SURFIN' SAFARI SUMMER ONE - DAY EIGHT - July 14, 2019




We headed out into the city on a high-season beach day anticipating traffic. But in the spirit of Surfin’ Safari Summer, we boldly plotted a path to the ocean via Sunset. We cruised Beverly Hills, got lost in UCLA, and stopped at Gelson’s in Pacific Palisades to pick up a roast chicken and beer and orange cream Coca-Colas. The whole world was at the coast. We’d break out of traffic on California 1, only to hit another snarl. Topanga was having some kind of hippie festival. Zuma was jammed. Leo Cabrillo packed. We kept driving north until we crossed into Ventura County and settled into a beach nobody

knows is there. 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 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.

“Urge and urge and urge. Always the procreant urge of the Earth

(Walt Whitman). 

A sign that surfers are welcome.
As to the surfing, the waves were good, but powerful. The former usually requires the latter, which means that along with the fun comes a pretty good ocean beating. I brought my new board. It is 2 feet 3 inches shorter, and five pounds lighter, than the one I’ve been using for years. I had not been able to get up on it. But we are starting to get some serious surfing time in at this point. I’m getting stronger and my timing and balance are improving so I did get a pair of rides. It was like flitting over water on a Frisbee. The board is light and I could wield it like a Kendo stick, move about more freely. It means a new kind of surfing for me. The Staircase setting is rural. It’s about 40 miles outside of Los Angeles. There are no street tacos, because there are no streets, but we got some fresh Ventura strawberries at a roadside stand. As Hemingway might have written: “And they were good.”

The famed "Staircase."






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