Scratching the Horizon

by Izzy Paskowitz

  We crisscrossed the country a bunch of times, those first couple years, when I was eight and ten and twelve. All the way to Rhode Island, down to Florida, and back along the Gulf coast through Louisiana and Texas. Summers, we’d find our way back to California, usually through Mexico, where there was almost always great surfing along the Pacific Coast. At each stop, we’d set up camp and fall back on our routines. Remember, we were a full house by the time we hit the road—or, I should say, a full camper. There were nine of us kids, ranging from toddler to teenager. My father would get up early, usually with the sun. If we were on the coast, he’d grab a couple waves first thing; if we were feeling up to it, a few of us might join him. Then he’d come back and say his morning prayers. He’d put on the tefillin and start chanting, though sometimes he’d forget the prayers halfway through. Or he’d lose his focus and drift towards something else—some problem with the camper, some drama playing out on the beach, something.… I don’t believe his morning ritual was about the prayers so much as it was about the ritual itself, the routine. He was a religious man, but only in a going through the motions sort of way. If he had to stop his prayers halfway through, he might never get back to them, because they were mostly meaningful in the setting out to do them.

  He made the effort, paid his respects. And, to him, that was everything.

  For a while, he kept up with our Chairman Mao march; each morning, he’d put us through our paces. It got to where we were so leaned out by our no-fat, no-frills, no-fun diets and by our morning calisthenics we started to look like skinny little sea urchins; we were all brown-skin-and-bones. When we’d stop for a visit with friends or family members every few months for a hot shower and a short breather, they’d ask after our health and well-being. We were ridiculously fit, but we looked so skinny and dirty and dusty. We’d always relied on each other for just about everything—love, support, friendship, partners in mischief—but now that we were living in the camper this was especially so. We’d created our own little world, moved to our own rhythms. We didn’t really see ourselves in any kind of objective way. But folks would look at our skinny selves and how we lived and wonder what the hell my parents were up to.

  Now, I sometimes wonder the same. My siblings, they probably do as well. I mean, it was a pretty messed-up childhood, even though it was messed up in mostly wonderful, exciting ways. We made our own rules, made our own adventures, so that part was great. We had our own little cultural immersion program going, and we were totally immersed in the water, totally at ease on our surfboards and in any number of whacky social situations, so that was great, too. I don’t think I was ever bored—not even on the long drives we sometimes took, from one beach to the next. I don’t think I ever felt scared or alone. Wouldn’t trade any of it. Not a single day. But there’s no denying we missed out on a lot of the fundamental elements of growing up. We didn’t have any kind of formal schooling, other than a couple years, here and there, for the oldest. We didn’t stay put in any one place long enough to develop any real or lasting friendships, other than with each other. And we certainly didn’t have parents who modeled any kind of traditional work ethic, or showed us how we might make our ways in the world beyond the family camper, away from the beach.

  But, like I said, I wouldn’t trade the way I grew up for anything. Because, hey, when we were in the middle of it, hopping from one town to the next, one wave to the next, one adventure to the next … it’s like we didn’t have a care in the world.

  That would come later, I guess.

  5

  San O

  Once we lit out for the open road and started living in the camper, the beach at San Onofre was the closest thing we had to a home. It was the place we’d return to each summer; it became like our base of operations, our Northern Star. And if it wasn’t for good old Richard Nixon, our lives might have spun in a whole other direction. We might never have taken up with our good, lifelong pals the Tracys, or started our family surf camp, or ridden the hell out of Trestles, a collection of sweet surf spots up and down the beach where we learned to really rip.

