The Boy Scout Navy

This makes my fourth summer—if I survive it—of working for the Boy Scouts of America, in the capacity of Sea Captain.

They don’t call the job Sea Captain. But the scouts who arrive at this program—their special-issue duffel bags stuffed with a week of clothing, sunblock, batteries, postage stamps for postcards, iPods (actually forbidden), DVD players (really vehemently forbidden), rain ponchos, flashlights, matches, water purifying tablets, science fiction novels, mosquito netting, sunglasses, miniature sewing kits, pocket knives and emergency flare kits—expect something very nautical and adventurous from the experience they are about to receive.

Maybe they get it. Usually some adults come with the kids—scout leaders and their assistants, adult staff, parents—and these also look forward to a seafaring time, full of complicated knots, salt spray, whaling yarns and the lore of boats. I usually start them out learning how to coil and cleat lines, crank a winch and use the toilet, an activity only faintly related to the similar practice onshore. During a later lesson they learn how to throw up over the side (always the leeward side, try to aim slightly upward.) Then they learn how to bucket off the deck with seawater. These early lessons take on a tediously practical character, though necessary.

I explain the importance of cleaning up, of closing bags, of collecting all crumbs of potato chips. I do this mostly to amuse myself: at the end of the first day, a riot would look more orderly than our boat.

I used to say all adolescent boys should be put on a boat and aimed out to sea; I never expected to be on the boat with them. But these kids have proven time and again to be thoughtful, awake and curious—most of them—the sorts of boys anybody would like as a son, and for a week they are mine. Included in the lot of big, helpful, always prepared young men is the occasional eccentric, and these are my favorites. We had the guy last year—long blonde hair, granny glasses--who insisted on wearing a kilt during most of the week. This he complimented with a pirate’s plastic sword and tricorn hat he bought in Yorktown, and swaggered up and down the river walk there with his entourage, to the great amusement of the local girls. There was the young man two years back who had made a remarkable number of fashion accessories including a wallet out of duct tape, and who, out of all the adults and boys there, was the only one to laugh at my less-obvious jokes.

The people I work with—another interesting group. The first pair I sailed with, a captain and mate, could not be persuaded to rise from their bunks before 10, which put us on the water from about 11 to 4, long enough to catch the ferocious thunderstorms that were numerous that year. They spent the summer naked but for their baggy Hawaiian swim trunks and never even packed their official CHASE shirts. Their presence echoed with waving palm trees and a crisping lilt of surf, and it was impossible to be near them and not relax.

Two years ago there was the mate who, after the program ended, persuaded one of his 16-year-old Venture Scout girls to join a voyage of his own boat for some near coastal cruising. At least, they were near the coast when the Coast Guard caught up with them. The girl had explained the trip to her parents as a kind of extension of our program and then disappeared completely from phone contact. The Council assured her parents the program had definitely ended, and the girl took on a status of national significance as helicopters went searching. They found her alive and well, as the whole crew of them were, sailing happily down the coast of South Carolina. They had managed to run through Oregon Inlet above Cape Hatteras on an outgoing tide, a treacherous bit of navigation in the best of circumstances, at night. Oh, yes, and without a working motor. I knew this young man to be a very good sailor. If he ever acquires some judgement he’ll be great.

More in a bit.

In the Land of the Lucky

NO ONE should come to Los Angeles unless he is willing to be lucky.

Probably the most interesting thing about creative Los Angeles—Hollywood, let us call it, the collective manufactory of illusion spread among the hills of southern California--is indifference to its own celebrity.

Popular culture has been remarkably unexalting of the place. It has failed to exalt itself. Nowhere do we hear of Los Angeles the toddlin’ town, or wish to give our regards to Sepulveda Boulevard. In no nursery rhymes do children learn of the Thomas Vincent Bridge falling down. No lines form to see the changing of the guard at the mayor’s residence.

Nowhere is sung the pride of Los Angeles the city, perhaps because the city is not pretty, this sprawl of development larger than the Republic of Ireland, spread across foothills of sandy rock. The attitude of most Angelinos seems to be one of apology--for the smog, the traffic, the odd characters who populate its streets, the ubiquity of fabricated plastic.

Los Angeles is uncomfortable with scrutiny from the learned states of the east. Meanwhile its work has changed the world.

Since 2005 the global entertainment and media industry has grown at the rate of about 7.3 percent a year. By 2009, this uber-factory of songs, movies, television, video games and advertising is expected to produce revenues of nearly $2 trillion. The death of movies foretold so many times has proven unprophetic to the utmost. Online distribution of games, movies, music, and entertainment objects of vague definition has put rockets on the entertainment market.

The worldwide appetite for online entertainment services--Internet TV, video on demand, music downloads, games, gambling and adult entertainment--will reach $36 billion in 2009, a three-fold increase over this year. Most of this increase in production will take place in Los Angeles.
But the city is simply too busy grinding out product to trumpet its importance. You can see the evidence everywhere.

Directly across from our berth in San Pedro is a warehouse with one of its ends blown off. You’ll see how it got blown off when you watch the last Schwarzenegger movie. Just down the channel, Jack Sparrow’s Black Pearl broods darkly among the container ships, a pirate ship that looks like a pirate ship only in a general way: Actual workmen built the ship from the keel to the crosstrees and digital imagery supplied everything above that.

Two of our maintenance days aboard Exy were disturbed by teams of men rappelling from helicopters above a nearby wharf. In the climactic scene of the next Die Hard, look for bewildered figures on the tall ship in the background, their paint brushes arrested in mid stroke.

The place abides in ambiguous reality. It’s strange to realize that, as you watch Chaplin’s Great Dictator frothing and raving and climbing his arras, traffic was proceeding normally on La Brea Avenue 200 feet away.

Non self aggrandizing it may be, but the cultural references point to California more frequently than anywhere else on earth. It never rains in Southern California, so do you know the way to San Jose? Are you a Valley Girl or a little old lady from Pasadena? Is there a free wind blowing through your hair on Ventura Boulevard? Are you on the side of L.A. Law or L.A. Confidential?

