Sunday mornings, I fill our little blue watering can at the kitchen sink and walk around like a waiter at a cocktail party, offering drinks to the houseplants. In our first place together, we sprouted plants from avocado seeds. One spread from a ceramic pot on the ledge above the sink, the window never closed, where the cat Freely came and went. Oak Street.
One day, each of us carrying a bag of groceries, walking home down Main Street, we paused at the Realtor’s window at the end of the commercial strip to look at the photos of houses for sale in town. We lived in one of four small white stucco houses, one in each corner of a courtyard, a wooden barn-like garage out back with four open stalls. Our rent was $95 a month, the beach a mile away.
Standing at the window of the Realtor’s, I was surprised to see a photo of our place. The four house lot was for sale. We didn’t have a telephone, so I went over to my folks-iz home and called our landlord, who confirmed our house was for sale, sold, actually, and he just had not had the heart to tell us, but the eviction notice would soon be in the mail.
That summer, the four small houses were torn down and a large apartment complex with no yard space erected, but this little story is not about inflation. It’s about night and day, dancing the night away, surfing in the morning.
The third in a series of surfing slides taken at the Redondo Beach horseshoe pier late 60’s early 70’s posted for “Sliding into Saturday.” 35 mm Ektachrome slide taken with an Exakta 500 with 120mm portrait lens.
“Sliding into Saturday” is a blog meme, a day-themed prompt for posting electronic copies of old slide transparencies, usually 35 mm slides, but also 120 and 110 formats.
Surfing at Horseshoe Pier in Redondo Beach CA, 1969. Unknown surfer. 35 mm Ektachrome slide taken with an Exakta 500 with 120mm portrait lens.
“Sliding into Saturday” is a blog meme, a day-themed prompt for posting electronic copies of old slide transparencies, usually 35 mm slides, but also 120 and 110 formats.
Surfing at Horseshoe Pier in Redondo Beach CA, 1971. 35 mm Ektachrome slide taken with an Exakta 500.
“Sliding into Saturday” is a blog meme, a day-themed prompt for posting electronic copies of old slide transparencies, usually 35 mm slides, but also 120 and 110 formats.
One summer, I worked for one of my Dad’s friends in the body and fender shop at a Ford dealership in Culver City. He entertained the idea of getting a race car and I would be his driver. He foreshadowed the advent of the short surfboard. “Why are the boards so big?” he asked. “You could ride a two-by-four if you could get up the momentum.” Another summer my Confirmation sponsor hired me to work as a lab assistant at UCLA, where he was working on a graduate degree, the chalkboards in the lab covered with formulas and equations that looked like hieroglyphs left by sanderlings bicycling around the wavelets at El Porto.
The first thing my Dad taught me about plumbing was to name the tools, so I could hand them to him when needed. And I learned to dig a trench with the correct slope, for “shit falls downhill.” I worked odd plumbing jobs with him and knew enough of plumbing to know a plumber by trade was not what I wanted to be. Today, though, I feel some affinity for the plumber’s craft, even if my Dad would not now recognize it as the same trade, the new plastic pipe, the special tools, the glues that have replaced the lead and oakum joint jobs. Boiling the molten pig of lead in a lead pot then working the cooling lead sealing the oakum with a cold chisel around the lip of the cast-iron pipe. Yarned and roped, poured and caulked.
One day, my Dad, a plumber by trade, he would say if asked, asked me what I wanted to do, to be: a carpenter, an electrician, a plumber. I wanted to surf, which he knew, his garage a surfboard shop, but while I was a good surfer, I wasn’t an excellent swimmer, like my two best friends who were county lifeguards, but we all knew we weren’t going to surf our lives away. And I played guitar, but as an ambition as aimless as walking on a surfboard, for while I was a good guitarist, I wasn’t an exceptional musician, and had no taste for the business. And cars, beginning with the 1956 Chevy I bought for $75 from Gary, who was headed for Vietnam. I became a wheeled and track vehicle mechanic, MOS63BC20, which helped see me through school, that talk with my Dad over and out.
What’s all this got to do with Benjamin Wood and his novel “Seascraper,” recently longlisted for the 2025 Book Prize?
