mouth of the alley where either man might turn and see him. There was something in the scene, he thought, that suggested he keep his distance. What was most bothersome, however, was the location of the building behind which they stood. As near as Ike could tell, it was the back of the first surf shop he had gone into that day he’d gotten his board.
The implications of this could of course be interpreted in more than one way and the task of doing so was enough to disturb the peace he had found at the end of the pier. It had him guessing as he moved away from the alley and into the night, and it kept him that way far into the first gray hours of morning. For the present, however, his resolve held and he was up with the dawn, dressed in cutoff jeans and a ragged sweat shirt, a towel slung over his shoulders, his board beneath his arm. A sleepless night behind him, he was headed for the Coast Highway and the beaches north of town.
• • •
It was different at the north end of town. There was not the sense of light and movement one got around the pier. From the beach you could not see the highway or the town. There were only the cliffs, which were bare and rocky, capped by the gray squeaking forest of oil wells and by the black oil-spattered earth. It was a landscape of grays and blues, dull browns and yellow ochres, of blackened fire rings and litter. And on every available chunk of rock and concrete there were spray-painted messages, swastikas, Chicano names, for he had been told that the northern beaches were the domain of the inland gangs when the sun went down, gangs out of the landlocked badlands back of Long Beach and Santa Ana. It was a strip of beach the cops did not even bother with at night, and there were grisly tales told by surfers of ghastly early-morning finds. One surfer Ike spoke to claimed to have found a human leg, bloated and discolored, floating in the shallows. But the beaches were empty in the mornings. There were only the painted messages, the litter, the blackened fire rings like stone altars, and Ike made no terrible finds.
He was growing accustomed to a kind of dichotomy he had discovered here, a contradiction between the bleakness of the landscape and the beauty of the sea. There were times when the sea was like the land, flat, barren, the color of concrete. But there were other times when its surface was alive with light, times when the wave faces were like polished stones and the white water seemed on fire with the setting sun. And nowhere was this contradiction more apparent than along the beaches below the cliffs. In spite of the stories he had heard and the evidence of human filth in the sand, he came to love those stretches of beach, empty in the first light, silent except for the sounds of the surf and the cries of the gulls. He went there for the first time the morning after he saw Preston in the alley, and then every other morning for the rest of the week. He took great pleasure in the mornings, in walking along the cliffs, close to the edge, the ocean smooth and glassy beneath, the air still and soft against his face and yet laced with the salty dampness of the sea. But what he found most pleasure in was that certain rush that began as he picked a trail and started down, watching the swell lines as he went, anticipating that first explosion of cold, the first line of white water breaking over him, washing away everything save the moment itself.
• • •
The waves beneath the cliffs had a way of breaking far outside. The white water would then roll toward the beach in long, churning lines. There was a point, however, where the white water began to re-form, to swell up into a new wave that would go on to break only yards from shore. It was in this second, inside break that Ike did his practicing. He would paddle out just beyond the shore break, let the wall of white water catch his board, and then try to stand up as the wave was re-forming. He usually fell off
The implications of this could of course be interpreted in more than one way and the task of doing so was enough to disturb the peace he had found at the end of the pier. It had him guessing as he moved away from the alley and into the night, and it kept him that way far into the first gray hours of morning. For the present, however, his resolve held and he was up with the dawn, dressed in cutoff jeans and a ragged sweat shirt, a towel slung over his shoulders, his board beneath his arm. A sleepless night behind him, he was headed for the Coast Highway and the beaches north of town.
• • •
It was different at the north end of town. There was not the sense of light and movement one got around the pier. From the beach you could not see the highway or the town. There were only the cliffs, which were bare and rocky, capped by the gray squeaking forest of oil wells and by the black oil-spattered earth. It was a landscape of grays and blues, dull browns and yellow ochres, of blackened fire rings and litter. And on every available chunk of rock and concrete there were spray-painted messages, swastikas, Chicano names, for he had been told that the northern beaches were the domain of the inland gangs when the sun went down, gangs out of the landlocked badlands back of Long Beach and Santa Ana. It was a strip of beach the cops did not even bother with at night, and there were grisly tales told by surfers of ghastly early-morning finds. One surfer Ike spoke to claimed to have found a human leg, bloated and discolored, floating in the shallows. But the beaches were empty in the mornings. There were only the painted messages, the litter, the blackened fire rings like stone altars, and Ike made no terrible finds.
He was growing accustomed to a kind of dichotomy he had discovered here, a contradiction between the bleakness of the landscape and the beauty of the sea. There were times when the sea was like the land, flat, barren, the color of concrete. But there were other times when its surface was alive with light, times when the wave faces were like polished stones and the white water seemed on fire with the setting sun. And nowhere was this contradiction more apparent than along the beaches below the cliffs. In spite of the stories he had heard and the evidence of human filth in the sand, he came to love those stretches of beach, empty in the first light, silent except for the sounds of the surf and the cries of the gulls. He went there for the first time the morning after he saw Preston in the alley, and then every other morning for the rest of the week. He took great pleasure in the mornings, in walking along the cliffs, close to the edge, the ocean smooth and glassy beneath, the air still and soft against his face and yet laced with the salty dampness of the sea. But what he found most pleasure in was that certain rush that began as he picked a trail and started down, watching the swell lines as he went, anticipating that first explosion of cold, the first line of white water breaking over him, washing away everything save the moment itself.
• • •
The waves beneath the cliffs had a way of breaking far outside. The white water would then roll toward the beach in long, churning lines. There was a point, however, where the white water began to re-form, to swell up into a new wave that would go on to break only yards from shore. It was in this second, inside break that Ike did his practicing. He would paddle out just beyond the shore break, let the wall of white water catch his board, and then try to stand up as the wave was re-forming. He usually fell off
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