by Don Winslow
The surf bums were so far out of mainstream America and yet so very American at the same time in their belief in technology, because some of these boys were your Tom Edison, Wright brothers, gee-whiz, can-do Americans, who just couldn't help but try to build a better surfboard. They took all that technology that came out of World War II-aerodynamics, hydraulics, and especially the new materials that had emerged and revolutionized the sport. Bob Simmons in La Jolla and Hobie Alter in Dana Point invented the first practical, lightweight board out of a new material- polyurethane. With the advent of the foam board, anyone could surf. You didn't need to be a Greek god like George Freeth. Anyone could now carry a board down the beach and into the water.
And these lightweight boards could do maneuvers that the heavy old wood boards just couldn't do. Instead of riding straight down the face of the wave, now the surfer could cut across its face, change directions, cut back…
It was the golden age of surfing, the 1950s, there along the 101.
So many goddamn legends were out there challenging the waves, testing the limits, cruising that highway with their classic woodies, looking for the next great break, the sweet new ride, the secret spot that the new-comers hadn't found. Miki Dora-aka “Da Cat”-and Greg Noll-aka “Da Bull”-and Phil Edwards-aka “the Guayule Kid”-they rode waves nobody had ridden and in ways nobody had ridden them. Edwards was fifteen, fifteen freaking years old, when he paddled out into the wave known as Killer Dana and rode it. Then he stayed on the beach all summer with his girlfriend, cooking potatoes over an open fire.
Living to surf, surfing to live.
Along the 101.
It must have been heaven then, Boone thinks as the road plunges down toward the ocean like some kind of water slide, like it's going to dump you right into the water, but then at the last second it veers right and hugs the coastline. Paradise, Boone thinks-long, lonely stretches of beach with legends walking on water. He knows his surf history; he knows all the stories, knows about Da Cat, Da Bull, the Guayule Kid, and dozens of others. You can't not know them and be a real surfer; you can't not see their stories every time you drive this road, because that history is all around you.
You drive right past Hobie's old shop, right past the break where Bob Simmons died in a wave back in '54, past San O, where Dora and Edwards went out together and combined their styles and created modern surfing.
In that golden age.
Like all golden ages, Boone thinks as he veers right again, crosses the railroad track, and climbs up to the famous old beach town of Del Mar, it had to end.
The golden age was done in by its own success.
As the culture of Highway 101 became the culture of America itself.
Gidgethit the screens in 1959, creating a new kind of sex symbol-the “California girl.” Fresh-faced, sun-tanned, bikini-clad, sassy, healthy, and happy, Gidget (“It's a girl.” “No, it's a midget.” “It's a gidget. ”) became a role model for girls all across America. Girls in Kansas and Nebraska wanted to be Gidget, to wear bikinis and cruise the strips of the 101 beach towns.
Gidgetbegat a slew of beach movies, which would be forgettable except for lingering images of Annette Funicello, previously of the Mickey Mouse Club, who swapped her mouse ears for a bikini. These movies featured handsome guys like Frankie Avalon and bodacious babes like Annette and had just a suggestion of sex about them- Beach Blanket Bingoin 1965 never revealed what was happening on or under the blanket. And they usually had a “beatnik,” replete with beret and goatee, wander on playing the bongos, and they always featured the “kids” dancing on the beach to music.
Surf music.
It also came right out of technology.
In 1962, Fender guitar developed a “reverb” unit, which produced the big, hollow, “wet” sound that became the trademark of surf music. In the same year, the immortal Dick Dale and the Del-Tones used the reverb on “Misirlou,” featuring the classic Dick Dale guitar run that sounded like a wave about to break. The Chantays responded the same year with “Pipeline.”
In 1963, the Surfaris released the first breakout, national surf hit- “Wipe Out,” with the sarcastic laugh, then the famous percussion riff that every teenage drummer in America tried to copy, and the surf music craze was on. Boone inherited all this music from his old man, all those old surf bands like the Pyraminds, the Marketts, The Sandals, the Astronauts, Eddie amp; the Showmen.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, and The Beach Boys.
