SURFIN’ SAFARI SUMMER THREE - DAYS 21 AND 22 (Sept. 20 and 21, 2021)

It’s often said we must take the bad with the good in life. Surfin’ Safari Summer has been about the inverse. “You have to take the good in life with the bad.” 

Anna Summer One 
Topanga Canyon

There isn’t a first step to anything a person might do in this life without a first consultation from the brain. You learn, right away with Alzheimer’s, just how omnipresent that gray mass inside your skull is, and just how little medical science knows about that mass. All-consuming. There are no breaks. The most popular bible for caregivers is called “The 36-hour day” for a reason. 

So, waiting around for a break in the ever-worsening action or the return of good times before going out and actually making a good time happen, is a loser. 

In the Summer of 2019, we made a decision - together - to enjoy the beach natural jewelry just a car ride away. We made a choice to step out of gloomy, tragic days of sameness - as if they were bad dreams to be awoken from - and go to the beach. More often than not, it worked. We communed with nature, ate street tacos, and drove our beautiful classic car - a rickety remnant from halcyon days - around a magnificent region at the western edge of the continent. Went with what we had, which was much less than we’d anticipated upon teaming up, but not worth quibbling about given the limited time at our disposal. 

Surfin’ Safari Summer was always working against the clock and simultaneously marking time. Although three Calendar summers are marked, it is actually just 24 months, and the change in Anna has, quite simply, dictated the arc of the unfolding story: Two lives sharing a tragedy strike a blow for life. The strategy is a winning one and the whole thing takes on an inner logic until escaping through surf and water is a healthy habit and distraction. The lives dovetail, one paddling forward against currents, the other left at home to the care of skilled strangers. New friends. Life moves on subtly and dramatically. 

The photos reveal the marked change in Anna and document the speed with which the illness has consumed her. 

In year one, she is wearing all the clothes she designed using her own body as mannequin. There is a light in her eyes, an erectness to the spine, a way of laying her leg about. In the second year, there is something of that missing. In the third year she is transformed into someone else altogether. During Summer One she recorded me playing “Surfer Girl” at beach sunset. The next year she didn’t know which way to point the camera, and now she doesn’t understand what a camera does. 

Some of her time is going to caregivers, professional and otherwise. I think Masha, and Julianna and Saint Safe Maria de la Maria Segura are really in love with Anna and they have taught me to move on from the loss of who she was to enjoy her as she is now. 

The photos from each year reveal three different surfboards and the evolution that could only have come about through the incessant surfing of a Hoddad saddling 60. Any skill set involves the reaching of a plateau, unless the striving and curiosity are constant. It is no small irony that all this surfing would have been unthinkable without Anna’s illness, which has kept me home, hours to fill, health a concern, time short. I surf within’ myself now, think about moves and infuse touches of style into my rides. I catch more waves and rarely drive home looking cool in my board-topped coupe while feeling a fraud. I really AM a surfer (until the next wipeout day). 

Anna, Summer Two

There were 54 Surfin’ Safaris over three summers, with another 20 each year for Spring, Fall and Winter patrols. 123 total. No injury of mention occurred, and the required hours of exercise prescribed for a healthy lifestyle blew through the roof. I am stronger and more agile than three years ago; none of which was intended or ever considered, and all of which I find pretty good for a feller in these particular straits. 

Walking through hell, Surfin’ Safari Summer has helped me come out pretty cool. That said, I’d hoped to be better given the level of effort. When the pandemic started, I tripled the time I played guitar daily and, while these are very loose guess-metrics, I probably am three times better than I was in March 2020. For me, there is no such Marxian “equivalence of exchange,” where surfing is concerned. You aren’t necessarily entitled to get out what you put in. The sight of a rideable wave is a seduction. You jump in the water after a wave the way you leap lunge for a mermaid. 

The clock is still ticking, so the surfing will continue apace until the situation no longer permits. There is more about surfing here than about Anna, because she remained in the background following her early summer breakdown. It was all real, a wrenching kind of goodbye, and we are not back to normal; merely accustomed to the changes wrought by the marked ratcheting down of her health that occurred at that time. 

So that’s a wrap. I don’t think this idea can sustain another summer. It feels written out in a number of ways and I’ve always believed in silence as a very important aspect to artistic pacing. And, after all, Anna can't go along anymore. Some have suggested there is a book here, too. The inexplicable dream of being admired by legions of people I would never meet wasn’t easy to release, but it was done quite some time ago. Frankly, the comments some have made to these posts are the most satisfying I have experienced as a writer. They are sufficient. 

This was not a “project,” rather entertainment for Anna to be shared with family and friends so they might see how she was getting on. But like that sailor in “South Pacific,” I like projects and am further conditioned by 35 years of journalism to report things about places I have been. “highwayscribery.” 

Anna with Maria Segura, Summer 3

In the end it became the most worthwhile writing experience I’ve had and, if that sounds sad, it is not. You never know. Just keep chugging. People got something from the hybrid surf saga-travelogue-medical journey (yes) tragedy that took form over quite so many safaris. For those familiar with the illness, it gave voice to feelings unexpressed. For those not familiar, it offered a peek into the MANNER by which lives are dissolved. Perhaps this was a truly effective way to broach an uncomfortable, but important topic. If I’d set up a Facebook “Story” and called it “Anna’s Alzheimer’s Journey,” most might have headed for the hills. But offer up a radical writer’s rendering of a “Surfin’ Safari Summer” in Southern California and leave out the subtext… you might have entree to a discussion. 

In another time, I was dismissive of people’s “true story” books about illness and tragedy and redemption, because of a feeling that the purely imagined text was superior to memoir and confessional, and because I didn’t realize any of that awful stuff was going to happen to me. Now I know we must credit the experience endured as extraordinary and respect their need to make an accounting of things. It is ours to mine the undeniable verisimilitude of their accounts for personal value. So, I will give it a modest effort. I have compiled them into a manuscript big enough to make a book and will now find out what genre it is, who publishes that kind of thing, and what agents work with those publishers and send them a letter explaining the idea I DON’T KNOW HOW. 

And wouldn't that be a turn of events? On Wednesday, Sept. 15, I sprung a trip to Marina del Rey. The waves were not good and I gave up after a while. She returned again on Saturday and I repeated the experience with the opposite result. A beautiful, crystal Indian summer day with good waves over choppy water that wasn’t hard to handle. And fruit salad from the Mexican fruitero. Surfing is Great. That is all.