Last week I touched on how much of our thinking is spatial in nature—but even that sentence supports an ontological difference between "us" and "the world." A paragraph from Dan's website says it better:
We are our environments. Our cognition is distributed in the environment. We are the relationships and spaces that surround us. We think through our friends and collaborators and our spaces. If we drew a closed loop around our thought in space, most of it would be outside of our bodies.
I forgot to bring this back to cars. A funny aspect of my experiences in California is that because of the relative ubiquity of car ownership, meeting people often comes conjoined with meeting their cars. Along with each person comes a bubble of space that they're responsible for: cars carry impressions of their owners in how they drive, how they look, what's piled in the back seat.
I was in a minor car accident this week. My car—a source of freedom, a source of pride, a tool for field work, and a partner-in-crime for life in out West—is at the end of its life. I'd love to shed car ownership (as a logistical and financial hassle), but need to carefully weigh how car rentals could get me surfing as much as I'd like for a reasonable cost.
Central Ocean Beach, Nov 2 2018 (Surfline)
On that note, the summer winds are starting to abate, and Ocean Beach ("OB") is returning to the circuit of favorable surf spots in the Bay Area. (If you're a surfer, much of what I'm about to write about is standard fare.) OB is the biggest stretch of San Francisco's Western edge, a bolt-straight, north-south sandy strip, frequently battered by dense fog and gnarly rip currents. Really, Ocean Beach is part of what used to be an enormous dune system—but now that dune system is now paved over and we call it the Sunset District.
Because of the California Current, the ocean water temperature along the California coast is very stable (except for the Southern California Bight, which gets more complicated, warmer, and has a counter-current eddy). In the summer, inland California gets hot, so the temperature gradient between the Central Valley and the coast of California is at its greatest. As the inland air heats up, it rises and pulls cool, coastal air to as replacement, sucked through the Golden Gate. This leads to strong onshore winds on the coast and through the Delta—the kinds of winds that can ruin a surf session. Additionally, summer in California mostly gets swell from the South Pacific—and Ocean Beach doesn't shine on days with S or SSW swells, because of its orientation. Ocean Beach is also affected by the huge volume of water that goes in and out of San Francisco Bay with the tides; typically, the direction you drift in the water is dependent on wind and swell direction: at OB, the tides dominate. Tide going in? You'll get pulled north, in through Golden Gate. Tide going out? You'll end up down the peninsula.
Ocean Beach is legendary—it's huge, it's not bogged down by sunbathing types, and it's a beach break that can handle 20+ foot waves (if the sand bars have time to get organized). I had never seen nor surfed OB before I read William Finnegan's essays on the topic, which scared me shitless. Thankfully, OB's spatial extent is one of its great assets: its waves are diverse. South of Golden Gate Park, people refer to OB typically by the closest cross-street that meets Great Highway in San Francisco (which runs parallel to the strand). I typically surf Sloat—the southernmost break, basically—but you can surf at Irving, Noriega, Pacheco, Taraval, whatever, and have a different experience. These are all reasons why I've experienced surfing as a geography practice. To surf, you have to know your local geography, meteorology, and oceanography well—and you need to constantly be monitoring it. The winds, the tides, the swells, the crowds.
I have never seen OB crowded, actually. Crowded by LA standards, at least, which is perhaps a high bar. This summer I mostly surfed in Santa Cruz, where nearly all the breaks are point breaks (meaning there is one particular zone to catch a wave). Santa Cruz waves benefit from rock reefs that make for terrific shape—but people are jostling for the same location, which gets aggressive. I've found Ocean Beach, as an expansive beach break, is much more democratic—and thus much friendlier.
Primitive Skills Magazine touts itself as: "an independent study into the rituals, symbols, & habitats of surfers." I think what they've gotten right about this is how much surfing is about ritual. The stretches you do, how you pile boards in the car, the necessary pre-surf poop, your regular breaks. Because no wave lasts forever, because nobody can stay in the water all day, because swells come and go, because seasons change, and because few people can actually live at the beach, surfing has at its core a cyclical, habitual feeling. There is always "the thing" and then "the wait," and we develop flows to move between these states.
My gaps between surfs are a couple days to a couple weeks. It's hard to call Ocean Beach at Sloat my "home" break because I don't even live near the ocean (it's always a 30-40min drive from Berkeley), but it has been my default since moving to the Bay. I can do the drive with my eyes closed, I know where to go to get wax, I know where parking is easy. With the car on its way out but the surf season approaching, I'll be looking for new rhythms to dance with the ocean.
Waiting for the tide,
Lukas