By Michael Delp
I never rode the big sets outside Wiamea Bay, the waves rising like the walls of canyons, each breaker an avalanche of foam and sound. I never took the chance to drift up and down the California Coast looking for good surf or had any idea what it felt like to shoot the curl inside a breaker on the Bonzai Pipeline. I never caught a wave on the North Shore of Oahu in November, pumped up for the winter surfing season because I grew up in a farm town in the middle of Michigan and before I was sixteen, the closest I got to waves was the wind undulating across Keith King's cornfield when I was hunting pheasants. I'd flush a big hen up into the sky but before I could bring the gun to my shoulder, my eyes would catch on the way the wind moved over the tops of the stalks, the way everything blew and how the shocks sounded when they rustled against each other. Then the wind rolling away, rising and falling over the tops of the corn, like wave after wave. I'd hunch down at just about eye level to the tassels and let the wind wash over me.
I wanted desperately to head west, hit the beaches at Huntington, Rincon, maybe head down to Baja, surfing the mile markers, hoping to find good waves at a place called Shipwrecks and then dropping down into the Gulf of California on the inland side of the peninsula. I wanted my feet on a board, my back tanned and my hair perfectly blond. A bushy bushy blond hair do, made even bushier and more blond by the salt spray and the sun. I never came close.
I watched "The Endless Summer" six times at the Silver Theatre before it left town for lack of ticket sales, making sure that one of those times I had my dad's 8mm Kodak hidden under my parka. The copy I'd made was dark, and grainy and you could barely hear any sound, but could see those two kids looking all over the world for perfect surf, following summer around the world.
But my summers were different: unloading boxcars of dry milk for a guy who owned a dairy and an ice cream factory. Fifty-pound bags stacked thirty high, forty deep, one kid to a car and the whole day to kill you. At night I'd hop on my Schwinn Corvette and take the High Street hill route so I could feel the wind in my face then ride around Baldwin Lake for a quick swim, hoping for a ski boat to come close enough to shore to send even the smallest wake my way.
My friends and I listened to the Beach Boys, cranking up the volume on my dad's Magnavox, using the car engine intro to "409" to shake the house and drive my sister crazy. She preferred Del Shannon or the Platters, but it was surf music all the time for us: Jan and Dean, two girls for every boy in Surf City, or the Markets helping us through the Surfer Stomp. Then we'd hop around the room and make ourselves look like we were surfing, holding our hands out from our sides, or dancing out to the end of the board to hang ten, do a curl, then dip down into the pipeline for a long shot out of the living groom. Some nights it was the Ventures or the Waiki-kis and "Wipeout" bouncing off the walls, my dad's Vivaldi LP's shaking in their jackets but it was always surfing music and always loud, an ocean of sound rolling through the neighborhood.
I was landlocked until I was sixteen and Ray Povolo reluctantly signed off in my Driver's Ed class, shaking his finger at my heavy foot, the desire to always be in the passing lane. Once in a while we'd drive to Lake Michigan during thunderstorms and body surf off the coast off the Muskegon State Park, the beach littered with alewives and empty bottles. We'd bring a record player, one of those little battery operated jobs that only played 45's and then sit on the sand and watch the surf, waiting for what we thought was a set, something rideable. There on the beach it was always the Ventures, or once in a while Sandy Nelson playing "Let There be Drums".
When I was seventeen, Dave Ford came back from his senior trip to California, his new long blond hair making him look like Brian Wilson, a battered up Hobie tied to his van with clothesline. I offer him twenty bucks at his garage sale and he took it, just like that, saying he needed the pizza money for college.
The rest is history, as they say. I tied that board to the top of my dad's 67' jeep, a red leftover from some local fire department and drove around town all summer, the Beach Boys blasting from the one speaker I had tied to the windshield frame. We hung our feet out over the doorframe, the entire cockpit open to the wind. We tooled. We cruised. We looked cool and combed our hair with peroxide and then messed it up right away to make it look wind-blown, California style. We stopped for burgers and fries. Malts at the High Delight where the waitresses skated out to take our orders. There under the neon lights we'd eat as slowly as possible waiting for the other kids to cruise past, all of them gaping at a surfboard so far from home.
