November 1st, 2007  image source: www.hopeforgaia.com At least one morning every week I run around Strawberry Point in Mill Valley, but on Monday the view of the San Francisco skyline across the Bay was marred by a spread of McDonald’s trash on the ground next to a garbage can. It was being dined on by an enterprising crow.
Normally I would have run right by. I clean up after myself and you can worry about your own mess, thank y ou. Trash is an eyesore but I’ll save my fretting for bigger fry, like global warming.
But as I ran on I recalled the article I read about the Pacific Garbage Patch, a stew of plastic and other castoff garbage that is floating in the middle of the ocean. It is twice the size of Texas and keeps on growing.
The pile of fast-food detritus I was trying to ignore stood right next to the Bay. I imagined it blowing a few feet west into the water and from there out of the Golden Gate, and then it would be on its way to join the giant cesspool of our creation.
So I doubled back, shooed off the crow, and picked the mess up, every last bit of shredded bag, quarter-pounder wrapper and ketchup packet, and stuffed it in the garbage can firmly.
And off I ran, feeling I’d done a good deed. But man did that crow glare at me.
October 30th, 2007  I am proud to report my first surfboard repair. My favorite steed, a Bing Bonzer, somehow developed an inch-long tear on the rail, and I opted for an in-house convalescence. The girl at the NorCal Surf Shop sold me a tube of resin and said a dab would do me.
With the help of two grades of sandpaper (one for roughing up the
spot before, one for smoothing it down afterward), the deed was done.
However, I live in the Land of Fog, and our tepid sun took three times
as long to finish the job as was indicated in the instructions.
The ragged spot where the tear was is now smooth. My fingers can
detect just the slightest dimple. It’s gratifying to make a fix without
a mishap like, I don’t know, bonding my finger permanently to the
fiberglass.
  
October 28th, 2007 This evening little drops of brine keep shedding from my nose. They taste of Ocean Beach. This morning I braved Ocean Beach, my nemesis, in the company of my friend Scott, and the power of the waves sent saltwater into my sinuses like a firehose.
 image source: treehugger.com If a wave at Linda Mar (my usual break) pushes like a fishing trawler, a wave at Ocean Beach summons the force of a Hanjin container ship, the kind that is six stories high and blares its horn as it maneuvers under the Golden Gate, just a headland north of where we float. There’s no jetty, no reef, no promontory to ease the power of the swells at Ocean Beach; they are delivered to the shore of San Francisco with all the terrible power of the mid-Pacific storms that formed them.
I get jumpy every time I surf O.B. Today I watched the break carefully before I agreed to enter. The waves were small, about four to six feet, and, for this beach, kinda gentle. The sun was out and the water was warm (high fifties!) and Scott and I floated in sight of the white stuccoes of the Presidio and the pale Marin Headlands.
We paddled for the same wave. Scott caught it and soared off to the right, while I thrashed hard and caught nothing. I watched the broad face of the wave roll away from me with one part frustration and two parts relief.
When he paddled back out I hypothesized aloud that the reason I failed was my weight. I’m several inches taller and outweigh Scott by 35 pounds. He looked over at me. “If you’d wanted it, you’d have caught it,” he said.
When I stroke for one of these Ocean Beach waves the swell lifts me like a toothpick and I have a moment to look down the face as my board accelerates under me. Something deep in my brain stem, the part where my chimp forebears learned not to plummet from trees, yells Stop! Danger!
The reasonable part of my brain knows that there is nothing much to fear from falling down the face of a wave – cheerleaders have higher injury rates than surfers, for chrissakes – but there is not much time for the chimp and the collegian to sort things out. In the moment of a wave tipping I have only a second to decide, and if the wave is too big I chicken out.
On one side is fear. I fear the ignominy that ensues if I fall off the wave and Ocean Beach swipes at me like a grizzy bear and sends me spinning, forcing brine into my nostrils.
On the other is joy – the buttery ecstasy of the ride. A feathery memory I can recline on with a smile for days afterward.
One of these days I will huck myself over the thing.
October 25th, 2007  Today Sierra magazine published a story I wrote about those bizarre ice pinnacles I saw on Mt. Aconcagua earlier this year. The penitentes are a fascinating phenomenon, and even better, they may play a role in saving the glaciers of the Southern Andes. Have a look…
http://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/200711/goodgoing.asp
October 20th, 2007 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.