You know the names of Oxnard, Beverly Hills and Long Beach, but can you point them out quickly on a map? Those places have very real substance. You can get in a car and drive from one of them to another.

All this I learned when Elaine, Exy Johnson’s new mate, took me on a drive through town in her very un-Californian beat-up Toyota. Together we visited some of the places in Los Angeles that live in the collective imagination of the world.

Such as the Chaplin studios at 1416 La Brea Avenue. Just a few blocks parallel from Hollywood Boulevard and about a half mile from Hollywood and Vine (a corner, by the way, now devoid of all commercial life), the Chaplin Studios enrich about half a block with little buildings in the semblance of an English Village, all of them fronting the 10,000 square-foot sound stage.

Chaplin built this complex on land recently cleared of orange groves in 1917, and it remained his headquarters until he left the country in 1953. It housed the making of most of Chaplin’s great films, including two of my favorites, Modern Times and The Great Dictator. About 10 years ago Jim Henson’s company bought it, which explains the figure of Kermit the Frog dressed as The Little Tramp on one of the gateposts. It was also the headquarters of A & M Records and—but you can easily find a list of the great things that happened there at http://www.seeing-stars.com/Studios/ChaplinStudios.shtml.

We stop long enough at the building to perform the obligatory tourist motions—press face against gate, speak disarmingly to the guard, shoot pictures through gate, back away slowly. Elaine is happy to be doing something very Hollywood-focused that she wouldn’t do without someone to guide.

Elaine came to sailing ships by way of the theater arts and a brief stopover in office work. A stage rigger by trade, Elaine got into tall ships as relief from a busted romance and an employer who playfully held a loaded pistol to her head. This man was—still is—a giant in the movie animation world. When he put the gun to her head and asked who would possibly miss her if he pulled the trigger, Elaine beheld a change of career in prospect. Coming to Los Angeles was her first retreat from reality, she says. After the gun incident, she leaped the second: sailing aboard tall ships. The third she can’t yet foresee. But she lives in the right place to find it. What E. B. White said of luck and New York goes double for Los Angeles.

Our next stop: Hollywood Boulevard, so famous now as to be the very symbol of fame—also a necessary check on the tourist checklist. We park the car a block from the street and somehow it’s still amusing to realize you can reach this place by car rather than a puff of magic fairy dust. A few short steps and our feet are planted on the very substance of celebrity: The Walk of Fame on Hollywood Boulevard.

Actually, our feet are planted on the names of luminaries both living and dead. Bernadette Peters is the first famous person we step on, followed by Dolly Parton, Diana Ross, Mack Sennett, Sylvester Stallone and Bob Barker. Every few feet another great name interrupts the pavement— Gloria Swanson, Bud Abbott, Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, Olivia De Haviland, Ray Bolger, Judy Garland—along with a symbol indicating the field of greatness in question—motion pictures, television, recording, live theater and performance, radio.

Fame comes in more flavors than even the entertainment business can encompass--unless Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong count as popular entertainers. They have stars for being famous on TV.

The arbitrary sequence of names tends to conflate disparate brands and wattages of fame. Thus Arsenio Hall resides next to Marilyn Monroe, and John Lennon beside Mae West.

It’s possible some archiving system may soon be needed for the famous who have become, well, less famous: Mabel Normand? Dale Robertson? Sons of the Pioneers? Some stars seem to require an explanation why they should be there in the first place. I’m thinking here of Buck Owen.

Given our current rate of celebrity production—this year some 23 names will achieve immortality, including Michael Caine, Michelle Pfeiffer, Erik Estrada, Barbara Walters, Sean “Diddy” Combs and Lily Tomlin—the Walk will need to be extended up to and over the Hollywood hills.

The commerce along Hollywood Boulevard runs to the slinky lingerie and team-logoed sportswear end of the spectrum, the shops mostly small, the whole tone of the retail environment inclining a few degrees to the seedy. But they suit the local market. Every city has its freak street, the place where the dispossessed and outlandish go to flaunt their defiance. Most of these streets in America contain kids saturated with piercings and tattoos. In Hollywood it contains grown men dressed as Wookies. These characters lurk in front of the Kodak Theater, scene of so many Academy Awards ceremonies, and sidle up to passers-by and attempt to have their picture taken, after which comes the bite for a couple bucks. We walk briskly past them.

From Hollywood Boulevard it’s a short drive—in fact it’s only a moderate walk, but let’s take the car—to a close view of one of the world’s best-known images, the Hollywood Sign on the shoulder of Mt. Cahuenga.

Built for $21,000 as an advertisement, the nine letters of the sign stand 30 feet wide and 50 feet tall, built of metal scaffolding, wires and utility poles. It originally read Hollywoodland, the full name of the housing development beneath it. It also originally enlivened the California night with a three-part blinking sequence, HOLLY, WOOD, LAND. The builders planned to take it down after a year and a half. But fortune intervened.

We wanted to hike up behind the letters on one of the trails of the state park that now houses the sign. But then we realized the park closed in half an hour.

“They’re really just aluminum siding anyway,” Elaine says.

However, we manage to drive close. Nearing the sign, ever nearer, on Beachwood Drive, which offers the closest approach, you can’t help but feel the power of it: the cynosure of billions, this beacon ablaze with promise. Give me your dreamy, your ambitious, your workday routine yearning to race across the sky. Its greatness rays filter down through the trees and lay a cover of stardust perhaps an inch thick.

Somehow just looking at it doesn’t satisfy the urge to know it, understand it, dwell with it. You need to keep watch over it constantly. I suggest using some of security cameras feeding to the web, http://www.hollywoodsign.org/247.html.

As we shift through the streets, another strange and unexpected thing appears in our windshield, this one what you might call secretly famous: the original Hollywoodland Realty Office, at 2700 North Beachwood Drive.