“The horse needs feeding up and harnessing. He gets into his boots on the back doorstep, rolls a ciggie underneath the rusty canopy his grandpa built from corrugated iron – it’s hanging by loose screws, and one more heavy rain could bring it down. He’s not repaired it yet, as mending stuff like that requires an aptitude he doesn’t have. His talent is for something else – his grandpa would decry it as a waste of time if he were still alive to hear him sing a tune, and if his ma knew anything about the pocket watch he gave to Harry Wyeth in trade for his guitar, then she would make a bonfire of it in their own backyard” (5).1
That talk with my Dad I replay like old vinyl, now full of scratches of course. I might pick an electrician to be, and maybe I’d specialize in electrical musical instruments. Or I might have moved from carpentry to lutherie. Those are indoor jobs. Do you want to work indoors or out was not a key question for a kid growing up in Southern California, where the weather was taken for granted. There were a dozen guys I knew having conversations with their Dads similar to the one I described above. Families just scraping by, recovering from one war and beginning another, and then another, or couples with a cache of war bonds that would see their two kids through USC or Stanford.
“It never used to foul his mood this much, the cold, the loneliness, the graft, but that was long before he harboured any aspirations for himself besides what he was raised to want. He used to think it was enough to fill the whiskers up with shrimp each morning and accept the cash for them by afternoon. Providing is surviving – that’s what Pop would tell him, and what else should any man desire? Perhaps a wife, if he could find one that’d have him” (12).
He has more than a job, an occupation, he’s a seascraper by trade. He both loves and hates it. For love, the culture and tradition, the brawn and brack, the freedom. For hate, the cold and wet and muddiness, the poverty, and not enough time to devote to his true calling:
“He was thirteen when he first went out to sea with Pop and, in those days, few adaptations to the old equipment had been made – the cart still had two wagon wheels with metal rims, and he felt queasy after half an hour of riding in the seat with him. It was supposed to be a weekend job, that’s all, and it was something he would beg his ma to let him do, believing it to be a rite of passage. Every other Flett had been a shrimper, going back to his great-grandpa who had putted barefoot on the beach alone with just a push-net and a basket on his back” (34).
Scraping for money, too. There’s the rub. And he learns and loves to read, fatal flaw. And comes under the spell, though he’s naturally wary, of an outsider who sees just some kind of romance in the beach and sea and fishing for a living, and who wants to make some kind of movie about it, with him the star, and the promise of some big bucks. He’s not sure.
“The folk club at the Fisher’s Rest begins at eight, and if he wants to play tonight he’s got to put his name down on the list by quarter to. Perhaps it wouldn’t be so bad to wait a week, rehearse his songs a few more times before subjecting people’s ears to them. He’s not in a position to refuse that kind of money. ‘I dunno,’ he says” (32).
What’s the catch? The empty promise of a false calling. And who is calling? You’ll meet all kinds of charlatans wanting to hear your story and help you to tell it. How could you tell? He’ll make a tourist scene of your livelihood. Tom Flett is the only seascraper around who still works with a horse and wagon. The others use motorized carts. He’s like a plumber who might still be using lead and oakum. Idealized and sentimental. The tourist view doesn’t see behind the facade. There’s no money in the songs. There’s no money in the seascraping. What’s he waiting for? To know his song well before he starts singing?2 What’s he going to sing about? Seascraping. Dangerous work, and just scraping by.
“He’s committed now and has to see it through. ‘Bear with me, then. I’ve got to work the nerve up.’ The guitar of Harry’s is much bigger at the body than he’s used to and its neck seems thicker when he takes hold of it. At least it’s strung the right way up. The frets are old and blackened, but it sounds in tune. ‘I need to warn you, I’ve not sung this more than twice from start to finish. It’ll come out ragged, but you’ll get the gist’” (161).
Mariposa Surfboards
“Seascraper,” Benjamin Wood, recently longlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize. Penguin Random House UK. ↩︎
“A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall,” released in 1963 on the album The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. ↩︎
We never tired of going down to the beach, in the mornings to surf, in the afternoons to boogie, in the evenings to walk, to catch the sunset. I bought a used Exakta 500 for surfing photos. The 50mm lens was too small, so I bought a used 120mm portrait lens. After the sun went down we sat out in the backyard and watched a slide show on the side of the garage wall.
Surf films, streaming videos, and photos often depict surf spots as gardens of paradise, perfect waves, friendly sun, and green down to tan-white sand and then the waterline, clean blues and greens. Nothing industrial going on. Very good days are rare though, and we went down to the water anyway, regardless of conditions. And once in the water, it didn’t matter. Every wave was a Top 40 hit song, every photo a classic. The beach break at El Porto was our home spot, over the dunes from the El Segundo Standard Oil Refinery. The photos we took in the 60s and 70s might today look as bad as the waves we rode. AI Assistant wants to touch them up for me, but I prefer seeing the originals, even if those are now becoming as faded as the memory, dye fading and color shifting.
