The Snows of Hope Ranch Beach
James N. Powell
The surf was not always flat. On mornings of wind swells, the haze usually loafing over the summer shoreline would ghost away, the sky would blue, and above the roaring surf the warm air would tingle with salt spray. The covey of nymphs would come to life, plunging through the waves while straining to keep bikinis in place; the lifeguard would wake up; and a few of us surfers would be out in the water, spread along a mile or so of sun-drenched beach. From time to time one of us would take off on a surging swell of blue, drop to the bottom of the wave, lean into a turn, and then squat on his board as a bellowing, hollow vortex of Pacific curled over him.
But there was a countervailing opinion. Ray Strange, an oceanographer who daily walked the sands of Hope Ranch Beach, suggested, tactfully, that our spring and summer wind swells were not generated by a god, but, scientifically speaking, by the prevailing winds off Point Conception.
To this heresy, Stein countered that prevailing winds might well act as passive agents involved in the formation of waves, but they could never be their Supreme Cause.
We followed Stein’s explanation. After all, we could pray to Kahuna, but not to anything as pitifully puny as prevailing winds.
And numerous were our ways of praying—some more austere than others. It is an activity we began in junior high and continued into high school. During lunch hours at San Marcos High, by then being long-practiced contemplatives, we would forego the nourishment of the common herd in favor of fasting and opening our souls to Kahuna’s manna. Besides, we were saving our lunch money for surfboards, gasoline to get us to distant shores, or an issue of the then-fledgling Surfer magazine. One favorite method of prayer was to stand on the concrete steps by the gym and repeatedly step forward and then backward—symbolically hanging ten hundreds of times an hour, each time proclaiming a devout “Hail Kahuna.” Or, we would stand aside the towering outside wall of the basketball gym and, imagining it to be a humongous Hawaiian wave at Waimea Bay, throw up our hands in futility.
Watching us perform these rites were sneering gangs of Hodaddies—pasty-fleshed, greasy-haired car guys who never went near the beach, who carried switchblades, and who basically had it out for all surfers. Though minor skirmishes sometimes erupted back then between Anglos and Mexican students or between San Marcos and Santa Barbara High kids, these divisions were nothing compared to the division between Hodads and surfers. This latter division, after all, was not merely cross-town or racial, but religious: Car guys contemplated Grease and we contemplated The Ocean. Obviously, this had to lead to a great war of faiths. Back then, the Carrillo Rec Center hosted dances every Saturday night. One enchanted evening after the dance, all the surfers in town, armed with broken beer bottles, lined up on one side of Carrillo, while Hodaddies by the hundreds bristled on the opposite curb. Our Gods, we were soon to discover, were inherently bloodthirsty.
The fine points of our theology were worked out by Stein in private moments while coasting on his bicycle beneath the cool, dark canopy of oaks, down the dark winding road from his aunt’s house. And they were imparted, discussed, and refined in conversations with two of his colleagues: Modoc and myself. These sessions always took place in a very secret spot, on a roof atop a row of lockers behind the changing rooms at Hope Ranch Beach. From the age of 15, on evenings when the surf was flat, we would climb up, assume philosophically comfortable postures, and brood upon eternal verities.
Central to Stein’s cosmos was a pecking order of surf beings. Kahuna, of course, presided over all. Next were Santa and Frosty, two huge stucco statues stationed at Santa Claus Lane. Then followed the All-Time Charleys. These were surfers who actually appeared on the pages of Surfer magazine. Slightly below them reigned the Big Mothers. These were surfers like Bob Hazard and Jimmy Grey, who were a couple of years older than us and had started surfing before we did. Next came ourselves, and below ourselves were those bushy bushy-blond-haired surfers younger than us whom we called gremmies.