The little building sits enshaded among old trees and resembles, like the Chaplin buildings, an English country cottage, though the developers aimed at a more generalized quaint European village look. Built in 1923, the building anchored the development effort of the Hollywoodland tract, a 500-acre subdivision to be built on a former ranch. It was the reason the Hollywood sign was built.

Most of the houses from the original development are still here. And they have housed their share of celebrities—scarcely a location in Los Angeles hasn’t, including a great many alleys and the overturned lifeguard boats on Manhattan Beach. Some recognizable names among Hollywoodland residents: Doris Day, Lowell Thomas, Bela Lugosi, Melissa Manchester, Bugsy Siegel, Vincent Price, Connie Selleca, Peter Tork, Stan Kenton and Aldous Huxley. Oh yes, Madonna also lived here before she became a security risk.


We’re spending daylight in vast amounts. I make one last request: I want to see a beach. We head for Santa Monica.

Santa Monica really throbs on the several streets closest to the beach—the beach which seems to exist only as an ornament: I have yet to see crowds on any beach in Los Angeles. Citizens of the walk stroll and sport among the more elegant and “exclusive” shops of the town—not a tattoo or lingerie joint in sight. A pedestrian-only street, one of the few I’ve seen not killed outright by the exclusion of automobiles, contains street entertainers in plenty (yearly permit: $25), and people I could easily imagine to be film or music VIP’s now enjoying sport-shirt time with the family. Most of these people look rich and relaxed, even the kids.

Our walk takes us from one end of the street to another, passing gymnasts, comics, miscellaneous entertaining persons and, finally, dancers. Except these are not performers dancing for an audience. These are the pedestrians of the street pulled into several circles featuring a different style of dance in each: bossa nova, ballroom, freelance jazz. A set of music ends and another begins, and the dancing style changes to merengue, waltz and fandango. Twilight is falling and Santa Monica is dancing.

It’s this image that sticks in memory as the daylight finally drains away and the almost brighter lights of the storefronts take over. Elaine and I choose a restaurant on the strength of a tall ship pictured on its menu, and settle in to a single beer each. Tomorrow we go back to work on our tall ship, our small bit of fantasy in this town devoted completely to it.

Students of the Gale

Last week we took a week-long voyage to Catalina, though as with many of our voyages, high winds modified our plans. Instead of staying a week at the island, we returned to the mainland early and anchored off Long Beach for several nights--a frustrating decision but, given the swells we'd have to sleep on at Catalina, a good one.

We still managed to sail the daylights out of the boat. On our next to last day, Captain Steve Peckham, whom no one will ever accuse of cowardice, chose to exit the Long Beach breakwater and sail into the open Pacific with 10-foot swells and a constant wind of between 30 and 40 knots.

He did it with too much sail up, I thought, given the wind, but if anyone knows what the ship will bear, Peckham does. It was no surprise to me when the first 40-knot gust sent the captain running around the deck screaming “strike the upper now,” while the crew scrambled about in mayhem and the ship heeled way over and our high school students wet their pants.

I think he did it deliberately, for the adrenaline rush, but he denies it. For several hours we tore around in this maelstrom under reefed sails and damn few of them, water breaking over the bow and the masts creaking and popping and the seas tilting one way and another around us, and some of us on the top yard furling the wild sails and hanging on like leeches.

Up in the rigging you sometimes aren’t looking down, and so see nothing of the pitching and rocking of the boat. But you’d better believe you feel it up there, as if barrages of invisible force were thrusting you first forward and then back, first against the shrouds you’re hanging on to and then away from them. You learn to hold on with your eyelids. The students I took with me were exhilarated.

Somehow your response to all this throwing about passes beyond fear and goes right into giddy laughter, and the wild shout of the rodeo rider. I have seen the deck of a pitching boat erupt in a perfect riot of laughter. My own little crew of high schoolers—after I challenged them not to scream at every rising of the bow—turned immediately into a party of the most gleeful and concentrated little sailors I have ever seen on this boat. They hauled on their lines with an absolute crowing confidence, as they realized they were equal to this weather.

And they were. Next day after a calmer sail we got back into the harbor and the trifle of wind that manages to get in through all the cranes and hills and illegal immigrants. The students didn't want to leave. Neither do I.

The Big Gun

Sure, it’s a great thing sailing out Angel’s Gate to see dolphins, seals, the occasional whale. Given enough time, even the sound of kids puking assumes a consoling and reposeful tone, a reminder of the cycles of nature. Kids sail, kids get sick, kids feel better, everyone starts to enjoy themselves. Every sail, every outward course, every billowing of canvas against the smoggy sky, we have reason to be happy.

But things don’t really heat up until Captain Mike loads the cannon.

For a large part of this season the Exy suffered along with an ordinary salute cannon, the kind that mounts in one of the belaying pin holes and shoots charges the size of shotgun shells. This cannon, you’d better believe, about the size of a large rolling pin, can make some noise. It has become the custom here—whether from long tradition or spontaneous invention—to salute other sailboats as they pass us by making a very loud noise. This purpose our little gun answered pretty well, speaking out with a spirited bang, deep-voiced for its size, and satisfying in the utmost. Yet, some people felt we could do better.

Since I arrived here in December I’ve come to understand not only many points of seamanship that were mysteries to me before; I’ve also come to understand the purpose of lots of the junk lying in the supply cabin on the dock. For three months, while visiting this cabin for spare rope, varnish, seine twine and the like, I’ve been amused at the sight of the truly stupendous cannon piled into the back of the little house—obviously some kind of prop, maybe from a long-ago pirate party or something. But no. As I came to understand, this was no prop.

Somewhere or other, Captain Mike got hold of this weapon—or just the cylinder of it—because our basic salute cannon simply was not loud enough. Captain Mike wanted a Really Big Gun. He built the carriage and the wheels out of fiberglass, then painted the whole to look like the genuine wooden marine cannons of old, a very convincing job. Two weeks ago, at the request of one of my shipmates who had taken leave of her senses, Captain Mike gleefully consented to dragging this thing on board, and setting it up on the port deck as a permanent fixture.

