast, carried by the rays on our tail. Beside me, Nick is driving his mid-1990s Chevy Cavalier, a subtle green, two-door sedan with seats worn from years of ass cradling. I can’t see him because a stack of three surfboards, picked from his growing quiver, rests between us on the shoulders of both front seats. We’re prepared for the ocean’s moodiness: a 6’8” Al Merrick and six-foot Firewire if it’s chest-to-head high, and a 9’6” in case the point is peeling in slow motion. Speculative anticipation fuels the 40-minute drive from the valley. There’s no call for heavy surf. We won’t know until the 101 curves inward toward Ventura proper, a mile after the 126 interchange after Oxnard, giving us a look north to the pier (only from the left lane). Forget the forecast. Ignore Surfline, or Wetsand, or Wavewatch. We’re going.

It’s what we do every time I’m in California. Old friends, different coasts, same wave.

It all happened rapidly.

Graduation, wedding, honeymoon, then they were gone. Nick moved from Pennsylvania five years ago, looking to settle down in a place of strangers, his wife pacing the showbiz scene. Los Angeles: where people arrive to become someone else. The town brims with aspiring actors and artists working towards varied interpretations of success. Biology teachers from Happy Valley, Pennsylvania, aren’t as plentiful. Nick’s services were in greater demand beyond Hollywood, in the neighborhoods where real lives are led. First, living 15 minutes closer to downtown – yet 15 minutes farther from the beach – in Santa Clarita. Now, on Magic Mountain Parkway, with the best view of a Six Flags amusement park any apartment could offer, a bike ride away from the middle school where Nick works.

Surfing happened just as quickly.

As kids, our friendship was episodic, filled with spats of heated jarring and communal skate sessions in parts of the northeastern United States where summer humidity soaked people with suffocation. Nick ollied, a lot – stairs, bike racks, grassy gaps. I was technical – flips to grinds on rails. Growing older we grew tighter, our circle of friends more cohesive. But full-time jobs with financial obligations, and concrete’s permanency – the road rash it inflicts on the unskilled, a ripening human body’s fading durability –  euthanized the lure (but not the love) of skateboarding.
Here was Nick, a rider of boards, in a new setting, with a new canvas. Surfing was instinctive.

‘I just don’t like that I can’t see what’s beneath me,’ Nick mentioned at the start. ‘I’ve never been much of an ocean person.’

‘You’ll get over it. It’s too much fun not to,’ I replied.

I’d surfed a few times before in New Jersey, near a friend’s beach house south of Atlantic City. The city’s anatomy is composed of hotel-casinos; spotlights shine on the veins of its economic organs. Donald Trump’s tacky decadence surveyed the dribbling, inconsistent Atlantic surf, waiting for the morning to join it in light. Gray skies and mostly glassy ocean outlined the landscape as I stared at the brightening east at 6:30am, imploring the wave gods to send a modest pulse, the borrowed 9’2” sleeping on the sand. From the distance I stood, there was no way to tell if the famed Atlantic City boardwalk was as awake as its skyline. Gamblers likely stumbled from the casino floors, dizzy from the drinks that numbed their losses, eyes squinting from the new day. My body convulsed with brief, spastic chills as the south-southwest crosswinds slid over my arm-crossed torso. Salty gusts filled my nose. The commotion – hundreds of fish breaching the calm water 50 feet out – caused by a traveling sardine school summoned the few gulls prancing across the sand, fleeing the foam chasing their feet. A faint ripple textured the dark water. In those parts, there is no iridescent liquid. Refuge found only in the early autumn water warmth. Living to surf requires tolerance, patience, effort – the East Coast of the United States makes sure of it. Calling it surfing was a joke when it was anything but. Still, I was in the water, infected with the incurable bug.

Nick eventually took a lesson, and then it happened. Hooked, another one. It was all he could talk about – all we talked about. His drive to Ventura became routine. His board collection expanded to the point of selling sticks he no longer used. From learning to duck dive, catching straight rollers, making short drops and bottom turns, to lacerating wave faces during minute-long rides: Nick’s progress was staggering. And frustrating, as our once equal evolution lopsidedly shifted when I returned to Washington, DC, from San Diego, where Nick, our friend Kyle, and I would meet to surf on weekends, swap boards, compare spots and our developing skill, figure out the fundamentals. I left to find work. Now he surfs and I write about it. Advantage: Nick.

That’s how I’m here today.

***

Early commuters are brewing traffic congestion in the southbound lane, headed towards L.A. to push paper. Pelicans, gray in hue and slender in shape, glide above the calm low tide, wings extended, transporting mere inches above the surface like Shanghai’s magnetic levitation train. On this side, south of where Ventura’s pier wades into the sea, there’s no sign of surf. Could be flat. Or just not catching the swell. Down here, a few hundred yards from the California Street point, swell energy weakens and crashes on shore. Sloppy. The point might be decent.

‘I’ll switch lanes. See if there’s anything past the pier.’

