Fault Line

 

 

 

 

 

FAULT LINE

 

My heart went out to the kid. I used to hitchhike to the beach myself. Me and my brother, on rotten days just like this. Raining, wet, gray, cold. The kid reminded me of me standing out there in the middle of nowhere with a thumb out, hitchin’ a ride to the surf…any surf. A board in a soggy, wax-spotted bag cocked under my arm, its leash serving as a shoulder strap. 

 

I pulled over into the mud and helped her put her board up on the racks. I was glad it was me picking her up and not some hatchet murderer. 

 

- Name’s Dale. I cut school. It was all she said as she hopped in. I put her at about 15 years old. I wheeled back onto the two-lane highway, winding my way down towards Stinson beach. She was pretty stoked to get out of the rain. Just to start conversation I asked her where she was from. She told me that she was from somewhere over the hill and that I’d never heard of it anyway. Then she asked me where I was from. I told her. Her eyes lit up.     

- Really? Santa Barbara, really? Do you know Tom Curren?. 

- Well, uh…Yes, as a matter of fact I do. Why do you ask?

- Huh! Why do I ask? Well maybe jus’ cuz the guys only just about the best surfer in the whole wide world! 

 

Dale went on from there to tell me she’d been “Studyin’” Curren’s technique, that she had her board colored like Curren’s, had all his pictures up in her room and that she wanted more than anything to be the World Champion “just like Curren”. Dale was on a roll now, telling me of how she was “Gonna’ start competin’ and shit”. How she was “gonna move to Santa Cruz someday, because you gotta make it there or you’ll never make it”. She told me she had never even been there yet, but she’d “Seen all the pictures and shit.” I listened attentively. The kid had a dream, no doubt about it.

 

We wound our way down into the town of Stinson beach and I made to pull over to a beachbreak there. Dale wouldn’t have it. 

- Listen man, You don’t want to surf here. I know a better place, keep driving. 

She sounded earnest, so I continued on. About ten minutes up the road I pulled over to a market to pick up a sandwich. Dale came in with me. I saw her grab an apple, take a big bite out of it and then put it back. Before she got to the checker, she’d  also eaten two bananas, half a bag of potato chips and 6 Oreo’s. I saw all this by watching Dale in one of those crazy mirrors little grocery stores always seem to have up in the back. 

 

I turned to the butcher behind the counter and told him to make that two sandwiches, and an extra milk. Dale bought a snickers bar (and pocketed another). I noticed she paid for her candy bar with nickels and pennies. Back in the car I offered her the sandwich and the little carton of milk. She said she couldn’t take it, couldn’t pay for it. I told her it was alright, not to worry about it. She wolfed it down in silence. We drove on.   

- Thanks mister, that was good. Lot better’n I get back at the house.

There was something about the way she said it. She called it “the house”, she didn’t call it home. 

- What house? I ventured.

- State house, I live there with the other kids, girls like me. Don’t have no parents.

She left it at that. So I did too.

 

We made our way around the lagoon and through the small town of Bolinas. It had stopped raining and the sun was shadowing everything in the evening cool. Dale directed me down to an old boat ramp at the end of town. We parked and hopped out to check the surf. It looked pretty good.

- See? What did I tell ya! This here’s the Patch. Been unreal ever since the earthquake.

- The what?

- The earthquake, man! The San Francisco earthquake…you know, a while back. See, this here’s where the fault line runs out into the ocean. After the shake, that right peak started working. 

And with that she ran back to the car for her board.

 

The kid was right. I was standing smack dab on top of the San Andreas Fault in the exact spot where it leaves the land and stretches southeast into the sea and across San Francisco beyond. I looked out onto the oddly shaped surf. Swells would hump up here and there, feathering, threatening to break and then they’d back off. But one spot seemed shallow enough, and sure enough an occasional swell would cap over it. I was stoked, if nothing else, it would certainly be a novel go-out. Surfing the San Andreas Fault.

 

I walked back to the car. Dale was already in her wetsuit. She crammed all her clothes back into her wet backpack, balled it all up in the soggy board bag and then shoved it all under a hedge by the car. She threw some leaves over it for good measure.

- Hey, thanks, man. For the ride and the sandwich and all. See you down in Santa Cruz someday. Then she pumped my hand once, real hard, and ran off toward the surf. 

 

And as she ran off, I think I saw her for the first time. The tattered wetsuit, way too small for her and ripped up to one knee. Her dinged up board, once a single fin, now a backyard thruster. And she’d told the truth; her board was colored just like Curren’s renowned Black Beauty. Except that anyone she’d done it herself with a magic marker. And it hadn’t been waxed in a long, long, time. 

The scene made me think of some of the surfers her age that I knew in Southern California. Kids with new boards, leashes, the latest wetsuits, the latest magazines, the latest video’s, nice parents that give them rides to the beach, the high school surf teams they belong to, the warmer water, the easier lives…and all the modern dreams and gilded promises that go with it.

 

And then I watched Dale paddle out into the freezing, overcast surf in a wetsuit that couldn’t possibly be doing her any good. I thought of how far she’d hitchhiked to be here,  at such risk, about 40 miles. Of what she’d had to eat that day. Of what she was going home to afterwards. And of how she was going to get there. It made me think of what her chances were of making her dreams come true. 

 

She didn’t stand a chance in hell. Another Mozart, murdered.  

 

Then I thought of how many other surfers there were out there up against the same kind of odds. Born under a bad sign, picking this world up by the feet and shaking the coins out of its pockets. Trying their best to ignore the meanness of it all. Trying to get something going, trying real hard. Going surfing, staying stoked…doing whatever it takes.

And all the while living on the fault line of their own dreams. Dreams that at any moment this old world could decide to shift and shake and reduce to rubble.

 

Outside I saw Dale spin and start paddling for the first wave of a set. I found myself smiling. God bless the survivors of this world, I thought to myself. May God bless them all.

I watched her ride. 

 

She was pretty good.

 

By Matt George

Song by Gino London Band, Lausanne (myspace.com / Gino London Band)

Special thanks to Andre Uger (www.audiolink.ch)