So now, there it sits, its squat form filling the midships deck, its muzzle poking out with considerable menace toward the Ports O’ Call rest rooms. It would be scary enough if the thing didn’t actually shoot.

But it does actually shoot.

When this monster goes off, it consumes about a pint and a half of black powder per shot. This powder comes in black plastic bottles that look like those you buy when you need to add oil to your engine—one entire bottle per shot. The powder itself comes from Germany, from a company called—this is absolutely true—Schuetzen, as in “Ve now going to schuetzen zee cannon.”

The first time I heard it I didn’t actually hear it—everyone was covering their ears. Rather, I felt the explosion as a radical fluctuation in air pressure. I have read accounts of sea battles in which the cannon fire is said to stun the wind. Now I know what this means.

Now, no voyage is complete without at least one ceremonial blast from this gun. Usually the blast comes as we’re nearing home. The captain will get a look in his eye, my shipmate Amber will notice it, the powder will come out. Amber will shove a huge wad of powder down the muzzle with a loading rod, sprinkle a bit on the touch hole, then stand by with her slow match until a likely target comes into range. Everyone around the cannon puts on headphones. All the while Captain Mike will be quietly bubbling with joy.

Then the great moment arrives: Another ship heaves into view, I do my best to communicate to them via pantomime the concept of hearing impairment. Amber shouts “Fire in the hole” and touches her linstock to the touch hole. For just a moment the powder in the pan fizzes and pops while the flame works down to the main charge in the breech. And then….

We recently saluted the little town of Avalon, on Catalina Island, upon our arrival there. Avalon sits in a gentle valley running down to the water, and is in all ways a quiet and peaceful little place. When our cannon went off, with its godless and rock-shivering noise, it was as hell had split open at this precise longitude and god was saying “Time’s up for peacefulness.” The echo of that crash returned to us again and again, for many long seconds after the shot. I was surprised we weren’t immediately asked to leave the place, but then, one makes certain allowances for maritime tradition.

That is, sometimes one makes allowances.

Two days ago we decided we would salute the Irving Johnson just as she left her dock, squarely in the middle of one of the busiest commercial ship channels in the world. The shot sent up the hordes of seagulls on the dock, and probably deafened the customers at the fish market there, which was expected.

What was not so expected was, first, the radio call from the Coast Guard asking us what in God’s name was that noise, and maybe we should call them before shooting off a gun that size in the harbor; and second, the visit from the Los Angeles Port Police, who, no doubt after changing their underwear, hurried down to our dock and came on board and inspected the gun, and agreed it was a truly impressive gun, and right at home on board our ship…but perhaps we could call them before shooting it in the harbor next time.

So there it is. We are chastened in the use of our cannon, but not by any means gun shy. We don’t intend to become gun shy. Never say die while there’s a shot in the locker, is the old sailor’s adage, and I happen to know we have at least a dozen shots left.

Life Aboard

We finished another day’s work and kept watch down the channel for the Irving Johnson—she’d been gone for a week on a voyage among the Channel Islands. Tiffany brought Judy aboard—she’ll be here two weeks as a volunteer, bless her heart—and Saul dug into his stuff and brought out some refreshing beverages. Judy immediately began making a big dinner in our galley, with me peeling potatos, Courtney drifted in and out—pried away from her MySpace account for the moment--and the whole operation shifted into after-work mode. A couple of truly stupendous luxury cruise ships went by, their decks crowded with waving people—you need to look way up to see them as these mountain ranges go floating past. The mariachi bands were already warbling away at the fish market dock beside us, and Saul came into the galley to hang out awhile.

You know, he said, living aboard a tall ship is really the best way to go. You make almost no money, but you have room and board taken care of, you get to hang out with a lot of brilliant crazies, and every day or so you get to sail. You get to climb to the top of the mast and look at whales or dolphins, explain to a bunch of kids how to haul a ton of mainsail and gaff to the top of the mainmast, and then stand back and watch them do it, steer the boat, anchor at interesting islands and explore them, zip around in your little inflatable, and be generally arvy-dar and self reliant among the pasty white landlubbers you see ashore. You really could do much worse.

Saul’s headed off this week to work on another tall ship, this one in Chicago, where he’ll be first mate. It’s probably not the career his scientist parents envisioned for him, and maybe he won’t stay with it. But for now, like so many people who drift into this world, he is captured.

A bit later, Irving came grandly in and discharged her crew of college students, the Irving’s regular crew came over for dinner and the sun went down on another raucous Saturday in San Pedro.

The evening drew on, the refreshing beverages got refreshed, and things in the nav station got increasingly debased until Tiffany finally crawled off to her cabin—not even Carlos wrestling her to the floor could stop her--and the party broke up. Tomorrow, another sail among dolphins and whales.

Yes, Saul, I know what you mean.

Tarring the Rig

Hey, you gotta tar the rig today.

You see all those ropes up there, brother? All the blocks and links and pins and shackles? Get a harness on, you’re going up to be among them.

Because you see the bigger lines leading down from up there, the ones that look like a ladder, starting near the top of the mast and going down to that platform 50 feet up, and then down from there to the deck, where they form a ladder seven feet wide? Those are the shrouds. They stabilize the masts laterally. But more important, they let hot-stuff sailors like yourself climb way the hell up into the sky and lord it over the distant world down below. Working a tall ship you can stay up there a good long time and no one knows you’re goofing off.

It’s a good thing the shrouds do. But they get thirsty-dry. They need a coat of this special little formula we got here, made of a bunch of ingredients including oils and turpentiney stuff and maybe some essence of heave-ho and whale tooth. It’s called pine tar, and it’s been used on ships since tall ships began.

What you do is, you take a squeeze bottle of this stuff—an old dish soap bottle will do—and tie it to your body with a length of twine. Then climb up to the top of the mast with this bottle and a rag, and start wiping down the lines with it.

Take your time. It’s gonna take several days. The shrouds will take two days each, if you’re working alone. And after the shrouds, you’ll want to get the backstays, two on each of the main and foremasts. For these, you’ll need to get in little boson’s chair at the top of the mast, and be slowly lowered along the stay, from 70 feet up down to the deck, by a person you trust like few people you have ever trusted.