‘It’s breaking, man. Nothing too big, but it looks fun. Not overly crowded,’ I report, happy that only committed surfers pull January weekday dawn patrol.

‘Score.’

***
Teaching demands a particular level of enthusiasm that may be innate, if not acquirable. The same subject and lesson plan, class after class, August to June, only the faces changing when the bell rings. A profession that, for surfers, can be exasperating.

Cold season swells pounding the coastline – gifts from invisible storm systems – disappear into piles of ungraded tests. When classes end, summer flat spells commence. Redemption arrives only during the holiday break from December to January: four weeks of fall-meets-winter freedom. When all aligns, sessions can be epic: full suits, booties and hoods, thin crowds, heaving murky barrels. While the wife works, the husband surfs.

Nick has the zeal, endures the frustration.

‘If it’s going off when I get back to school,’ he says every summer, the week before school resumes, ‘I’m going to be pissed.’ There is nothing worse than missed waves. Ugly conditions that normally keep Nick from burning gas suddenly become attractive when he’s no longer alone. For this borderline wave-snob, paddling out at his home break, where locals know him from outsiders, with a friend from back home, in soft, waist-high crumblers, awakens his stoke as much as pumping, overhead drainers. Somebody to watch him claim silly waves. To talk away the lulls.

***

California Street: the spot. Or simply: C Street.

Nick whips across two lanes of grooved concrete and macadam, layered in oily grime, up the off-ramp. To our quick left, whitewash smacks the pier pillars. We rumble over the train tracks, make a long arcing turn towards the parking lot facing the point, an empty, fenced-in warehouse and fairground lot at our backs. Only a handful of cars, beaters mostly, and an aging RV next to us. The Santa Clara River mouth – itself a storied resource nourished by westerly swell energy – seeps into the Pacific a football field or two to the south. Straight ahead, though, waist-to-chest high right-handers approaching from the Channel Islands, across bowling ball-smooth rocks and driftwood, unravel from the first point. Shortboarders post up on the outside, longboarders in a tight lineup inside, where the coast swerves abruptly inward, carving a crescent to the south jetty.

The haze has vaporized; it’s a southern California day. We hustle down the beach without stretching, dodging splintered planks and clumps of gnat-infested kelp washed ashore, damp wetsuits gradually warming to our body temperatures, fearing the limited swell will die in minutes. With a flurry of conditioned strokes, Nick is in the lineup. I follow course, free of his fluidity and in-paddling-shape strength, relying on marginal athleticism to propel the 6’8” squash tail. Nick speeds past me front side down the line. From the trough, I turn in time to see the yellow bottom of his Firewire spray rainbow prisms off the lip. I hoot, showered in the rain of the slight offshores. ‘Yeah!’ But he’s past, already thrashing a new section before soon blowing a tire on the next. Nick’s tamed, brown-bearded head surfaces, dripping and smiling, thrilled to have his progress confirmed. He’s a surfer and he’s good.

We trade waves for two more hours – Nick amending his turns up the face and onto the shoulder, me trying to hide my mediocrity. I sit away from the regulars, avoiding their ire, which is softened by Nick’s presence. I finally figure out the art of the bottom turn that has since had a wondrous effect on my surfing. (Oh, weight on the back foot, not like an evenly distributed snowboard lean. Got it.) Alongside Nick’s evenness, it starts to look like I’ve ridden a wave before. Digging fewer rails. Throwing multiple pumps. Less pearling, more kicking out. It’s like most days we come out. Except Nick lives here, I don’t.

We’re keenly aware that my flight home lingers at the end of this week, that this isn’t a regular thing – back to my customary monthly sessions. That as much as I’d like to, life simply hasn’t given me the right circumstances in which to return west, where today would be customary. When it does, Nick and I will make this same trip we do several times each year. To C Street. To surf with a friend while dolphin pods rove through aisles of horizon-struck surfers. To stop at Ventura Surf Shop. The Carl’s Jr. drive-thru. It’s what Nick talks about when I ask that esoteric question: Did you go out today?

The tide fills in as the morning ages. We ride in, dry off, arrange our gear, leave the way we came – down C Street, framed by leaning palm trees shading people living, where a spot check could be shared with a Curren, or a Malloy. We b-line to Steaks and Hoagies, inhaling sandwiches and fries on a picnic table, elbows securing breeze-blown napkins and pigeons pecking at our feet. Bodies tired and bellies full, we’re elated, feeling blessed that even on an unremarkable day we’re able to surf waves. Nick and I cruise home without speaking, removed from each other’s sight. Plenty of afternoon remains; we’ll talk about our session eventually. We blend into the freshly diluted freeway traffic towards the San Fernando Valley. The sun that followed us this morning hovers above, melting our movement. Air floods the car when the windows open. The stench of hot, wet rubber escapes. Our heads rest on the board shelf splitting us, thrilled to have surfed with someone, absorbing the chosen silence, content with life at the moment.