  Yep, say what you will about Tricky Dick, but surfers in Southern California hold a special place in their sun-splashed hearts for the man, and to us Paskowitzes in particular he was a kind of godsend. Or, at least, a slightly out-of-step old uncle who might have fucked up from time to time but still looked out for us. Don’t know that my parents were all that thrilled with Nixon’s politics, but as kids we didn’t know the first thing about politics. We all knew who he was, of course. With or without San O, we knew who he was. And it’s not just because he bought a Presidential retreat up the road in San Clemente. It’s mostly because I don’t think it was possible to grow up in that time and place without hearing his name, even if you didn’t go to school or read the newspaper or live in a house, and if you grew up like we did you tended to hear it in a negative way. For us as little kids, his name was like a punch line to every anti-establishment or generation-bashing joke we could think to tell. We blamed Nixon for Vietnam, for the generation gap, for whatever else was dragging us down. And all of this was way, way before Watergate, before folks knew the guy was completely corrupt.

  But Richard Nixon’s one saving grace, far as we were concerned, came when he opened up the state beach at San Onofre, which for years had been run as a private surf club. You needed to be a member to surf there, or know somebody who was a member, or know how to sneak past the gatekeepers who ran the place, and that just wasn’t my dad’s thing. He’d grown up on the public beaches of San Diego, and it rubbed him a bunch of different wrong ways that folks wanted to privatize what he’d always thought should be public and open and free. It went against his nature, especially since he used to surf that break as a kid. The way it works is that the beach itself is public land, up to the high-water mark, but the access to the beach can be owned or controlled. At San O, the bluffs hugged so close to the shoreline for such a long, long stretch it was difficult to reach the water if you weren’t a member without a really long trek from the nearest access point. There was no place to park, and you certainly couldn’t camp, so most folks just took their surfing business elsewhere. But then Nixon came along and bought his famous Casa Pacifica, the Western White House, in San Clemente, which overlooked the Upper Trestles surf spot, just north of the San Onofre Surf Club beach, and he decided to turn the area into a state park.

  To my dad and his surfer pals, it was like a great gift.

  Guess we should have another special place in our hearts for Ronald Reagan, who was our governor at the time, because he was the one who upheld Nixon’s Presidential decree and set the whole thing in motion. Almost overnight the California surf scene tilted to San Onofre. Just like that. Over the years, going back to when my dad was just a kid, a lot of the real diehards found a way to surf San O, to bypass the club, because the break was just too, too special to leave to a privileged few, but it was a real sea change when the government opened up the beach and set up campgrounds where we could park our rig and hang for the summer. Don’t think the surf club guys were happy about having to share their private little sandbox, but to the rest of us it was huge. Even today, more than forty years later, you can still find grizzled surf bums at Trestles with nice things to say about Nixon and Reagan. It’s an odd picture because for the most part these are left-leaning old hippies, but they don’t give a plain shit about Nixon’s politics or Reagan’s policies; they just care that these guys made it possible for them to surf one of the best damn beaches on the Pacific Coast.

  ’Nuf said.

  The good news/bad news was that the beach was directly alongside the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station—or SONGS, but nobody called it that. The iconic features of the plant were these two giant containment structures, which always looked to me and my brothers like enormous breasts, rising up from the sea. I don’t remember there being too much talk about what it meant for us to be spending all that time in what was basically the middle of a nuclear power pla
nt. It wasn’t really an issue. Also wasn’t really an issue that the beach bumped right into Camp Pendleton, the primary West Coast base of the United States Marine Corps, which occupied an absolutely huge tract of land along the coastline. It was just part of the deal—if you wanted to surf San O, you had to deal with the military base and the nuclear power plant.

  Back when he was young and single my father used to do a lot of surfing at Malibu Point, another legendary surf spot. To hear him tell it, the guys on the beach in Malibu were always up for a good time, which wasn’t really my father’s thing, but he got along well enough with these guys in the water, on the beach. He didn’t drink, but he didn’t mind that everybody else did, so when the sun dropped from the sky he’d spend his time checking out all the pretty girls. This was back in the 1950s, when surfers like Miki Dora and Terry “Tubesteak” Tracy ruled the beach. Miki was known as the King of Malibu, and Tube was like the mayor. He lived in a hut right on the beach, and all these Hollywood types would come down and hang and surf. It was like a never-ending party, with bonfires on the beach, music, cookouts … the whole deal.