Then how about the peak pendants? For these you’ll need to walk out along the gaff, 10 feet over the deck, balancing with feet only. And then, of course, the lifts. Oh, the lifts’ll be easy. Just loosen them as much as you can, then climb up the shrouds again to reach the top parts, pulling the lifts over to you with one hand and tarring with the other; then get the lower parts by walking along one of the housetops and reaching out over the deck as far as you can. Better rig a tagline to hold the lifts away from the boom: If you get tar on the mainsail, the first mate is legally bound to cut off your thumbs.

The whole thing is just dip and wipe, dip and wipe. Work slowly and rub your rag into the service of the shrouds like you’re trying to polish them. Don’t quit till the service is soaked with black liquid. After a while your rag will be saturated with pine tar, also your hands, and you won’t need to refresh it so often. Just work that rag, brother. Get comfortable with your rag. When you’re finished, you’ll have a good looking ship with gleaming black rigging that looks supple and fresh. And you’ll smell good. Some soap makers even put the fragrance in their soap. It smells like a campfire in an evergreen forest.

But before you get started, go and find the lousiest, dirtiest, oldest clothing you can possibly find, the kind of clothing it would give you pleasure to destroy. Because by the time you’re finished, you’ll look like the creature from grime planet. It’s just the pine tar, really, a good and honest residue from a good day’s work. You’ll remember this when you go out for a beer afterwards and the other bar patrons move away from you. That's okay, you still got your crew, and they are just a crazy as you are.

In Search of the Killer Dana

The curious thing about Dana Point, where Exy took us for three days last week, is its blandness. All upscale, all palm-treed, all highwayed. It sits at a place where a ridge of highlands comes down to the Pacific, making a very picturesque headland with cliffs. The headland itself bears the name Dana Point, and the town behind goes by that or San Juan Capistrano, its original name, tiny though it was until three decades ago, when it began to grow like mad. The cliffs entered popular consciousness through the huge annual migration of swallows, who come every year to nest there—though fewer now because of development. The Inkspots wrote a song about it, which you might have heard Bugs Bunny sing in one of his cartoons:

When the swallows come back to Capistrano
That's the day you promised to come back to me
When you whispered, "Farewell", in Capistrano
T’was the day the swallow flew out to sea

But Dana Point has much more to boast about, and probably should.

I had time to kill during one of our days there and found my way into town, intent on fleshing out a bit of cultural history. More than half a century ago, a young man named Hobie Alter began building surfboards in a small shop he’d bought in Dana Point, and added some significant flavors to the American taste. It’s not too much to say that from his work in that shop we get much of what we know today as American Surfer culture: Beach Boys music, surfboards posted in rows along the beach, Annette Funicello, Surfing Surfari and the Endless Summer. I wanted to see the place where it started.

I found my way to the Chamber of Commerce office and asked the nice lady behind the desk for the location of Hobie Alter's original surf shop.

Blank stare. Another nice lady joins us. Same question, same stare. There's a Hobie Surf Shop down in the shopping center, they say, you just go back down that road there and--No no, I say, I'm thinking of the original surf shop, the one built by Hobie Alter way, way back, where he made his surfboards. It's around here very close.

We all scratch our heads for a while. Then a man from the back room comes out. Yes, he says, he knows the place. Just down the street, second building after the intersection, on the right. It's mixed in with a bunch of newer buildings so you have to look. And it's not a surf shop anymore.

I follow his directions, down the street and across the intersection, two buildings down, and there it is, The Place Where It All Began: It's now a dive bar with a loopy Mexican theme. An old frame building that you can just recognize from the old black and white photographs. Nothing on the outside hints at its history but one long wooden surfboard fixed to the second storey facade. No plaque, no poster.

This time there are dazed looks when I enter, faces at the bar, busy with the slow work of inebriation. The bar is along one side, small tables on the other. Like any other bar. The magic dust of historical momentousness does not flutter down around me. They have decorations made of palm leaves, a sign advertising $2 beers, coconuts carved into faces. I step out as soon as I enter. These people don't even know what this place was.

In 1954, Hobie Alter began shaping balsa surfboards in this building, having been "encouraged" by his father to stop doing it in the family garage in Laguna Beach. His father bought the lot, a lonesome spot on a lonesome stretch of the Pacific Coast Highway. Alter shaped the boards, the surfers bought the boards, and the lonesome shop suddenly become very crowded. It became more crowded yet four years later, when Alter and Gordon Clark finally learned how to build a decent board out of foam and fiberglass, a much lighter and much cheaper product. This was the revolution. Now it was not just the California crazies who came by and hung around, but increasingly kids from the east, from the south, from the north. From anywhere near a breaking surf. Because surfing suddenly had mass appeal. Surfboards suddenly didn't require an unconscionable outlay of capital to purchase, or a long wait to receive. Supply went rocketing upward. By the end of 1969 Alter was producing 250 fiberglass surfboards a week, and production had moved to a small factory. But demand grew faster.

Increasingly, too, there were kids showing up at the shop who liked surfing all right, but who really liked the lifestyle that went with it, a lifestyle that was now becoming for many a tantalizing detour. They forgot about work and fell in love with sunsets and bikinis and baggie shorts. They cooked hot dogs and drank whisky and pineapple juice at Dana Cove. And with Alter still hard at work, they wanted to be part of what everyone seemed to believe was the dawn of a legend.

I walked the few steps through the sprawl to the other Hobie surfshop, the one the Chamber ladies directed me to first. Inside, indeed, Hobie surfboards stood in racks, along with hundreds of Hobie shirts and other Hobie gear. But more numerous by far were sun-worshiper hats, jewelry, tank tops, sunglasses, tote bags, and many varieties of beach-related bric-a-brac. This was Alter’s later surf shop, the one he built to stay current with the huge boom he had helped create. A young man there answered my questions, a surfer, who did not seem especially pleased that the surf shop he signed up with two years ago had become a boutique. But so it had happened.