Where in white flats over hills and dales live snowy creatures in snowy hills overcast the sky a white veil covers a frozen forest of fairies in fallen fate telling tawny tales and this winter’s rest one rare bird flew west into the sun passage over the ocean and caught waves and played with the dolphins improving her endorphins.
“Over hill, over dale, Thorough bush, thorough brier, Over park, over pale, Thorough flood, thorough fire; I do wander everywhere, Swifter than the moon’s sphere.”
We two boys stood at the edge of the road at the top of 45th high above the beach, where the slow moving two lane Highland (lined with spots we ignored as kids: vista apartments and curio shops, corner cigarettes and beer market, breakfast cafe and evening bar), turns into Vista del Mar and curves down to Grand, only about a mile away, but still we stuck our thumbs out to hitch a ride. We were on our way home from Junior Lifeguards, which was held on the beach near Marine, down from the big tower. We never caught rides thumbing, so we were surprised when some sporty car with jaunty driver pulled over coming to a stop some twenty yards past us and we ran to hop in but the car revved up and sped off wheels spinning in sandy grit just as we got close.
I’ve been reading “A Time of Gifts,” by Patrick Leigh Fermor (subtitled “On Foot to Constantinople: From the Hook of Holland to the Middle Danube”). First published in 1977, when Fermor was sixty-two, it recounts the time in 1933, when Fermor, then just eighteen, left England for a wintry continent, outfitted with greatcoat, hobnailed boots, and commodious rucksack:
“During the last days, my outfit assembled fast. Most of it came from Millet’s army surplus store in The Strand: an old Army greatcoat, different layers of jersey, grey flannel shirts, a couple of white linen ones for best, a soft leather windbreaker, puttees, nailed boots, a sleeping bag (to be lost within a month and neither missed nor replaced); notebooks and drawing blocks, rubbers, an aluminium cylinder full of Venus and Golden Sovereign pencils; an Oxford Book of English Verse. (Lost likewise, and, to my surprise – it had been a sort of Bible – not missed much more than the sleeping bag.)
In the mornings, when the first-shift lifeguards opened their towers, the beach was grey-white foggy and cool-damp and the yellow sand stuck to your feet, the water dark-grey and the waves glassy and small and the blue of old fruit jars. At my parents’ house, 2 miles inland, walked in under an hour if you took the Devil’s Path shortcut and didn’t dawdle, the morning was open and clear and the air fresh and warm. The town was hilly and you had to cross the dunes to get down to the beach, which meant you had to climb back over them to get home, up the long Grand Avenue hill, but the afternoon breeze would be onshore and pushing as you walked before the wind.
Travel descriptions can be confusing to read, to see the images as they develop on the page. One key to travel writing must be movement – in time and place. Still, how does the reader see the scene unfolding? I’m finding it helpful to pull up the places Fermor talks about in Google Maps, but of course consulting a map is not travel, nor does the map help bring forth the local. Maybe we’ve become too saturated with photographs to understand prose pictures. And while Fermor’s story takes place in 1933, the images I see seem older. I was reminded of scenes like the following, from Penelope Fitzgerald’s “The Blue Flower,” but which takes place in the late 1700s, and concerns Friedrich von Hardenberg, later known as Novalis:
“From the age of seventeen he had been in almost perpetual motion, or the Gaul’s unhurried version of it, back and forth, though not over a wide area. His life was lived in the ‘golden hollow’ in the Holy Roman Empire, bounded by the Harz Mountains and the deep forest, crossed by rivers – the Saale, the Unstrut, the Helme, the Elster, the Wipper – proceeding in gracious though seemingly quite unnecessary bends and sweeps past mine-workings, salt-houses, timber-mills, waterside inns where the customers sat placidly hour after hour, waiting for the fish to be caught from the river and broiled. Scores of miles of rolling country, uncomplainingly bringing forth potatoes and turnips and the great whiteheart pickling cabbages which had to be sliced with a saw, lay between hometown and hometown, each with its ownness, but also its welcome likeness to the last one. The hometowns were reassuring to the traveller, who fixed his sights from a distance on the wooden roof of the old church, the cupola of the new one, and came at length to the streets of small houses drawn up in order, each with its pig sty, its prune oven and bread oven and sometimes its wooden garden-house, where the master, in the cool of the evening, sat smoking in total blankness of mind under a carved motto: ALL HAPPINESS IS HERE or CONTENTMENT IS WEALTH. Sometimes, though not often, a woman, also, found time to sit in the garden-house.” 57