They just blew it up.
The Beach Boys had kids all across the world singing “Surfin' Safari,” “Surfin' U.S. A,” and “Surfer Girl,” mimicking a lifestyle they'd never lived, mouthing the names of places they'd never been: Del Mar, Ventura County Line, Santa Cruz, Trestles, all over Manhattan and down Doheny way… Swami's, Pacific Palisades, San Onofre, Sunset, Redondo Beach, all over La Jolla…
All along Highway 101.
Boone doesn't know the answer to that old Ethics 101 question from his freshman year in college-if, knowing what you know now, you had a chance to strangle little Adolf Hitler in the cradle-but he's clear about the answer for Brian Wilson. You'd splatter his baby brains all over the bassinet before you'd let him make it to the recording studio to turn the 101 into a parking lot.
By the mid-sixties, every kook with a record player or a transistor radio was hitting the surf, crowding the breaks, jamming the waves. People who never wanted to surf wanted the lifestyle. (There's a messed-up, inbred mongrel of a nonword, Boone thinks. Lifestyle-trying to be both and ending up neither. Life style-like pseudo life, a bad imitation of something worth living. Like you don't want the life, just the style.) So they headed out to sunny Southern California and fucked it up.
What was it the Eagles sang-“You call some place paradise, / kiss it goodbye”? Well, pucker up for Highway 101. So many people moved to the SoCal coast, it's surprising it didn't just tilt into the ocean. It sort of did; the developers threw up quick-and-dirty condo complexes on the bluffs above the ocean, and now they're sliding into the sea like toboggans. Those little beach towns swelled into big beach towns, with suburbs and school systems, endless strip malls with the same shit in each of them.
You had traffic jams- traffic jams-on the 101.
Not people trying to go surfing-although it can be hard to find a parking space at some of the more popular surf spots nowadays-but commuters on their way back and forth from work.
So Boone missed the golden age of surfing. He figures maybe he got in on the bronze age, but to him, the 101 is still the Highway to Heaven. “I never saw the golden age,” he explained to his dad one time. “I only see the age I'm in.”
There are still some golden days along the 101-particularly during the week, when the road is relatively free and the beaches aren't crowded. And the truth is, you can still find an empty beach some days; you can still have a break all to yourself.
And there are days when that drive along the 101 is so beautiful, it will break your fucking heart. When you look out the window and the sun is painting masterpieces on the water, and the waves are breaking in a single white line from Cardiff to Carlsbad, and the sky is an impossible blue, and people are playing volleyball, and your brother and sister surfers are out there just having a good time, just trying to catch a wave, and you realize you are living in the dream.
Or drive it at dusk, when the ocean is golden, and the sun an orange fireball, with dolphins dancing in the break. Then the sun flames red, and it slips quietly over the horizon and the ocean slides to gray and then to black and you feel a little sad because this day is over, but you know it will begin again tomorrow.
Life on Highway 101.
This is the road that Boone takes, following Teddy north along the coast.
46
Boone needs to be on his game going through Del Mar, because there are plenty of side streets for Teddy to turn onto, but the doctor doesn't turn off toward the beach or up into the hills; he stays on the main drag and heads north, across the old bridge over t
he San Dieguito River, on past the famous old racetrack, then up through Eden Gardens and Solana Beach.
Now the road, old Highway 101, parallels the railroad track on its right, through the town of Solana Beach, and then onto the narrow open stretch of coastline at Cardiff, which is one of Boone's favorite places in the world, where the highway edges the beach and you feel like you could reach out the car window and touch the water. The whitecaps are already peaking, tall, but nothing to what they'll be this time tomorrow. Even from the van, he can hear the ocean getting ready to go off, the big swell starting to build, a heavy heartbeat that matches his own.
The big swell.
Sunny's shot.
Onewave, one macker, and it changes her life.
