SURFIN’ SAFARI SUMMER THREE - DAY TWENTY - September 20, 2021

 

Upwards along the edge of the western world - Pacific Coast Highway (1) - Friday’s Safari rumbled; past Temescal Canyon, and Puerco Canyon, and Carbon Canyon, and Topanga Canyon, and Trabuco Canyon and La Piedra State Beach, and El Matador State Beach…

The Andalusian DNA of California and the American Southwest is writ all along the map and the primary reason for what sets it apart from the rest of the country.

The story of the United States is told with the English settlements in Virginia as a starting point, but the oldest church in this country was built in Santa Fe, New Mexico by the Spaniards who were rooting about for gold and spreading the Good Word in western deserts around the same time Jamestown drove its first pike into the Virginia soil.

You don’t change all that with a won war and the raising of a different flag. At least not completely. Culture is a rooted thing.

When Masha Tsiklauri told me she couldn’t make it on Thursday to stay with Anna, and Julianna (replacing Vilma) reported that she was starting early on Friday morning, I asked Masha to come on Friday, too, so as to stack the help into an almost eight-hour getaway, which meant a distant destination was in the offing.

Packed a sandwich, a bag of Kettle white cheddar potato chips, a Pacifico (because surfing and Mexican beer go together) and bolted the Safari northward and fast, goin’ up the Malibu country.... far away from ALL THAT.

You can entertain the Great American Fantasy of taking off in a car with a wad of cash and a full tank into the vast West to start a new life in a peaceful, but nameless hamlet, where no one will know who you are because you are mysterious and keep to yourself and are therefore more sexy than in your prior life.

But you’d have to leave your cell phone somewhere to avoid being tracked. Yes, you’d be getting away without your phone, which you would then be reaching for every 10 seconds to check your bank account, or fire up some electronic pay app, or post photos of your getaway route on social media, getting freaked by an Amber Alert, and just generally feeling suffocated, or without control, until you turned around and went home.

Whew.

The ultimate Safari destination was the hidden jewel of Staircase Beach, which is way up there in Ventura County. It is a postcard kind of locale, a cobble stone reef cove scrunched down under some terra cotta colored cliffs, and just a handful of people. If the wave is no good, a spot called “Zeros” is about 300 yards to the south.

In Surfing Safari Summer One, I wrote this about Staircase beach:

“[It is] Not exactly far from the madding crowd, but hidden from it. There’s no sign, the parking lot is set down from the highway and that’s that. You have to know. It’s called “Staircase” after the steps hacked into the coastal scrub by pioneer surfers in a wilder California [and which are still there] to access the sweet little reef beyond. Now it’s a county beach called... Staircase. It is a measure of surfing’s impact on California that, as the state went about rationalizing the beach system, it often kept the names surfers had given them. It’s a dramatic spot with a rickety nature walk down to the rocky driftwood shore. The wildfires last year reached the water here and we saw green shoots and blossoms side by side with charcoal trees.”

So it is, you know, a “real” surf spot with a durable, dependable wave and it was pretty exciting to see some clean lines rolling in and not a single surfer out there. It is a fantasy kind of thing, but it does happen where one is suddenly alone with a great wave and famous beach all to one’s lonesome.

Anyway, it was fool’s gold. There were no surfers because they’d pulled into the parking lot and decided the wave was breaking too close to shore and was too “walled up.” That’s when it just kind of builds to a peak and crashes over the surfer’s head, collapsing any place into which the board might be dropped.

I am starting to think that trying to get up on not-very-good waves is actually a little dangerous. I know what a walled-up wave looks like and what it will do to you if you try to mount it. Think Brahma bull. Gave it a try anyways and my assessment was confirmed.

Thank heavens for the Mexican beer and scenery.