Yes, he said, Hobie Alter is alive and well and living in Idaho, though an old man, now, in his 80s. He comes in every so often just to say hello, but the shop and its products have nothing to do with him anymore. He licenses the name and stays out of things. Some of the old surfer gang went with him to live in Idaho, all of them old men together. Alter's sons still oversee the name licensing and so on, and keep an eye on production at the factory, which still produces surfboards. As for the Hobie Cat, another of Alter's great inventions, the most popular catamaran in the country, the young man doesn't know much, and in a way it doesn't matter. Because it was surfing that Hobie loved first, he says. It was surfing that Hobie loved best, like it was in the old days. And here he points to a photograph on the wall that I had to look at twice to believe.

The photograph shows a man on a surfboard cutting cleanly down the face of a wave that is 20 feet high.

That, he said, was the famous wave, the Killer Dana. When certain weather patterns set in around Dana Point, waves would curl around that headland and roll in toward the beach at heights of 30 feet, sometimes. It was that wave that got surfers coming here in the first place, that brought Hobie Alter out of his garage in Laguna Beach. And it was that wave that sent the California surfing spirit rolling across the country.

But the 70s came along, he continued, and you know what happened then. The city of Dana Point asked for and received lots of federal money to build a luxury marina in the cove. Construction began with three days of public celebration. It finished with a mile-long breakwater beside a huge concrete island, and slips for thousands of yachts. Tons of rock went into the water just where the wave came around.

Yeah, I said.

That put an end to the surf scene in Dana Point, and destroyed one of the great breaks of the world. There was some noise about it at the time, but really not much when you consider the loss. And who were surfers anyway but a bunch of deadbeat teenagers?

Which may be why Dana Point doesn't make much of Alter's original surf shop now, the young man said. We're too embarrassed by the killing of our own original culture. Of course, there's still a fun little wave nearby, just down the way at Doheny Beach, and folks still come out to ride it. But it's nothing like it was.

I thanked him and left. Walking down the hill toward the water and the expensive marina where my own guilty boat lay tied up, I tried to find some more engaging moral to the story than "nothing like it was." But I couldn't. Dana Point is a sprawl of expensive condos and upscale strips. The force that used to dwell here has gone. Hobie Alter is nowhere near an ocean, and the birthplace of Surfin' USA is a Mexican restaurant.

The Day

Had a great sail today. I'm onboard the Exy Johnson, one of two brigantines named for the pioneers of tall ship education, the husband-and-wife team of Irving and Exy Johnson. Mostly we do day sails just outside the channel at San Pedro, and today was no different. Both ships went out today, which was unusual, and our crew were young people in training to sail tall ships, so the professional crew mostly stood back and watched. I took pictures. This one shows Irving Johnson with Catalina Island in the background.

Here's our first mate Tiffany Krihwan driving the boat, a very skilled captain in her own right and a blessing to those who work for her.

Here are a few of the less-active student crew.

Next week we're making a 60-mile trip to Dana Point to take over the program that The Spirit of Dana Point can't, being in drydock for a few weeks. Dana Point is a fascinating place which I hope to write more about.

More From the Far Field of Winters

Two emails in four days! Readers will remember that our poor wayfarer has just left a temporary job and is now on the lookout for another such, and is currently staying with friends--or family, we can't tell. We wish we could say that, based on the clues presented here, we can fix our traveler's location, but we cannot. The aunt and uncle he refers to could be anyone. His outlook seems to remain good--nothing about the "groping limbs of darkness" we have heard about before. And he still has a sense of humor.

I think I must be getting less interesting. Last night my aunt and uncle took me into their living room because they wanted to discuss something important with me.

My aunt did all the talking. She said they didn't know what my plans were or what I intended to do and I said that made three of us. She said she was glad I was there in their apartment and was welcome to stay as long as I wanted--though she of course would take no rent. She said wasn't it true that I really only wanted freedom and no close connections with anyone, at least not now, and I said yes, absolutely true. Then she said I was a puzzle and she was going to figure me out, as if she hadn't just articulated the very key. She said she'd assumed I would stay awhile in _____ and take up the pursuit of a teaching job, as I had before confessed to something like an interest in that, and because I was getting to be that age where if I weren't careful I could wake up an old man in a rescue mission and have no regular income. I said aunt I'm already there. She said what I needed was a regular job and a regular woman and a place to settle down, as a man needs a home and family and what did I think of that. I said I agreed completely that a regular job, woman and home would suit me fine provided my objective were neverending despair, as that had basically been the lesson of my last 20 years. And she said there was nothing wrong with teaching and I said no there wasn't. My uncle watched the ceiling. She said I had never had any career, never posted any achievement, and I said, well, yeah, probably 15 years in newspapers and 20 as a professional writer is not really a career, and those travel- and feature-writing awards don't seem like any great shakes at this point. At the time I was inclined to regard them in the light of a recognition, but I see now I was being unreasonable.

She looked at me blankly. She said a teaching job would give me a regular paycheck and I'd have all kinds of time off. I said I have all kinds of time off now. She said I'd get a pension and live my last years in comfort and I said I have never had comfort in my life and didn't expect to want any. Where's your retirement plan, she asked, and I said at present it consisted of jumping off a bridge at age 72, which she did not find humorous in the least.

Eventually she lightened up and seemed to be satisfied. We parted as if we had eached a crucial decision, and if we did actually decide something I hope to find out what it is before I'm supposed to deliver on it. I'm afraid to tell her I want to go to Florida in January. I'm afraid to offer to pay rent again because she'll say no, and I'll feel like I'm imposing.

So there are my last few days. I'm sorry for this recitation but I thought you might find it funny. It says no fine thing about me that I do.