October 4th, 2007  image source: seafloor.csumb.edu/Map_Gallery I wonder sometimes if America’s obsession with surfing is due for an ebb tide. Haven’t all the good waves have been surfed already? Is the demand for “Endless Summer” movies really endless? Is there anything left to say about this sport?
However, after attending a lecture on the science of surfing last night, I feel we’re much more in the middle of the session than riding a last one in toward the beach. I arrived late at Axis Café to find it was standing-room only with curious people spilling out the door. Playing on a giant screen was a short film by KQED’s Quest about the science of big waves like Mavericks. All 150 people watched mesmerized as the giant green walls of water reared and roared.
Both of the evening’s speakers were big-wave experts, but with perspectives that could hardly be more different. One was Toby Garfield, a professor of geological sciences at San Francisco State and one of the Bay Area’s leading authorities on waves and the ocean floor. His counterpoint was Grant Washburn, one of the best surfers ever to ply Mavericks. (The professor had a paunch, and the surfer a set of shoulders like Aquaman’s.)
What they had in common was a fascination with how waves form. Washburn, it turns out, brings a scientist’s eye to his sessions at Ocean Beach, having recorded his observations of ocean conditions daily for the last 20 years. “Being a surfer is just being a data object out there,” he quipped.
The most interesting revelation is that the charting of the sea floor off of Northern California is just getting underway. Garfield mentioned that in the next few years, our knowledge of the bathymetry – or underwater depth – of the coast will become more exacting as new data comes online. Combined with steadily increasing knowledge of storms, wind and swell, forecasts of surf conditions will get far more accurate. How this will change surfing is anyone’s guess.
 image source: San Francisco Chronicle The science of wave prediction is building, as evidenced by Garfield’s current crop of protégés. Three of his grad students are themselves surfers, drawn to careers in science because of their curiosity about the winds, swells, ridges and sandbars that make waves happen.
The crowd – studious types with thick glasses, surfers with their lustrous tans, fleece-clad environmentalists – had lots of questions. There were high-school students. There was a grandmother who didn’t even know how to swim.
With interest that broad, I imagine the surf movies will draw long popcorn lines for years to come.
October 2nd, 2007 Just to scare myself, I have started reading The Devil’s Teeth, a book about the great white sharks that feed at the Farallon Islands, just 30 miles or so from my favorite surf spots.
The first sentence, about a seal execution, raises the hackles of a surfer and keeps him reading: “The killing took place at dawn and as usual it was a decapitation, accomplished by a single vicious swipe.”
 Photo credit: www.have-a-great-time-in-south-australia.com The book follows the single-minded quest of journalist Susan Casey to get chummy with the world’s most dangerous sharks. First she must wrangle a stay at the Farallon Islands, one of the world’s most fiercely protected nature preserves, home to seals, seagulls, sharks, four or so biologists, and absolutely zero guests.
Needless to say, she succeeds. Then Casey goes on to describe her forays into the waters around Southeast Farallon Island with the biologists, where sharks seventeen feet long bump against the boat. They lunge up and nibble on the gunwales with their two-inch-long teeth.
When I am belly-to-board this week I am looking anxiously seaward, scanning the swells for fins. Wondering what’s gliding around my feet as they dangle carelessly off the board. And I’m only on page 41.
I have learned that great whites can attack from two directions. One is that of Jaws fame; a dark triangle, the dorsal fin, speeding from the deep, “tunneling toward you like a German U-boat, creating a sizable wake,” Casey writes.
(Cue the music: Dum-dum. Dum dum dum-dum.)
The other – the more likely scenario – is from below. Sensing the electric tick of a heartbeat, and recognizing the shape of something seal-shaped near the surface, the shark jets upward at 40 miles an hour, enclosing prey in its two-foot-wide jaws.
As a surfer, thumbing through The Devil’s Teeth is a deliberate exercise in terror. I might as well pull Edgar Allen Poe from the bookshelf while home alone on a stormy night, or, halfway through a trans-Atlantic cruise, pop Titanic in the video player.
But then, if I didn’t want to be scared, I wouldn’t have started surfing in the first place.
