novel excerpt reworked

    Along the coastline of California you’ll notice the lower third changes direction, from running north-south to eastward—from Point Conception along Gaviota and to Ventura County before turning south again into Los Angeles County. Along that coastline is a coastal mountain range three thousand feet high, where ridges and canyons of chaparral in olive greens rise up, crowned with sandstone peaks and cliffs colored tan, orange, pink and red; veins of wave-rolled rock and fossilized shell rippling through them—ancient beaches lifted up and now overlooking ocean from which born. Below those peaks slope foothills of sage and tawny-colored grasses, studded with dark green oak, the sycamores turning gold in the fall, marking the creeks to the shore.

    A storm out of the Gulf of Alaska sweeps from the north, or a Pineapple Express system unloads from the Equator, and those rains spill boulders which spill out to the Pacific. The boulders settle and get groomed by swells, where today, the deposit juts out to sea in a geologic feature which creates waves that sweep across them. When conditions are right, at a point break, where a creek let’s out at the top of a cove, the waves form cylinders of water, which pitch and run down along the point into the beach. Of course for surfers, it’s as if these points were made for us, where the wave sections again and again, for weightless turn after weightless turn upon an open face of water.

    There are a number of point breaks along the California coast but two are superior to all others, known the world over by the finely shaped waves they provide—Republicans, near Santa Barbara, and Federals at Malibu. Comparing them wave to wave, Republicans is superior, getting hollower, tubing longer more readily. Federals has been altered more than once due to where the creek lets the lagoon out. There were whole decades where Federals would barrel, not so much the last decade.

    Growing up, my teens and twenties, I never surfed Federals or Republicans because point breaks are always crowded. You can get stoked on a wave, but how fun with people dropping in? Not fun at all, and younger I couldn’t stand it. Point breaks with a bunch of people in the line-up only re-produced what you were attempting to escape in the first place. I always surfed Zuma or up near Deer Creek, or some other wave breaking out of the way at the right tide. My twenties, thirties, and forties, the thought of surfing a point break with tons of people had me scowl in disgust. Then one night, almost fifty years old, I saw someone post something on social media saying they needed a writer.