If you’ve ever seen a surf video, you’d think that the song in a surfer’s head is pretty much electric guitars, drum machines, and a lot of screaming from a raspy-voiced grungestar with greasy hair. I am here to tell you that’s a bunch of marketing hoo-ha.
Today as I floated off Linda Mar Beach in 52-degree water, with my feet slowly going numb, I sang to myself this ditty I learned when I was four:
How cold my toes, tiddley-pum
How cold my toes, tiddley-pum
How cold my toes are growi-ing
Are grow-ing
Tiddley-pum.
One year ago today, sitting at a cramped vanity in my friend Donnella’s hotel room, I made the first post to The Ferris Files. The world of self-publishing has never been the same, if I may say so myself.
Over the last 365 days, The Ferris Files has reported the highs and the lows, from the top of the highest mountain in South America (or very nearly, anyway) to the troughs of some sparkling Pacific waves. You, dear reader, have accompanied me as I danced drunk by a pond in Montana, sported a turquoise bolo tie around Santa Fe, ran through the mud in Seattle and on the famous Dipsea Trail, and, in one ignominious moment, fried all the wires in a homeless woman’s van.
On Saturday I went on a tour of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, just miles from where I grew up. At SLAC they’re in the business of making atoms move really, really fast, and then smashing them together, and poking through the wreckage to see what’s inside.
The accelerator is an extremely large facility – at two miles long, the longest building in the world – dedicated to work on the extremely small. The tour was assembled by my friend Kishore Hari, who runs a science café and has a passion for making science accessible to anyone, and our guide was Adam Cunha, a graduate student who has worked at SLAC.
Adam Cunha points out a "light tube" at SLAC.
Adam led us through a Power Point presentation and walked us around the accelerator with smiling enthusiasm. Rather than dwelling on the facility and its science, which you could learn about here, I will share the most mind-blowing thing I learned that day.
Adam gave this analogy to explain atoms. Let’s say you puffed up an apple so big its diameter extended from the Earth to the sun (take that, New York!). If an apple were that huge, how big would one of its atoms be?
Answer: the size of a football field.
OK so far. Pretty small. But does that mean that this magnificent apple is made up of football-field-sized chunks? No. All that means is that the components of an atom – its nucleus and electrons – exist in that football-field sized space.
So how big are the nucleus and electrons? The nucleus, Adam continued, is the size of an apple seed in the middle of that football field. And the electrons are far smaller than that. They are, in Adam’s words, “the size of a small virus,” which is to say, so small they’re hard to measure. In fact, Adam concluded, current theory holds that electrons don’t have any size at all. Oh, and they don’t really exist anyplace, either. There’s just a probability they exist.
This means that all matter – your hands, your mouse, the coffee cup, the screen upon which you read this – are made up of infinitesimally teeny bits of almost-nothing. How can something that appears so substantial in fact be the exact opposite? Mind blown. Game over.
The scientists at SLAC have been examining these apple seeds and viruses and finding out what they’re made of. And while I can’t say I understand what they do, I do believe these atom-busting cowboys deserve the four Nobel prizes, three in physics and one in chemistry, they have earned so far.
Last week, when all my favorite surf spots were closed because of oil spills, I headed inland, to a forgotten corner of Wildcat Canyon, to walk a line in the air.
The sport is called slacklining, and it really is as simple as these pictures make it look. Walk the line. No problem, right?
Damian gets high while Stephanie keeps it on the down-low.
I met with Damian Cooksey, who is one of the stars of this obscure sport. He is the first man ever to do a front flip on a slackline and, last year, did the longest slackline ever, 405 feet, in a park in Poland (and subsequently did another of 506 feet, in Germany this July).
Damian is an unpretentious guy with the slender, zero-percent-bodyfat physique of a rock climber, which in fact he is, as are most adherents of the sport. Slacklining began as a downtime activity among climbers in Yosemite Valley and uses the materials of climbing – specifically the inch-wide, flexible webbing upon which one walks.
Damian was kind enough to bring me and Jeffro, who are the rankest of novices, as well as Liz and Stephanie, who can already walk the walk.
We set up two lines. One hung a mere two feet off the ground and ran 30 feet. The second stretched 90 feet across a giant crease in the hillside and stood and 20 feet in the air. The latter is called a “highline.”
Damian demonstrates “slackline surfing.”
While Liz tried out the highline, calling out tremulously and yelping as she fell, I practiced again and again on the lowline. Here’s how it went: Step on, jiggle, fall off. Step on, wobble, fall off. Step on, wobble…pinwheel the arms…dodge hips to the left…ah, balanced!
Fall off.
Standing on that wobbly line is completely absorbing. Your synapses and muscles are entirely given over to the webbing’s bobble and sway. No question I’ll try this sport again.
I walked into the gym today to see the same-o same-o, Michael doing flyes and Betsy doing deadlifts, and oh my god, that guy on the treadmill is Barack Obama.
I put down my bag and immediately got on the neighboring elliptical trainer. Elliptical trainers are kind of dumb, but with the most inspiring presidential candidate since Bill Clinton at my elbow, I could deal. Obama watched TV and listened to an iPod. He looked tired and had that serious expression on his face. I acted like I was working out real hard, whew.
Obama poses with me and two other breathless admirers.
The Illinois senator has the lean physique of his Kenyan forebears and a pretty good running stride, though his footstrike’s a little heavy if you ask me. He finished up on the treadmill and walked across to the stationary bike and then to a Stairmaster, which was on the other side of my elliptical machine. He kept sweating and I kept pretending I wasn’t paying attention.
