I toed the curious piece of flotsam past the line of foam marking high tide. Muddy and sea-colored, larger than my sneaker, I’d almost walked right past it. Objects like this had been following me for years. I kicked it again. Harder.
The ocean has many colors. Whenever I look into its blue or green or gray or foaming white face, I think it’s telling a story. It’s remembering something, splashing together lost histories. What does froth murmur?
The Atlantic is childhood.
The Pacific is youth.
I’ve worked on ships.
I can talk about ballast and ratlines and know that, dreamy as it sounds, starboard just means “right” like “port” means left, like “bow” means front and “stern” means back. If I imagine my body as a mast, my outstretched arms are a yard, a horizontal beam where a sail would hang. I’ve walked on decks, not floors, stepped over knee knockers rather than through doors. I can identify the correct tool for splicing rope, which isn’t called rope on a ship—it’s called a line. I’ve never called a ship a “she.”
This piece is a part of WATERFRONTS, a series of personal essays engaging with the waterways of New York and/or Los Angeles, presented in collaboration with Trop.
"A distant glimpse of navigation lights, the remote passing of a liner from an office window, perhaps a Sunday excursion around Manhattan or across the Bay to Staten Island—such is the sum of the average New Yorker’s acquaintance with his port.” - Jan Morris, The Great Port
I heard a story on NPR recently about a family living aboard a boat in the Pacific Ocean, in waters so unpredictable that they literally tied themselves to the boat in case it capsized. Though experienced sailors, eventually a health emergency forced them to send out an SOS signal. When the rescuers came, the mother explained that the hardest part wasn’t the decision to get help, it was leaving their boat: “having to say goodbye to our home.”
Bald guy in his twenties paddles out next to me, introduces himself. Jason. Friendly, eager, not your standard head-nod type. Afterward, every time I paddle out at that spot, he's there, talking to somebody in the water. He introduces himself to me again and again. He tells me he's now friends with a local surf shop owner. One day, it's head-high and stormy. Nothing crazy. Jason paddles to the outside, announces that it's the biggest he's ever seen it out there. Nobody says anything. And then, as quick as he appeared, he's gone. I think I see him in a supermarket once. I ask if the guy surfs the spot, he says yes, I ask if his name's Jason. No, he says, it's John. I never see Jason again.
I grew up in Orange County, California, twenty-five minutes from the Pacific Ocean and some of the world’s most beautiful beaches, but as a teenager, it was swimming pools that preoccupied me. Any old person could go to the beach, but not everybody had a swimming pool, and the people who did were important. And if you were lucky enough to be invited poolside, so were you.
"Tip the world over on its side, and everything loose will land in Los Angeles."
—Frank Lloyd Wright
My last proper Los Angeles beach day was in June of 2008. I was a summer associate at a law firm and one of the recruiting events was a Saturday morning surf lesson at Venice Beach. I didn't really want to go, but it was free for me and I liked that it was costing that terrible place a neat chunk of money. I don't remember the surfing lesson. I don't remember touching a board, or going near the water, or having a single minute of fun.
I grew up in a 1950s ranch house cradled among the pine trees towering over Coldwater Canyon in Beverly Hills. We were only thirty minutes from the ocean, yet to my recollection my mother took me to the beach only twice. One time we built lopsided sand castles on the public beach just north of the Santa Monica Pier and the other we were guests of family friends at the Surf and Sand Beach Club. From both occasions I remember little except the checkerboard of light glittering across the waves. The mental snapshot is so iconic I suspect it’s been influenced by TV and picture postcards, or perhaps falsely generated altogether.
I’m waiting inside a trailer-office on a construction site just off Wilshire Boulevard, fiddling with my camera. Los Angeles magazine has sent me to take notes and photos of shoreline fossils discovered here, nine miles from L.A.’s present-day waterfront. Ziploc baggies of dirt cover the little room. They are scattered on the desk, tucked above thick binders lining the bookshelves, in shoeboxes on the floor. The soil differs slightly from sac to sac: grayish and gravely; chocolate-brown and soft; black and shining. Each is marked with the depth at which workers scooped them from the sixty-foot shaft they’re digging outside, destined to become a subway station.
When people ask me where I’m from, I tell them, “Los Angeles.” But, if pushed to be more specific, I have to reveal I actually grew up in Pasadena. Some people get angry. “Pasadena is not in Los Angeles” they say, seeming to accuse me of pretending I’m a real Angeleno. Pasadena is indeed its own independent city, not part of the City of Los Angeles and in pointing out my geographic vagueness, these people are also tugging at an old, deeply buried inferiority, the heart of which begins at the Pacific Ocean.
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