SURFIN' SAFARI SUMMER TWO - DAY ELEVEN - July 26, 2020







Saturday Night Live used to do a skit called “The Californians.” A melodramatic daytime chronicle, compromised characters would respond to the accusatory question of, “What are YOU doing here?” with an explanation of their route through town. (“I took La Cienega to Melrose and cut up to Cynthia,”) thereby distracting the accuser with this important byte of traffic knowledge.

In the spirit of “The Californians,” it must be said the San Vicente to Sunset to Pacific Coast Highway route is fast becoming a lifeline for Surfin’ Safari Summer Two. This is due to the pandemic and shutdown, which have cleared these normally choked arteries and made Malibu that much more accessible.

On Saturday, the launch was a solo effort. It was hot, but the conditions were choppy at most of the beaches. They were pretty crowded. A beach is a micro-environment -- it’s own small atmosphere -- and no matter how much distancing and masks are in evidence, you’re breathing a bunch of other peoples’ stuff.

Pushing up the coast, striving to separate from the populous egg-yoke that is Los Angeles, yielded no relief, so I resorted to a secret spot called Staircase Beach that can’t be seen from the highway. It was relatively empty and beautiful as ever.

Sometimes I don’t want to surf, or would prefer a spot to the one I’ve chosen due to the editorial dictates of Surfin’ Safari Summer. I like to vary the beaches. It’s nice to expand the geographical area covered because it is, among other things, a travelogue of surfer California.

But on Saturday, Staircase served my purposes, because I wrote something last year and reposting it will suffice. It’s a surf spot, not the Alhambra.

Included are three images from a splendid day, and nice surf session; the second in less than 24 hours.

No one should complain about anything under such circumstances:

“Surfin’ Safari Summer Day 8 (2019):.... We kept driving north until we crossed into Ventura County and settled into a beach nobody knows is there. Not exactly far from the maddening 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).




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