Hovering around the room were three handsome and muscular black men in workout clothes, which is more black people than I have ever seen in one place in Mill Valley. Probably Secret Service. They went through the motions of hefting iron but their eyes darted this way and that, sizing up everyone who walked through the door.
Two green Chevy Tahoes were parked in the lot and through the glass I could see well-dressed people talking on cellphones. Obama, I have learned since, is in town attending fundraisers and visiting the Google offices down on the Peninsula.
I got wind that the Man might do a photo op when his workout was done. As people arrived for spin class, Obama and his henchmen headed for the exit and I followed right along with my camera. An agent took this photo and I shook the candidate’s hand, which was surprisingly delicate and soft.
I hope that 40 years from now I will show this photo to my grandkids, and that by then the event will have been so thoroughly embellished that I’ll tell them, “Yep, here’s me with my friend Barack Obama. That’s right, the president. This was waaaaay back in 2007. Barack and grandpa had a good workout together that day.”
I was in the parking lot this morning at Linda Mar, waxing my board and eager for my first surf session in more than a week, when a cop in a black dune buggy drove up and yelled, “Beach’s closed!”
Last week’s oil spill in San Francisco Bay had finally reached my bread-and-butter break. Dead, oily birds had turned up at the beach that morning, the cop explained, shortly after a similar bodycount emerged at Rockaway Beach, one headland north.
After the spill last Wednesday it seemed that the coast south of the Golden Gate might be spared from the goo goblin. Slicks and distressed birds were reported on the north coast as far as Point Reyes. But now the blobs are drifting everywhere. There’s no harbor from our fossil-fuel catastrophe.
I walked down the beach with my camera but was only able to find one bird (pictured). No way to know for sure if it was a victim of oil or natural causes.
As if the Bay Area’s plight isn’t bad enough, there’s a sister disaster emerging in the Black Sea, where a tanker broke up in a huge storm on Sunday and dumped more than six times the volume of fuel that we’re suffering here. Thousands of birds are struggling on the beach, too coated with oil to fly.
My plans to surf at Ocean Beach today were drowned, or rather coated in oil, when I heard about the 58,000 gallons of fuel oil spilled by a container ship when it grazed the Bay Bridge yesterday.
Reports have big slicks moving north along the Marin coastline, rather than south toward my usual haunts, but Ocean Beach is close enough to the Golden Gate that the likelihood of swimming through big gobs of black goo is high.
The Hanjin container ship is docked in San Francisco and its shipments to South Korea will be delayed. Small inconvenience compared to those now being suffered by the seals, grebes and scoters along the shoreline that may pay with their lives.
Psst. Don’t tell anyone, but I think I just might be getting better at this surfing thing.
If you’ve been reading this blog, you know that there’s a move I find super-scary – tipping myself over the edge of a wave that is big enough to go vertical. It feels like leaping off the top of an armoire.
This Sunday, surfing with my buddies Bob America and Rich in ice-cream-headache water at Linda Mar, I chased after a wave. Suddenly I found myself riding left and crouched like Spiderman. With my right hand I gripped the right rail, or side, of my board. This helped me dig the left rail hard into the wave, which might have actually been vertical.
I was moving so fast at the time that I couldn’t judge. Only a minute later, bobbing from under the spent wave, did my conscious mind catch up and ask, in a rather awed tone, Did I really just do that?
The Bay Area’s wind this weekend is so atypical that it made the evening news. In Southern California, still smoking from last week’s wildfires, these gusts might be called a Santa Ana. But here they’re so unusual they don’t have a name.
Driving to Linda Mar in the bright sunshine I noticed that the American flag off Rockaway Beach was flapping hard and pointing due west. Good sign. Offshore wind like this props a wave up, like a dowel holding open a steamer trunk, and gives the surfer a wide, steep surface to ride.
I met Scott and his buddies Jonah, Ethan and Sean, and we headed into the water, which was frigid, recently delivered from the depths off the Pacific shelf. But a consoling gust of warm air hit my face. I closed my eyes with pleasure. San Francisco can be windy and it can be warm, but windy and warm, now that’s something to cherish.
Unfortunately, shortly into our session the tide changed and the waves closed out. This means instead of folding on itself in a line, like a Ziploc bag closing, the whole body of water topples over as a unit. No fun for the surfer; no Ziploc trail to follow.
They were beautiful, though. The wind opposed the wave and sent a giant cockscomb of spray off the lip, sprinkling onto the glassy water behind it. Then the wave closed on itself with a BOOM.
Tonight I floated at Linda Mar in a fog. I mean real fog – a thick cloud hugging the water – but the weather made my brain foggy, too, like I was surfing in a restless dream.
Waves rolled out of the mist, but I couldn’t read their size or contour. The beach was back there, somewhere, but no telling how far. Gray sky, gray water. The only thing I could see clearly was other surfers, a muddled line of them that extended north and south until they ghosted away.
The only way to orient myself was the Taco Bell restaurant on the beach, which was invisible except for its orange sodium-vapor deck lights. The Taco Bell seemed to float, too, like a visiting ship.
The water and air were about the same temperature, low 50s, and I shivered and reminded myself that I need to buy a new wetsuit, one that doesn’t leak.
As the dusk fell and my core temperature continued its downward creep, I headed for shore, got in warm clothes and picked up a couple of warm chicken Chalupas from the U.S.S. Taco Bell.