One great photo and she makes the net, the magazines. She gets the sponsorship she's been working for and it's her takeoff. She'll be all over the world, making the tournaments and the big wave contests. She'll surf Hawaii, Oz, Indo, you name it.
“Where did you just go?” Petra asks.
“Huh?”
“Where were you? You looked like you were a million miles away just now.”
“Nope. On the job.”
But aware that they're fast coming up on the funky old surf town of Encinitas and the great right break called Shrink's, arguably the best wave in SoCal, maybe the place to be when the swell rolls in.
If he weren't on the job, he'd turn in at the small parking lot on the bluff and take a look at how it's building out there. But I can't, he thinks, because I have to follow Dr. D-Cup to locate a stripper.
Teddy drives up through Leucadia, where the big eucalyptus trees line the road on the inland side and cheap motels, drive-thru burger/taco stands, and little shops take the ocean side.
Ocean side, Boone thinks… Oceanside. Isn't that where Mick Penner said that Teddy takes Tammy for their little matinees? Well, he thinks as he follows Teddy through Leucadia and across the bridge that spans the Batiquitos Lagoon into Carlsbad, we're on our way to Oceanside.
The road drops back down again and flanks the long stretch of open beach, with its promenade along the breakwater, then takes a right jog into the faux-Tudor village of Carlsbad, with its English shingled roofs. There's a store here where you can buy all kinds of English food, and Boone thinks of mentioning this to her, but then he figures that she probably already knows about it, so he keeps his mouth shut.
The route curves right again, then crosses Buena Vista Lagoon and takes them into Oceanside.
Heads up, Boone thinks.
Teddy takes a right, turning east onto Highway 76, drives all the way through town and out into the suburbs and developments that house a lot of the marines from Camp Pendleton, then takes a left into the countryside.
Where the hell is he going? Boone wonders. Boone drops back a ways because the traffic has thinned out so much.
Then Teddy takes a right and heads inland.
What the hell? Boone thinks.
There's not much out here now. It's one of the few even semi-rural spaces left in metro San Diego County, out here by the old Sakagawa strawberry fields.
47
They cling to the landscape, these pieces of old farms.
They dot the local map like small, shrinking atolls in a roiling sea of real estate development.
In housing-hungry San Diego, buildings are going up everywhere. Housing developments, condo complexes, and high-rise apartment buildings are taking the place of the old fields of flowers, tomatoes, and strawberries. With the residential developments come the strip malls, the high-end shopping complexes, the Starbucks, Java Juices, and Rubio's, the Vons, Albertsons, and Stater Bros.
Once a steady but slow tide, the building boom became a tsunami flooding the little islands of agricultural land. They're still there, but harder to find, especially this close to the coast. Farther inland along Highway 76 are the avocado orchards of Fallbrook, then the vast orange groves among the hillsides and canyons. Farther south, in the flatlands of Carmel Valley and Rancho Peсasquitos, small fields fight a slow, losing war against development, surrounded now by new million-dollar “spec” homes built on the plateaus between the wooded canyons where the illegal workers live in camps of jerry-rigged tents and tin-roofed shacks.
Up here in Oceanside, along the banks of the San Luis River, some of the old strawberry fields stubbornly hold out. Drought, insect infestations, depression, racism, voracious development-it doesn't matter, the farmers hang on. They could easily sell the land for far more than they make farming it, but that doesn't matter, either.
It's a way of life.
Not that you could find a single Japanese-American, a Nisei, actually working these strawberry fields. They're two generations removed from that, the kids and grandkids having moved into the city and the suburbs, where they're now doctors, lawyers, accountants, entrepreneurs, and even cops.
The old man who owns these particular fields wouldn't have had it any other way. Upward mobility was always the idea, and now a different generation of immigrants, field hands from Mexico, Guatemala, and El Salvador work his fields, and the kids come to visit for an “afternoon in the country.”
Old man Sakagawa loves seeing his great-grandchildren. He knows that he'll be leaving this world soon, and he knows that when he passes, this world, these fields, this way of life will pass with him. It makes him sad, but he also believes what the Buddha said, that the only constant is change.
