Troubled Waters

I woke up this morning and one look out the window propelled me out of bed. The sky was serene blue and every tree glowed gold in the October light. A perfect San Francisco fall day. It’s an easy mistake, thinking a fair sky means a fair sea.

Photo Credit: bible.ca

I drove into the Linda Mar beach in Pacifica, found a parking space and observed the break from the driver’s seat. The ocean had been blue-green a few days ago. Today it was green-brown.

Thirty or so surfers huddled near the south end, the only safe place, since to the north the waves collapsed in a giant and confused roar. I slid on my wetsuit quickly, shivering a little, and walked down the sand, which was covered in washed-up seaweed giving off that rotting-salty smell, and looked up at the sun, which lay behind a scrim of high cloud that covered Pacifica but left the rest of the coastline unmolested.

An encampment of tarp-tents clung to south end with a banner reading “San Pedro Surf Club,” fronted by a row of longboards that together meant a surf competition. The announcer on a plank podium tried to make the best of it. “The winds are only 10 knots onshore!” he said, as if to explain why the waves sucked so bad.

The water I paddled into wasn’t brown/green, but white. Or rather, the water wasn’t white but its surface was – a carpet of foam extending 100 yards offshore with gobs lying on the surface. I scrambled for a wave alongside jittery, unsmiling boardsmen and –women, many waiting for their turn in the competition. The waves bitch-slapped us suddenly and at irregular intervals, sending everyone scrambling back and forth, in a sea that resembled a tubful of old dishwater.

Dishwater. I peered down over the rail of my board. The three inches of opaque water I could fathom teemed with…stuff. Little green bits and little brown bits and – is that a hair?  What is all that stuff?

No one knows, of course. There had been rain. Every surface in the municipality of Pacifica had washed here overnight. For all I knew, the liquid under my board contained the drippings from the oil pan of a 1995 Subaru, the detergent someone used to spray a driveway, insecticide for the flowerbox nasturtiums, seagull poop and the remains of a Diet Pepsi Slurpee. I tasted something acrid on my tongue and spat and then spat again, not knowing if my palate was actually tasting something or reacting to my imagination.

I paddled for shore without waiting on another wave. Surfing isn’t worth being poisoned.