Another Dubious Correspondance

We have received further communication from Winters, that far-away and wide-scattered writing friend of ours. As usual it's another fragment of diatribe, there is no telling what prompted it. The writing begins without explanatory preamble, and no other enlightening detail comes through to us, neither a return address. He speaks chumily enough, and though we learn nothing of the identity of his correspondant--could it be us?--something of the warmth we used to know in him, the passion, and certainly the earnestness, illuminate the page. He seems to be speaking to some far gallery, though on a topic best dicussed in whisper. Such is the paradox of our friend--one of the paradoxes.

Somewhere along the line I came to the conclusion that those things I yearned for, in the first place would not provide the solace and security I sought, but in the second place were positively bad for me. The yearning for a steady woman and steady job, for example. I almost had these things many times. Yet with every approach to their proximity, I felt shades of the prison house closing down around me, and withdrew. Withdrew with some vehemence, I say, despite the difficulty. Getting out of a full-time job was the hardest thing I ever did, followed closely by staying out of a full-time job. Getting out of not one but many close associations with woman--who cannot guess the pain of that? But always the yearning, always the looking for surcease of restlessness. Some day I would find it.

I sought it in writing. Early on, writing looked enough like a worthy dream that I chose to follow it, and follow it I did. Follow it through staff jobs, freelance jobs, my name in great publications and small. And yet for all the good it did me I might as well have been digging ditches. Not fortune did I earn, nor fame, nor reputation. Nor even did I acquire a marketable advantage by it. For writers fall from the very sky. You can pick writers out of the trees with a slingshot. Without even touching the ranks of those who truly earn livings at it, there are many--millions--who style themselves writers, though their firmest achievement be but a grocery list. And more are born every year. Among these multitudes I was one, and not a very noticeable one.

Thus did long association with the dream, that foolish hobgoblin, prolong my suffering. But there were other dreams, each embraced with vigor and abandoned, sometimes many years later, with despair. So many others, indeed, that at last I came to suspect the yearning itself was at fault. Never would I stand in that sunny meadow of complete comfort and security. The perfect job would never come, the perfect woman would never show up. It was all going to be a long series of makeshifts and compensations. What was more, the best guide for behavior was not going to be that deep yearning any longer. It would inform, perhaps, but not guide. It would be one voice at the table, not the only voice, and its judgments would be scrutinized more thoroughly than most.

Just as women--allegedly--seem to often fall into that syndrome of looking for the prince, the man who will make everything all right, so do men frequently subscribe to the delusion of airtight job security, profound repose and reward, which the right work will confer upon them. The right work will save everything.And yes, it may be that the spouse will save everything for some men. How many people of both sexes, but men especially, invest that hope with every succoring and redemptive notion their spirits are capable of. If only they could get the job right, if only they coul find the right spouse, everything would be satisfactory. And yes, there seems to be a strong parallel between the delusions of perfect man and perfect work. The right job will fill that gap in a man's life, the right man in a woman's. But there is certainly overlap, as I myself am witness. I despaired of finding the job that would make the dark places light, and when that failed I despaired of finding the woman who would do likewise. Neither of them existed. Both were the creation of fear and imagination. And so we might indeed guess that this desire itself, this quiet subterranean yearning for the all-inclusive solution to our anxiety, is to blame for much fallacious behavior. Let us call it something perky and memorable. Let us give it a handle--the better to throw it out the window with. Let us call it the Sunny Meadow Delusion, and let us learn to beware of all the sunny meadows in our dreams.

Experto crede!

Coming About

Weird stuff has been going on since I last wrote. My fiance and I split, I returned to my third summer as a sailboat captain in the Chesapeake, then found a job on a schooner when that job ended. Now I am a deckhand on the schooner Virginia, based in Norfolk. I haven't done much writing and haven't missed it. Writing may turn out to be a fool's errand, I'm not entirely sure yet. Anyway, here's a picture of me and the rest of the crew from the schooner. Their website, by the way, is schoonervirginia.org. Wish us all luck, eh?

Before I go, one more picture. This one of me and one of the best sailors aboard. Here we're striking an angry pose to represent our working relationship.

More From the Journal of Sour Grapes

I can't resist another cut from The Bitch Goddess Review, perhaps more bitter than the last. Which probably only proves that practice makes the heart grow bitterer. Once again, don't shoot me; I'm just the excerpter.

* * * * *

Well then. The Times recently ran a story noting the sudden abundance of books using the events of 9/11 as a theme. Abundant they may be, but not exactly early. No, it took the serious writers a while to get around to writing about 9/11, the Times notes. Lesser books have come and gone. But it took three years for Literature to come to grips with this tragedy in a way that will endure. All praise and hosannas to these brave and battling artists!

One of those books was written by Nick McDonell, a 21-year-old novelist already “acclaimed” as the author of Twelve, a first novel written when he was yet innocent of two decades. Twenty one years old is mighty young to be dealing with human tragedy on a grand scale. I think of Hamlet asking the actors visiting Ellsinore whether they subscribed to “the late innovation” when they performed, referring to the Elizabethan-era gimmick of having children perform the grownup dramas of the day by keening their lines at the tops of their voices. Shakespeare didn’t care for it.

Now, I am all in favor of children writing serious books. I have no doubt some of them write very well. Only I suspect that the renown they enjoy says more about the publishing industry’s need for saleable stars than the presence of practiced skill.

As discerning as we all like to think ourselves about writing, it’s nevertheless true an author’s reputation sells a book faster than its quality. Publicity departments declare authors prodigies for the simple reason that the great unwashed readership lacks the time for comparative judgment. Greatness usually doesn’t show for many years anyway, but publishers need the return right now. Especially in the case of authors, who is called good is considered good. Which is why I can’t remember the last book whose author was not proclaimed brilliant by his jacket copy.

Marketing departments also love it when prodigies can be made of unlikely material, like children, or former illiterate people, or former dead people—anyone about whom they may speak in not-completely-disprovable wonder.

My friend went to hear this author read during the publicity tour for his first novel. He was nice, she said. Afterwards, playing a hunch, she asked him how it happened that a large publishing house should so much as glance at work from such an unlikely a source.

Well, said the source, his father worked in New York journalism; he knew a lot of publishers.