That prose was first published in 1995, when Penelope was seventy-nine, so around 200 years after the scene takes place. And in Patrick Fermor’s “A Time of Gifts” we see this:
“I was plodding across open fields with snow and the night both falling fast. My new goal was a light which soon turned out to be the window of a farmhouse by the edge of a wood. A dog had started barking. When I reached the door a man’s silhouette appeared in the threshold and told the dog to be quiet and shouted: “Wer ist da?” Concluding that I was harmless, he let me in.” 73
That traveller was Fermor, in 1933, writing in the 1970s, but could have been Novalis in 1795, described by Penelope in the early 1990s. And many travellers wanting to save their day’s journey in writing may have shared something like the following experience, here described by Fermor:
“This was the moment I longed for every day. Settling at a heavy inn-table, thawing and tingling, with wine, bread, and cheese handy and my papers, books and diary all laid out; writing up the day’s doings, hunting for words in the dictionary, drawing, struggling with verses, or merely subsiding in a vacuous and contented trance while the snow thawed off my boots.” 66
The title of Fermor’s book comes from a Louis MacNeice poem, “Twelfth Night”. From the last of four stanzas:
“For now the time of gifts is gone – O boys that grow, O snows that melt, O bathos that the years must fill – Here is dull earth to build up on Undecorated; we have reached Twelfth Night or what you will . . . you will.”
I haven’t reached the Abbey of Melk yet, which in Jan Morris’s introduction to “A Time of Gifts” we are told is the “central point of the narrative.” So more on Fermor’s travel’s in a later post. Meantime, I harken back to the time and place of the two boys walking home from the beach. They don’t have maps, nothing to denote, “You are here.” They really haven’t much idea where they are in time or place, nor can they fully grasp the gifts of either.
Richard Henry Dana Jr, in his memoir, “Two Years Before the Mast” (1840), found at least the California weather a gift, and the beaches and waves. The following is from the “First Landing in California” chapter:
“It was a beautiful day, and so warm that we had on straw hats, duck trousers, and all the summer gear; and as this was midwinter, it spoke well for the climate; and we afterwards found that the thermometer never fell to the freezing-point throughout the winter, and that there was very little difference between the seasons, except that during a long period of rainy and south-easterly weather thick clothes were not uncomfortable.”
…
“I shall never forget the impression which our first landing on the beach of California made upon me. The sun had just gone down; it was getting dusky; the damp night-wind was beginning to blow, and the heavy swell of the Pacific was setting in, and breaking in loud and high ‘combers’ up on the beach.”
And where was that place? And is it still there today? The Grand Avenue Beach Jetty (it’s now called El Segundo Beach) is located in the middle of Santa Monica Bay. It’s about 10 miles north from the jetty to Sunset Beach (not counting getting around the Marina), where Sunset Boulevard winds down out of the hills to the coast road, and it’s about 10 miles south from the jetty to Malaga Cove, on the north side of Palos Verdes, the cove part of the Haggerty’s surf spots. Santa Monica Bay, the flat Los Angeles Basin surrounded by hills, Palos Verdes to the south and Malibu and the canyons to the north, the beach cities in the south, oceanic stupendous views or at least close enough to the ocean to smell and feel the salt and surf in the air, breach the storms and storm surf, wander down to the beach the day after a “south-easter.” But the South Bay is also full of industry, and all along and up from the beaches from Marina del Rey to El Porto, the dunes are supplanted by pipes and tanks and asphalt grounds surrounded by chain link fences: the airport, the Hyperion sewage treatment plant, the steam plant, the oil refinery, the power plant. It’s a different kind of desolation than what Dana saw when he wrote of Los Angeles:
“I also learned, to my surprise, that the desolate looking place we were in was the best place on the whole coast for hides. It was the only port for a distance of eighty miles, and about thirty miles in the interior was a fine plane country, filled with herds of cattle, in the centre of which was the Pueblo de los Angelos — the largest town in California — and several of the wealthiest missions, to all which San Pedro was the seaport.”