September 19th, 2007 Every surf break has its alpha male, and this afternoon at Linda Mar beach it was a man I’ll call Methuselah, a heavyset man with a bald head and a bull neck and a wet gray goatee. He positioned himself far out, turned his back on the other surfers and looked straight out to sea. When a big swell arrived Methuselah turned his fat board around and rode that wave straight in. No one ever got in his way.
 Photo Credit: newscientist.com It’s a fact of surf etiquette that an alpha male (or female, rarely) always and instantly emerges, even among complete strangers. We watermen are like chimps or wolves, but in rubber suits. A human must dominate or defer. Or perhaps Methuselah’s superiority was a testament to how powerful it is when someone simply demonstrates these waves are mine.Methuselah talked to no one and no one talked to him. A few guys hovered on their boards just a couple watery feet closer to shore than he. I paddled out and joined the beta males.
A wave approached that was just a little bigger than average. Methuselah showed no sign of movement. I took chase. The swell plumped into a delectable riding surface: bigger than expected, with a large and lazy face that I carved up and down for what seemed like forever. I finished it off by doing a 280-degree turn and catching air off the back.
I paddled back out to Methuselah’s orbit. He turned and gave me a nod and flashed his bright blue eyes. He said, “That was a nith one!”
Methuselah would have said “nice one” if it wasn’t for the two front teeth he was missing. Or mithing.
“Best I caught all day!” I grinned, happy for the benediction of the head chimp, but with an implicit bow: I am a bad surfer. I not your equal.
I am a chimp, after all. Can’t upset the order of things.
September 15th, 2007 This morning Bob America lurched over to my place for a surf session despite the rough fermentation of the night before. He had downed two Negro Modelos, two glasses of an Australian pinot, a glass of bubbly and two pints of Guinness, best he could remember. The libations had stayed till morning and were now engaged in negotiations as explosive as the Iraqi Parliament’s, and it probably wouldn’t help to subject them to a couple hours of violent bobbing up and down in the Pacific. But Bob showed up anyway.
Bob is a rock n’ roll hero but hasn’t caught a wave in two years. I pulled out my 9’6” Softop, which I keep as a loaner for friends, and on the drive to Ocean Beach he ranted about the jackass antics of our local senator, Dianne Feinstein. Bob is always good for fervently poetic observations on politics and culture, such as Phil Collins, whom he recently described as “a touring piece of saffron that sang monkey songs from a schooner.”
From the cliffs above Ocean Beach we could see the break was in a playful and mellow mood. I paddled straight out for a ride; Bob floated about in the shallows for a while, marinating.
Twenty minutes or so later he mustered the mojo to stroke out through the whitewater to the real waves, and there he sat, staring toward the open ocean for what seemed like a long time. I wondered if I’d see no rock n’ roll at all today.
I caught a grand slow roller and, surprise, there was Bob, catapulting in toward shore right next to me. We got buried together. That was Bob’s Wave #1. Near the end of the session came Wave #2.
I saw Bob spring to his feet, watched his board planing straight for where I floated; he bailed, kindly, because if he hadn’t I might be writing this account for you minus my scalp.
Perhaps three seconds of ride time in a two-hour session. Afterward, while drying himself off with a red, white and blue towel, Bob America declared himself satisfied.
“When you ride a wave, it’s good as sex, and as good as playing rock n’ roll music. So if I can just set my sights on those three things, my life would be fulfilled,” he said.
September 13th, 2007 I had just struggled onto my second wave this morning at Ocean Beach when something blue-black flickered past me quick as a starling.
The apparition was past before I recognized it as a fellow boardsman. Sliding along a sixty-degree wall of water, he had simply weaved around me, no room to spare, like Jackie Chan in neoprene. My first thought was damn.
 My second thought –after he paddled back to the lineup and gave me an ain’t-I-hot grin – was how good my fist would look, just there, on the bridge of his nose beneath his neoprene cap.
One wrong move and we’d both have collapsed on a deck of fast-moving fiberglass.
But I made no fist. I was in the wrong and both of us knew it. Whoever is on the wave first, closest to the peak, owns the wave, and in the excitement of the moment I hadn’t seen him.
He caught wave after wave. He’s one of those greedy surfers who gobbles waves like Cheetos. The wave boils behind him and his tongue hangs out, like Mick Jagger slurping a microphone.
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