One of the most important matters we discussed was the ritual for surfing Rincon. Rincon, of course, is the Santa Barbara Channel’s most remarkable cobblestone point, a subtle bend in the coast about 15 miles south of Santa Barbara. During the fall, winter, and early spring, Kahuna moves from His relatively close roost off Point Conception, repositioning Himself thousands of miles to the north—in the general area of the Gulf of Alaska. There he produces violent storms, generating powerful, long-period ground swells that pulse into Rincon thousands of miles later with seismic power. We established the Rincon ritual because Kahuna was so distant at that time of year—so far to the north—he could not hear us.
We needed a host of local deities and demigods to intercede, to carry our prayers to His northern domain. Our ritual consisted of this: (1) While driving in my big brother’s woodie down the coast to Rincon listening to KRLA in Los Angeles, we listened for an omen. If we heard “Bonanza,” as played by the twangy guitar of Dwayne Eddy, we knew the surf would be good. Even better, if during our drive over Ortega Hill, it so happened the dj Wolfman Jack was playing “Bonanza” at the same time we spotted a big north swell, we knew the day would be perfect. Once, it actually happened. (2) Midway between Santa Barbara and Rincon, at Santa Claus Lane, atop buildings between the freeway and the ocean, presided our demigods, the two huge statues of Santa and Frosty the Snowman. We waved to them because, after all, they were divinities of the far north—and thus in close touch with Kahuna in His wintery workshop.
Our other salutations were to our only local All-Time Charley, Renny Yater, and his wife, Sally. Renny, after all, was the only area surfer whose photo appeared in Surfer magazine. He was the first and for many years the only surfboard manufacturer in Santa Barbara. In our theology, he was viewed as almost semi-divine. He was, at any rate, not quite as aloof as Frosty and Santa.
Occasionally—once every five years or so—he would even say something to one of us, such as “Nice ride.” Coming from Renny, that was quite a compliment—because in those days surfing was more functional than frilly, and Renny, with his board always in perfect "trim," surfed with a pure economy of movement.
On a lower level, Northness was the realm where Kahuna conceived the largest and most powerful swells—the Gulf of Alaska. To possess Northness was to possess a kind of spiritual isolation and remoteness, as when during the cold winter months the senses recede from their objects. It was Northness that had compelled Renny to sit like a hermit so far out in the middle of the ocean, waiting for only the biggest, darkest mountainous waves; that had chiseled his style so clean, and that had hollowed caves in the north-facing sandstone in the mountains near Point Conception, caves illumined by paintings of Chumash Indian deities.
They built beach houses there of driftwood and would sometimes just disappear to the Ranch for a week or a month of pure surfing.
None of the girls at the beach could resist their charms, and entire coveys of nymphs, along with cases of wine, would disappear into the mattressed backs of their woodies and panel trucks for days at a time—even on days and nights when the surf was good.
This, of course, presented a serious challenge to the validity of Stein’s theology. How could the Big Mothers, who were notoriously worldly, preferring women and drink to Kahuna’s waves, be the Chosen Ones to surf the sacred shores of the Hollister Ranch while we, the Pious Ones, the priests and seers of the whole surfing cosmos, the Noble Ones, were left stranded in flat Santa Barbara daydreaming about waves too heavenly to be contemplated?
But it was another crack in Stein’s surfing cosmos that proved to be apocalyptic. It began quite innocently. We decided to form a surf club—The Hope Ranch Surf Club—and to hold weekly meetings in the evening at the picnic grounds above the beach. We formed the club because the Hope Ranch Homes Association wanted us to come up with a solution to a certain equestrian concern. We tended to leave our surfboards strewn about the beach in such chaotic patterns that galloping horses had to slow down enough to thread their way through them. Not to mention the highly classified Woff Woff problem.