My friend liked the kid. But knowing as many starving writers as she does, she could not exactly applaud his success. It seemed to her—even to her, a bystander in this game—that the laurels too often went not to those who worked hard and wrote well, but to those it would be fun to gog at in amazement.

Another Spin of the Random Excerpt Wheel

Ben Hecht on the appeal of Teddy Roosevelt:

The second time I cheered for Teddy, I cheered the words he spoke. It seemed to me I would never hear finer words said by a man, and, perhaps, I have not.

There was no historic stage wait this time. Some five thousand men and women sat in silence in the Milwaukee auditorium. They had come to hear Teddy Roosevelt speak, but it was doubtful whether they would.

On his arrival in Milwaukee that forenoon, Teddy had been shot by a would-be assassin. The bullet had plowed into his midriff. He had been taken, bleeding, to the hospital. Surgeons had cut him open and probed for the bullet and been unable to find it.

We in the audience were uncertain whether we would see and hear our Teddy or listen to a bulletin announcing his death. At ten o’clock a group of men came out on the stage. They were escorting a pale-faced, walrus-mustached figure to the speaker’s stand. It was Teddy.

Surgical bandages wrapped the thick torso under its short cut-away coat. Teddy’s voice was fainter and squeakier than I had ever heard it. He held up his hand for silence this time and we gave him the auditorium instantly. He looked as if he might topple over, if we kept him standing too long.

I have never checked my memory of his speech against the records of that night, so I do not vouch for its literal accuracy. However, these are the words I remember.

“Friends and fellow Americans,” said the walrus mustache grinning at us. “I was shot this morning and the doctors haven’t yet removed the bullet from my insides. They are going to operate on me when I get back to the hospital. I came here to tell you one thing. I want you to know that whatever happens to me, I have had a hell of a good time on this earth, for which I am grateful alike to my God, my friends and my enemies.”

Long after Teddy’s ambulance had clanged back to the hospital with him in it, we were still on our feet cheering.

And why was I full of hoorays for Teddy Roosevelt? Why did I respond so worshipfully to his exuberance? Was I admiring myself in a large gaudy mirror; applauding the quality that was at the bottom of my own character?

I doubt this easy answer. There is a life force in hero worship beyond personal psychology, a sort of racial optimism that keeps the human tribe from drifting into psychic defeat and melancholy.

….It is the cry of despair the hero denies for us. He is no mad man reeling and without a goal. He is no structure without foundation. He is no soul overcome by the confusion and dreariness of living. What we see of him glittering in the spotlight is a winner, a human who has met destiny and pinned its shoulders to the mat, a happy man.

Such was my relation to the popeyed hero of San Juan Hill, of Doubtful Rivers, forgotten causes and tattered political phrases. I rejoiced to see in high office not a
sage or statesman but a happy man always ready to enjoy himself swinging the world by the tail.

--From Child of the Century

Excerpt From The Bitch Goddess Review

Here's a passage from the latest number of “The Bitch Goddess Review, a Journal of Sour Grapes,” a sarcastic little sheet overseen by my friend Winters, who really ought to get out more. Don’t shoot me, I’m just the excerpter.

* * * * *

But to return to our vivisection of Barbara Kingsolver.

I have been nose deep in “High Tide in Tucson,” her collection of essays drawn from the trying life of a full-time world-famous author. Novels are Kingsolver's primary sort of literary emission, not essays, but she’s branching out. Because it’s wonderful being an essayist, isn’t it ? Such scope for literary talent, such a précis for living--the essay. The jacket copy assures us these essays show the author at her brilliant best, and how is it we forget that every jacket connected to every book ever published has assured us likewise?

The essays are personal. We hear of Kingsolver’s trials as a mother, of the pain of learning to “multitask,” of the uncertainty with which she performed onstage in a band made up of other famous authors. We learn through her careful scientific process of remembering what she learned in college that some animals dally with non-mates in secret, and so perhaps with humans. In short, we experience with her all she has known of the range of human enterprise, the whole two yards.

To my besotted eye, of course, there appears to be precious little difference between what the book publicity department calls “compelling insights from the small departments of life,” and what the rest of us call grumping.

A certain turned-outwardness characterizes Kingsolver’s writing, a certain share-it-with-you, as if she is tipping her cards to us, but nothing more brilliant than this, so far as I can tell. No gripping enlightenment. No pinky-fresh phrasing. No sounding trumpet.

This is not to disparage her, not in the least. It’s only to try to understand, in so far as we can, why Kingsolver can get away with doing this sort of thing and the rest of us cannot.

Much the same, I’ll be bound, could be said for many of the lady authors that now so ornament the landscape out there. But no. Save that for another time. I like to read a lot of them. Some of them I like a great deal. (Hey, I just stole from Dorothy Parker.) But oftentimes you find yourself delighted with them not so much because they write well as because they can write at all. Yet their names are heaped up high with the celebrity of their work.

As for these essays, without question most of the rest of us could gather words in about the same quality of combination as they exhibit. I could make an essay about my time working in a summer camp, for example. I could turn my everyday morning sequence into an essay, describe my time of rising and my reason for that time, the conditions which have forced such a time upon me. I could speak of my shaving strategy, the vicissitudes of complection. I could bring in references to bugs and other authors. I could speak of the poetry of the soap dish, and how the peculiar pattern of mildew in my tub takes me by allusion back to my first boyish love of Christ. For a concluding insight I could make the flushing toilet into a metaphor for the fresh start of the day.

But in the first place it’d never fly with anyone; I would get no book jackets praising my brilliance. And in the second place I’d have to bore myself to a state of material disintegration to get all the way through it.

Sour grapes here? Very many of them, yes. But also my own little attempt at insight; something along the lines of this: If this stuff gets taken seriously, and this is the kind of stuff most of us turn out just warming up, maybe we should have a higher opinion of ourselves. Maybe we should stop looking, even just a moment, for the felicitous, the keen, the crackling, to come out of our efforts, and aim instead for the merely competent. Maybe it’s time to lower our standards.