We surfed whenever we could. Hit the beach in Muskegon during storms, heavy squalls. Even went to Sleeping Bear Point in November once and surfed in the kind of storm that took the Edmund Fitzgerald down. We had wetsuits by then and Mark Christensen and I both had "Live the Life You Love" hand lettered across our backs. We thought we were surfbums, but we were really farm boys, teenagers in limbo between Korea and Vietnam, swooning at every line to "Don't Worry Baby".
Once, on a whim, we put contact paper that looked like wood all over the side of the jeep...a woodie for sure, than parked it at the Baldwin Lake Beach every day for a week and just kind of hung around it, leaning on the fenders, the lake flat and calm, a hundred degrees in July. No surf anywhere for a hundred miles.
When we saw Harley Marquardt drift past with his fifth wheel camper we both looked at each other like an anvil had fallen on us from out of the sky. If you could hook up a trailer to such a thing, then you could rig up a surfboard.
We welded a frame together and mounted it on a plate that had what Christensen called both pitch and yaw capabilities and then bolted some ski boots onto a mock-up board we'd managed to hack out of fiberglass resin and chunks of old Styrofoam from the refrigerator plant where my dad worked. We'd whittled it down to roughly the shape of the Hobie, but from a distance it looked like some kind of deep sea fish, a Marlin, maybe, scuttled in mid-Michigan, run aground on the back of a Ford pick-up, with a bunch of kids driving it around as if they were part of a traveling carnival advertising a Gulf of Mexico freak show.
The entire contraption hung out over the side of the truck, cantilevered, Christensen said. Land surfing is what we called it. Christensen would drive and I'd be out there three feet off the side of his pickup, screaming down back roads at sixty miles an hour. When you tipped back the board would lift up into the air, then drop back down like you were riding a wave or the back of a dolphin. I cold hear the music screaming from his speakers, my feet laced into an old pair of Kastle ski boots, my arms flailing the air like I was rocketing down the face of a monster at Dohenie. I remember feeling like I was part of the wind, that if I closed my eyes and crouched down, pretended like I was about to be washed out, I could open my eyes and I'd be landing on a beach at the other end of the world where someone like Annette Funicello would be squirming in her two piece to get her hands on me.
Night surfing was best, we'd head out into Keith King's cornfield following the narrow access roads, the truck in the ruts, the board hanging out over the corn, shocks and ears flying, imagining the sound of the tassels hitting the board to be the echo of heavy surf off Maui. We stopped night surfing the only time I drove and Christensen hit the cow.
I punched him up to just a little over sixty. I had "Shutdown" coming from a guitar amp we had hooked up in the pick up bed and Christensen was making the board buck like a horse. Up and down, up and down and then he ran head on into one of Keith Kings Holsteins. Forty-five stitches, broken jaw, flipped right out of the boots and skidded ten feet into a ditch. He was unconscious for two days.
When I visited him the first time, I gave him the Hobie T-shirt the Beach Boys had signed when I joined their fan club. He wadded it up and threw it in the corner and said he never wanted to hear another stupid surfing song as long as he lived. We started parting our friendship then, he strayed toward the Beatles, then the Stones and finally ended up listening to Jimi Hendrix, his life a growing montage of psychedelic colors and American Flags mixed with the pain of a hip that never healed right.
I drove around town by myself for a few months listening to the slow ones, like "Surfer Girl" and "In My Room". I was lost ten states away, hopelessly looking into the US map every night that was taped next to my bed. My dreams grew ever-specific: girls and beaches, then specific girls like Ginger Gibson on specific beaches, like Redondo and me riding the wild surf. In my fantasies they were all there, Carl and Dennis, Mike Love and Al Jardine. I played them into a fantasy soundtrack for my life, sure that every move I made was punctuated by their intricate harmonies, or the driving sound of a couple guitars and a set of drums. I kept my frayed cut-offs and huarache sandals, let my hair stay long for a while. Part of me stayed in the cornfield that night, young and foolish, ready to do just about anything for a cheap thrill, my hair wild and the ocean in my head, while another part of me lurched toward a life on dry land. Christensen trucked off to MSU and my dad sold the jeep to buy a four door Corvair, a family car that looked like a rolling meat case.