Stein, however, was suspicious of anything originating in Los Angeles, so far to the south, the very opposite direction of Northness, and wanted nothing to do with any contest, nor with our club with all its rules and regulations, nor with our oceanographer who claimed to be able to actually predict the surf according to scientific calculations. In order to counter this threat to his world, his occasional fits of mythologizing began to erupt daily, and then hourly, and then began to blow and howl constantly at us with such a hurricane force that it made the very sky seem to darken. He argued that Kahuna’s great transformations of winds and clouds and rain and thunder and waves could never be fathomed by any science. Their supreme patterns, he proclaimed, are beyond human knowing. For sometimes, he argued, Kahuna will send us faint silvery little ripples, frail as ribbons. Sometimes he’ll send huge dark watery summits that obliterate the horizon. Sometimes there will be several months of continuous swell. Sometimes a swell will come thundering down the coast, but vanish in an hour. Sometimes the waves are as black as vinyl; sometimes white as clouds. Sometimes the sea is violently windblown all day, and some surfers will say that in the evening it will glass off. But it doesn’t glass off. Or sometimes it will be glassy and perfect in the morning but some know-it-all Big Mother will predict that it will be blown out in the afternoon. But it stays glassy.
But what if Kahuna’s patterns of winds and waves and thunders were knowable, predictable, and regulated by oceanographers and ruled by surf clubs, and Big Mothers, argued Stein! Why then, when Kahuna was going to send us a wind swell in answer to our prayers, he first would have to muster the tribes of waves, next have them stand at attention, and then give them their orders, their rules: “I am Kahuna. Now I am going to send you waves down to Hope Ranch Beach. You, go first; you, follow; you, I want you to rise up 20 feet; you there, lay low. You, shine silvery; you, make some green little ripples on your face just before you break; you, double back into a giant wave of backwash and punch the next incoming wave in the face; you, pull in your stomach; you, puff out your chest; and you over there, go whisper all this in the ear of the oceanographer and the Big Mother and Surf-Clubber as they dream so that they will be able to prophesy what is going to happen!” If Kahuna sent waves out like that, then there wouldn’t be any life left in any of them at all, and neither would there be any life left in Kahuna! This could never be His pattern of creating wind and waves. The result of such a way of sending waves would be that Kahuna would begin to feel that sending out waves was a colossal burden; and the winds and waves, from their side, would begin to feel that being sent out by Kahuna was an unbearable waste of effort. And yet, those waves would still have to be sent out every single day!
The following winter, it snowed in Santa Barbara. Lemon groves, streets, hills, and beaches lay silent and white. At school, we plastered everyone with snowballs and during lunch hour sneaked down to Hope Ranch Beach. In its radiance it shimmered like a ghost of itself, hovering somewhere between presence and absence, being and non-being: no lifeguard, no surfboards, no nymphs, no kelp, no kelp flies, no aspiring surf contestants—only avalanches of liquid energy thundering in from the north.
Richard used to hang out there on his catamaran for a few years while enjoying the waves off the California Coast and Baja. He got to know the lighthouse well since he would run up and down the hill it crowns. Someone once told Richard it was highest (in altitude, not height) of any lighthouse on the West Coast of N. America. He never checked this out but found it to be a good push to the top.
Richard started the HR Surf Club in the summer of 1962. The Hope Ranch Homes Association wanted to impose some sense of order on an often unruly new social group: the local surf tribe. Equestrians were complaining that our surfboards, strewn haphazardly on the sand, presented an obstacle course to their horses.
After the desire for order, there arrived a call for order.
Calls for order usually lead to meetings. Which usually lead to more calls for order.
Which lead to calls for still more meetings. With more ardent calls for order.
The larger the meeting, the more likely it becomes that non-group-think types of surfers will be weeded out.
Ray Strange, an oceanographer who lived in Hope Ranch, was our first surf forecaster. He talked about how waves, at first disorderly, can become coherent. Richard asked him to give us talks on winds, waves, and shores. We met evenings, once a month, at the picnic grounds at HR Beach.
Being the oldest surfer among us, Richard was elected first Club President but left the next summer to attend the United States Naval Academy, which involved for him, even more meetings.