But it does make him wistful, that the Sakagawa fields will fade like morning mist under a blazing dawn.
Now Boone follows Teddy east along North River Road, past a gas station and a food mart, then past an old church, and then…
Son of a bitch, Boone thinks.
Fucked-up, lovesick Mick Penner was right.
The motel is one of those old 1940s places with an office and a line of little cottages in the back. Someone has tried to freshen the place up-the cottages have recently been painted a bright canary yellow, with royal blue trim-one of those attempts to make it so retro that it's hip.
Teddy pulls into the gravel parking lot and gets out. He doesn't stop at the office but goes right toward the third cottage, like he knows just where he's going.
“We got her,” Boone says.
“You think so?”
“Yeah, I do.”
He pulls into the parking lot and parks on the other end from Teddy's car. “You have your subpoena?”
“Of course.”
“Then let's deliver it,” Boone says.
Then I'll call Johnny Banzai and let him know that we have a potentially important witness for him in his fresh murder case. Then I'll go home, catch some sleep, and be fresh and ready when the big waves hit.
He's thinking these happy thoughts when Teddy suddenly walks back from the cabin, carrying a small black bag. He walks right past his car; then he crosses the road and walks up about fifty yards to a thick bed of reeds that stands between the San Luis River and the western edge of the old Sakagawa fields.
“What's he doing?” Petra asks.
“I don't know,” Boone says. He reaches behind and grabs a pair of binoculars and trains them on Teddy as the doctor walks to the edge of the reeds.
Teddy looks around, then steps into the reeds. Inside of two seconds, he disappears from sight.
Boone sets the binoculars down and jumps out of the van.
“Go look in the cabin, see if she's there,” he says to Petra, and then he crosses the road and jogs down to the edge of the reeds. Foot traffic has trampled down the front edge of the reed bed, and narrow paths cut into the standing reeds like tunnels. Soda cans, beer bottles, and fast-food wrappers lie among small white plastic garbage bags. Boone picks up one of the bags, unties the top, and then gags, fighting back the vomit.
The bag is full of used condoms.
He drops the bag and steps into one of the tunnels that lead through the reeds. It's like being in another world-dark, narrow, and claustrophobic. The late-afternoon sunlight barely
penetrates the tall reeds, and Boone can't see five feet in front of him.
So he doesn't see the shotgun.
48
The curtains on the cabin windows are open, and Petra can see into the small front room, which has a sofa, a couple of chairs, a kitchenette area and a table.
But no Tammy.
Petra walks around to the side, where another window offers a view of the small bedroom, where there is likewise no Tammy.
Maybe she's in the bathroom, Petra thinks.
She walks around to that side, puts her head against the thin wall, and listens. No sound of running water. She waits for a minute, hoping to hear the toilet flush, or the taps running, or anything, but it's perfectly still.
For one of the few times in her life, Petra doesn't know what to do. Should she wait here, in case Tammy is inside? Should she go back to the van and wait, in case Tammy just hasn't shown up yet but is on her way?
And how does she know it's even going to be Tammy, and not some other bimbo that Teddy is shagging in his Bang for Boobs program. And where was Teddy going? What could he possibly be doing in a bed of reeds, looking for the baby Moses, for God's sake? And what, if anything, has Boone found? Should I follow him? she wonders.
She decides to go back to the van and wait.
Except waiting isn't her best thing.
She gives it a shot, she does, but it isn't going to happen. What she really wants to do is go see what Boone is finding out. She makes it about three minutes, then bails.
49
Mick Penner should have.
Bailed, that is.
Should have taken Boone's advice, thrown his shit into a bag, gotten into his beloved BMW, and hit the highway.
He doesn't, though.
He intended to. One of those “road to hell” deals. He meant to get moving, but then he decided that one beer and a quick toke would help him get his shit together. He's on his third Corona when the door comes in.
