SURF REPORT
24 September 2009




In the former pagan days of surfing during the 1950s and 60s, surfers would get wild during prolonged periods of flatness and burn surfboards as a sacrifice to the surf gods. If we’re blessed, some twisted sense of karma or need has been fulfilled by having all of Francis Oneill’s boards burn in the blaze at Katy’s house in Ojai in the early morning of the 24th.

The good in the disaster is that nearly everything but the boards had been removed because Katy had rented the house and the tenant-who is moving because his last house also burned-had not moved in yet.




The Jack London Desk had been safely moved to my house. The book collection and all the Katy personals had been trucked to storage in Northern California weeks ago. On the morning the house caught fire Katy attended her first classes in graduate school at UC Santa Cruz, wandering around campus entirely distracted by terrible events three hundred miles away, hanging on her cell phone all day, with Francis or her parents or me and Olivia or the insurance people on the other end, calming.

I have wanted to go surfing with Francis and his brother Devin, but the boys are always way too busy and have young children to care for. I would say: “ Hey we’re going to the beach. Let’s hit it!” But they are too responsible. Their work scene requires a lot of inflexibility. Now its not maybe but a must. This business calls for a Pacific Purge. We have to get Francis a new board. Girl gone, board’s burned and the house too. His car mostly melted. Guy has to catch some love with the rising tide.

The Oneills grew up in San Diego County and surfed places like Oceanside and Encinitas when they were young. Their dad is my age and still religiously surfs a board shorter than seven feet. He’s a wiry drywaller down in Escondido. I lived in Escondido forty years ago, and he was there then, when the place was renegades, incipient food freaks and avocado orchards. I hung drywall for a season there with a heroin addict named John. Oneill doesn’t remember him exactly.

One day I went down from Escondido with my guys Ronnie and Fred to surf Oceanside one September day and it was giant. 1972. The sandbars were nothing but turmoil, but a blue-green wall was available outside often enough. Nothing was getting in the way of those big sets though. They came in like a white-out, and there was nothing to do but steam west to get out of the way. I didn’t ride but maybe three or four waves in between and spent the rest of the afternoon trying to survive the thick freight trains closing out at the end of the pier.