Meanwhile, though, back at Hope Ranch Beach, Richard got to know John Peck (& his sister) when they were living in HR temporarily in the winter of '62. John was fresh from Hawaii but surfed with a catlike cool even on puny Hope Ranch ankle-snappers. Peck taught Richard how to do standing island kickouts on 8-foot Rincon shorebreak.
The Ace remembers a surf trip we took to Malibu after Ray Strange informed us a swell was coming. While there, we stopped in at a surf shop and saw a poster advertising the first Malibu Invitational. The Ace still has the poster. On the way home, since we had a club, we decided to enter the contest. Jim Hanson said he would take care of the paperwork.
After the evening HR Surf Club meetings at the picnic grounds, a meeting took place downtown. I remember it being somewhere in the vicinity of Mom’s Italian Restaurant (whereas the Santa Barbara Surf Club meetings were at that time held upstairs at what is now the Wells Fargo on Anacapa).
The guy leading the meeting was someone I did not know at the time and now only tangentially. He designed, among other things, the Lovelace's Japanese tea house: Andy Neuman.
I do remember him announcing that the meetings were now going to be conducted as per Robert’s Rules of Order.
As Andy announced this, I was sitting next to two Pit guys. I think they may have been the Psyche-out King and the Wipeout King. When they heard the word "rules," they held their palms up to their lips and blew, producing a series of farting sounds.
I was appreciative both of the rules and the spontaneity of the Pit-style reaction.
Riding a typical Pit wave is, after all, a matter of survival.
Unlike point breaks or forgiving beach breaks such as Hope Ranch, Pit waves tolerate neither style nor rules nor anything having to do with the shore except shaping it: in a kind of topological mutual admiration society.
Pit surfers spend much of their finer moments tumbling around in shore-whomp. The raw functionalism Pit waves enforces upon surfers is dictated by the compressed theater of operations the waves provide them.
More lyrical breaks allow, even invite, considerably more frill. They provide the time and space for lots of non-wave philosophies, images, and other considerations. Into that time and space, the locals at such breaks tend to develop and insert style and its various artifacts of the shore, such as pecking orders.
The water-shore distinction is not mine but Mark Twain’s.
His pen name refers to a depth of two fathoms (12 feet), as demarcated on a lead line. Two fathoms being the minimal depth allowing safe passage for a Mississippi steamboat. Thus, the river piloting phrase "mark twain" can mark both a warning and a sigh of relief.
The lead line used for the measurement, the steamboat, the act of measuring, and the name Mark Twain itself are products of the shore, as were the rules of the Mississippi River Pilot’s Association. Henry Robert, author of his Rules of Order, wrote the book when he was an officer in the U. S. Army.
For Twain, transcending these—beyond shoreness and what Huck Finn and the slave Jim call "sivilization"—abides a wide-stretching, ever-flowing, ever-rolling trickster—the Mississippi—which, being aqueous, shares much with the ocean.
Occupying the summit of the HR Surf Club's pecking order was John Peck, who placed 2nd at the First Malibu Invitational, at Surfrider Beach, Sunday, August 25, 1963.
James, your words of surfing past in Santa Barbara were fantastic. If my memory serves me right, you were called, Slim. Forgive me if I'm wrong. My surfing began in 1957 on the shores of Miramar and Hammonds. George Sr., George, and Seth Hammond owned the multi acre property. The beach had no name, so we thought since the Hammonds owned the land and beach, that would be the name. Mr. G. Sr. had a 1940 Ford pickup he would drive everywhere with his wife to do shopping. He also had a small plane that he landed on his vast lawn. For some reason young George and Seth never caught the surf fever. George Jr. loved taking photos of the surfers and Seth loved speed and cars. His dad bought him a dragster and he almost died racing that machine. John Eichert and I started the first balsa longboard surf shop in Montecito in1957. We were just in the learning stage of what surfing was all about. ......to be continued......
ReplyDeleteI remember that little beach shack on the estate. Did you live there? Happy to hear any old surf yarns.
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