After being tricked by the off and running car, we two boys put our thumbs in our pockets and walked back down 45th to the beach. Just up Highland a few doors, we could see the apartment my oldest sister would rent about eight years into the future, while my future wife lived a block over and down on 44th. At the bottom of 45th, we turned north and walked along the beach at the water’s edge beneath the power and steam plants, all industrial now, the beach path, north of 45th, prime real estate denied the developers, but we didn’t mind that, for here we were in a short stretch of beach able to avoid the tourist crowds and catch a few empty waves on our own. We reached the Standard Oil Pier and crossed under the big pipes and wood beams, kicking through the surf. I was still a year or two from my high school reading of “Two Years Before the Mast.”
From the pier we walked to the jetty at Grand and then up the long hill past the steam plant and ice plant hillside that borders the refinery. We parted ways at Loma Vista and I continued down Grand across Main to the old railroad station then followed the tracks up and through Devil’s Pass to home, where I would find my mom making a watery spaghetti and sauce dinner, having found no time, no doubt, to sit happily in the yard in any place for any length of time.
45th Street Lifeguard Tower ramp, north El Porto, circa 1976, looking north. High tides and storm surf have washed out the beach, creating a cliff.
Under the Standard Oil Pier, early 70s.
Standard Oil Piers, early 1970s.
El Segundo Power Plant, mid 1970s. The giant rocks were brought in as riprap.
Grand Jetty with old pilings uncovered by a very low tide, early 70s.
Standard Oil Pier and Power Plant Stacks – looking south from the Grand Jetty, early 1970s.
Ice plant covered dune overlooking Grand Ave. Beach, March 1974
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Grand Avenue, 1974.
Above photos taken with my Exakta 500 I used at the time. The exact dates on some of the slides are sometimes so faded I can’t say for sure when they were taken, but likely from 1968, when I purchased the camera used from a camera shop on Main Street, into the mid 70’s, maybe as late as 1977 or 1978 (thinking too of a box of slides most of which are not shown here). The Standard Oil Pier has since been taken out, the pipe now underground, underwater. The pier was located between 45th, the last residential street in El Porto, and Grand, which comes down to Vista del Mar from El Segundo. I’ve posted some of these pics before at The Toads, but in a different context.
Books referenced above include New York Review Books copy of Fermor’s “A Time of Gifts,” 1977, introduction 2005 by Jan Morris; and Second Mariner Books edition, 2014, of Penelope Fitzgerald’s “The Blue Flower” (1995). “Two Years Before the Mast” was published in 1840, just a few years after Dana had made the voyage described in his book.
Those who travel back and forth through time, to and fro, up and down, in and out, with the tides, over and under the swells, stopping now and then to visit. They were here, now they’re gone, return to sender. Sisters, first, then brothers, then ten of us, thoughts like tinnitus that echo like a whiffle ball others can’t hear, sounds won’t leave us alone, to night us, all ten nights of us, Knights of Tinnitus, while these guitars gently sleep, and surfboards drift. A banjo plays brightly, its tabor head a full blue moon, up on the beach. So it goes.
But how does it go?
Ah, but ask the winged burds!
We look before and after, And pine for what is not: Our sincerest laughter With some pain is fraught; Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.
But what did they bring along, if not knotty pine – oak or peonies?
They brought along their come-a-longs, and along the river they walked, while in the wet reeds the wee birds nested and rested. There were peonies and pizza aplenty.
And along the river, did they sing songs?
Of chords they sang songs, serious songs, silly songs, songs of love and despair. Cover songs and under cover songs. Songs with no words.
What songs did they sing?
So it goes, so it goes. They sang so it goes.
But where did it go?
I don’t know. “While we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen: for the things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal.”
And what did they take back?
Don’t look back, but they took back a weighty tome, a mighty book, a reference book, a history book, a look into our times, past times, out of time, a book of songs.
And did they play it as surfers or hodads?
They played it both dolce or metalico, as the moon prevailed.
Why did they leave so soon?
“Blue moon of Kentucky, keep on shinin’. Shine on the one that’s gone and said, ‘Goodbye.’” So it goes.
“The game is a foot, I’m certain of it,” said the poet who talked the walk datum. To bloviate down his shorts and long waits about town he strolled and spoke and sprayed the populace with one-off quips and quotes. A foot player he was who climbed high limbs lofty the poet tree of mystery. Came he then to a steep stairway and down he went a long way down a circus clown. Loose freely from his three-rings born he returned to la-la-land a surfboard under his arm covered in salt and sand. “If life be a game,” he said, “play I will in waves never still twirl the pencil’s twill.”
“We take it as a given that games are useful, productive, redeeming forms of human experience and expression.”
The Coming of the Toads 