  The legend of Tubesteak was that he was the original Big Kahuna, the inspiration for the character made famous in all those Gidget movies. The way that came about was through a girl named Kathy Kohner, who used to hang with these guys. All day long, all summer long, she’d surf and play with the crowd around Tubesteak’s hut. She fit herself right in. Each night, she’d go home and tell her father all these great beach stories. Turned out her father, Frederick Kohner, was a Hollywood screenwriter and a novelist and he grew his daughter’s stories into a book called Gidget, the Little Girl with Big Ideas, which became a big success and led to a bunch of sequels, and a bunch of movies, and eventually a television series and a whole other bunch of movies.

  Turned out, too, that Tube was the guy who gave Kathy Kohner the name Gidget. In those days, you didn’t see too many girls out there surfing, so a lot of the guys didn’t bother to learn Kathy Kohner’s name. She was just known as the girl surfer. That was enough of a peg. Plus, she was short, so she was sometimes known as the midget surfer—or the girl midget. Tube mushed it all together and start calling her Gidget, and the name stuck. Frederick Kohner used it in his book, along with a lot of the other nicknames he’d pinched from his daughter’s stories. Apparently, there really was a guy who went by Moondoggie, and there would have been a Tubesteak, too, except the name was a little blue for mainstream America, so he became Big Kahuna instead.

  My father was a San Diego surfer and Tube was a Malibu guy, but they hung out from time to time. (Up in Malibu, the hard-core surfers knew Doc as one of the old-timers—because, hey, he was a veteran surfer even then. Anyway, he’d been at it awhile.) When the break was just right, Tube and Doc even snuck into San O together, which I guess would have been neutral territory for them. In the water they were both pretty hard-core, but on the beach Tube’s Big Kahuna–type personality took over. Down at San O, they were like lone wolves, each out of his element but thrown together on the same break. And yet somehow the two of them developed a nice friendship, before they fell off of each other’s radar for a stretch. Wasn’t like it is now, with cell phones and e-mail and Facebook. It was easy to lose touch, and that’s what happened with Doc and Tube. They started having families, and the tug and pull of work and kids meant they didn’t see each other all that much anymore. Soon, the tug of the open road pulled Doc off the map altogether, and they drifted out of each other’s lives, same way they’d drifted together.

  But then San O opened up in 1971 or so, and there was a place to park our rig and a way to surf Trestles without the hassle. A lot of the old-timers were pumped about it, and for the first couple summers the place was packed. We pulled into the lot one day and it just so happened we’d parked right next to the Tracys’ Ford Country Squire station wagon, with the fake wood on the door panels—a classic SoCal surfer ride. Don’t know when the last time was that Doc and Tube had seen each other, but they fell right back into it. There was a lot of hugging, and clapping on the back, and wondering what the hell they’d been up to. Tube had had a bunch of kids, and Doc had had a bunch of kids, and we all started spilling out of our rides and checking each other out.

  Took a while to introduce everybody. In fact, I don’t think our dads even bothered with introductions, that first time. It was more like, “Hey, that one over there, that one’s mine.” And, “Those four over there, they’re mine, too.”

  There were probably seven of us Paskowitz kids by that point, and seven Tracy kids, and we matched up close in age, so we just kind of paired off and hit the beach. No big thing—except, you know, it kind of was. I mean, for all of our adventures and road trips, we Paskowitzes had been pretty sheltered. We never really had any friends, other than each other, and here were these Tracy kids, a bunch of crazy little Irishmen. Looking at them was like looking in a mirror. They were a raggedy bunch of sea urchin kids, same as us, only they lived in a house and went to school. Their clothes were a little nicer. They lived in Lakewood and ran with a rough-and-tumble crowd from Huntington Beach we called the Hole-in-the-Wall Gang. Seemed to us like the Tracy boys knew just about everybody. First couple times we hung out it was all we could do to keep track of who was who and what was what, but we figured it out soon enough.

  One of the great side benefits of hanging out with the Tracys was we got to ride their boards. We’d trade off—usually just for a couple hours, sometimes for a day. My brothers and I all had our own boards by this point, but our equipment ran towards the crappy side. Doc did a decent-enough job, touching up his old pals and recycling some of their used and tossed-off gear, but the oldest of us were becoming pretty strong surfers and we had our eyes on some of the newest and best equipment. This was still a couple years before we started competing in local tournaments and were able to pick up some local sponsors to help us out with our gear, so we scrambled for our rides.

  We never complained about our equipment. We made do. We were happy with what we had. When you’re a kid and you get your first board, you tend to fall in love with it. Doesn’t matter if it’s a piece of shit, it’s yours. You fix every ding. It becomes like your pal. So we learned all the little quirks and nuances of these throwaway boards and came up with all these different ways to compensate and adjust, which I guess made us better surfers. We had to really work at it, you know.

  But we saw what the other guys on the beach were riding, and we wanted in. And then along came these Tracy kids, with their sweet, sweet rides, so we were all over it. And it worked out great for the Tracys, too, because some of our ancient gear was throwback, so they got to ride old-school style. Never gave up on our own boards, but it was a chance to kick things up a notch, to grow our game.

  * * *

  After our first summer together, it’s like we’d known the Tracy kids our whole lives. We found all kinds of ways to make all kinds of trouble. A lot of the time, we were out in the water, surfing, but for hours and hours we’d be on the beach, exploring. We’d sneak onto the base at Camp Pendleton and make our way to the commissary or the PX, where we’d scarf back cheap pizzas and chips and all this good stuff we would have never thought to eat if it weren’t for our new friends. Remember, for years and years we couldn’t eat anything refined or processed, but now that we were out in the world and the Tracy boys were giving us our first taste we were hooked. They were like our dealers. They turned us on to this whole other world, a world of fast food and soda. We used to spend a lot of time hanging at the visitor center at the power plant, where there were huge vending machines set up on a kind of deck area. People would drop loose change between the wooden slats of the deck and it’d pile up, so we’d crawl around underneath the boards, scrounging for money. There’d be spiderwebs and rats and all kinds of crap, but we didn’t care. We just wanted to collect a couple fistfuls of change, which we’d then use to buy cheap, crappy food.

  The best was when we’d find some old surfers getting
ready to head into town on a beer run and we’d give them money to buy us donuts. The surfers would bring back three or four boxes of donuts, which we’d eat until we were sick; after so many years without sugar and sweets, it’s like we were starved for this stuff. When we were just a little bit older, we’d grab these same guys on their beer runs and ask them to bring us back some beer instead. We just traded one kind of contraband for another.

  On hot days, we’d sit in a small, air-conditioned theater in the visitor center, where plant officials would play a syrupy, ancient film about the benefits of nuclear power, over and over. We weren’t really listening, just chilling, but the message must have seeped in, because we never thought to question the safety of the plant. Nobody did—not even our moms. It was just there, that’s all, looking like a giant-breasted eyesore, and for a while the plant infrastructure created a killer break, thanks to a big, gnarly seawall that had been put up by the power plant engineers. During construction, they erected these piers that also made for some incredible waves, so we spent a lot of time surfing right in the shallows by the plant. Can’t imagine it was any good for us, swimming in those waters, but we had a blast. There was one spot in particular, right by a return pipe that poured hot, steamy water directly onto the shore. The water had been pumped from the ocean into the core of the reactor, to keep it cool, and then it would get pumped right back out with such tremendous force it could knock you on your ass, but we’d splash around and bodysurf in these waters for hours and hours. On some days, when the current was just right, you could find that hot-water stream from the plant a full mile off the shoreline.