On June 16th, 1961 my friends and I graduated from high school. Some of us had actually been together since kindergarten. It seems there was never enough time, and now all the time was used up. I can recall wandering around on the football field after the graduation ceremony looking for the mortarboard I had launched into the air, a new altitude record for hand-based headgear. I was thinking about our last day at school, that it had been over too fast, and that people I wanted to say goodbye to were vanishing, heading to their own graduation celebrations with family, vanishing like a wisp of smoke in the wind. Our world was changing, and I had never in my life wanted so much for it to stay the same.

           I had been warned by some of my older friends that I would never see some of my classmates again. Our lives and the choices we would make would take some of us far from our special little California suburb of South Pasadena. It was hard to accept on that sultry June day. Classmates I had known for most of my life passed out of it forever. The fact that many of my closest friends have stayed in touch amazes many of my more recent acquaintances.

           As we left our childhood behind, I remember thinking that nothing would ever be the same. But then the summer began, and although we all had jobs, we still got together for pickup basketball games at the high school gym, movies and beach outings. It was our last magic summer. We were able to postpone the inevitable. The real changes would come in the fall. In the meantime, can we all say "denial" together? One of my friends had written in my Copa de Oro yearbook, “I can remember when summer was forever….” while another wrote, “It looks like the Group is just about through.” For some reason in life, each year seems to pass more quickly than the last, perhaps because it is less of a percentage of your total life. Many of us had the sensation that time was passing too rapidly. Once our days had stretched out before us seemingly as numerous as the grains of sand upon the beach, if we wasted some of them carelessly, how could we know?

 

 

           As soon as school ended I started work at a gas station and had two days off in the middle of each week. I spent most of these days at Newport Beach, specifically trying to solve the mystery of the dangerous break at what the locals called The Wedge. The waves at the Wedge are a by-product of improvements to the rock jetty on the north side of the Newport Harbor entrance undertaken before the Second World War. When supplied with a south swell of the proper size and direction, it can produce waves that are both magnificent and menacing. The swell washes against the channel jetty and kicks back against the next wave to form a peak that crashes on a shallow bottom. Sometimes it’s almost a shore break. Almost always it’s the biggest, most treacherous break on the Southern California coast. “When conditions are just right and the waves approach the shore at the proper angle [south swells], an approaching wave will reflect off the groin creating a second wave. It’s the toughest bodysurfing spot in the United States.”, or so said Sports Illustrated in 2004."

           There was actually a point in time when like the Kahuna of the movie Gidget, I might have succumbed to the siren song of Bruce Brown’s Endless Summer and filled my days with bodysurfing and a search for the perfect girl. I must have seen the movie at least dozen times. One really excellent thing about summer was that there was far less communication between the girls because they didn’t see each other at school and gossip about who was dating who. I’m sure it worked the same for the girls. Stephen Bishop once wrote in his song It Might Be You,

 

 

           But I suppose in our hearts we knew the endless summer couldn’t last. College loomed ahead of us like a gathering storm, a “disturbance in the force” just over the horizon. Over that next horizon and beyond was adulthood and responsibility, a future magnificent and daunting. At seventeen we were filled with the conviction that all things were possible, and in time our strong belief in that made it come true. But in the summer of 1961, we knew we had to make each day count, and we lived completely in the moment.

           The sands of those summer days inexorably passed through the hourglass of time until at last they could be counted on one hand. We spent most of our hours surfing and dreaming of what might be, the rest of the time we just wasted. August became September and the public schools launched another class toward graduation and real life. One by one the boys of summer left for college. My friend Bill Little and I were the last, fortunate in that our colleges started later than our friends’ did.

           At the beginning of the summer we had jointly purchased a pair of “Duck Feet” swim fins and split them. I’m not sure why, but at the time we believed you needed only one fin to bodysurf. This is of course a ridiculous misconception, although I never questioned it at the time.

           I think Bill and I had an understanding of one another matched by few others. Who else among us had seen the ocean bottom from the peak of the Wedge on a big day and knew what it meant to brave the nucleus of the spin cycle if it closed on you? To enjoy it, you had to stay in the wave. To survive it, you had to roll under the break before it closed. This was a deed that required precise timing and a kind of courage. First, you had to be a strong enough swimmer to catch the wave. You couldn’t allow it to catch you. If you didn’t turn away from the breaking wave swiftly enough, it would throw you “over the falls.” Tons of water would hold you under and pass through every orifice of your body. Timing was everything, because the huge waves frequently bottom out in less than three feet of water. There is a certain fierce pride when nearly the entire beach watches while you surf; you are a member of a pretty elite group that is perhaps best appreciated by its members. We were suffused with a sense of belonging, of being at one in that place and time, each a witness to the others deeds of daring? As Bobby Vinton wrote in the theme song from Friends,

 

 

And so at last the grains of summer sand finally ran out. On the last possible day before I was to leave for the University of Redlands Bill and I went to the Wedge one final time. We didn’t even bring girls, since the girls we had dated were back at school, comparing notes no doubt, but perhaps not judging us too harshly. Oh well, you ride the wave, sometimes you hit the bottom.

           It wasn’t a really big day for surf, but of course a bad day of bodysurfing beat just about anything else, or so I believed at the time. We arrived early and stayed all day, grateful for every wave. The September waters were much colder than August, chilling both of us to the bone, but we stayed in for hours. When we emerged we were all but frozen because at that time there wasn’t an ounce of body fat on either of us for insulation.

           We raised our body temperatures for a half hour in the warm sand and then grudgingly started packing to go. We were collecting our possessions when abruptly we looked at one another and without speaking, dropped our stuff and picked up our fins. We raced each other to the water and just as we reached the wet sand Bill reached out a hand and we shook, a powerful, frozen moment in time that still stirs me across these forty-six years. The road ahead although uncertain, was promising, it was only fitting that we go for just one more wave.

           We reached the sweet spot of the break and tread water. I took off on the first decent sized wave. The peak was perhaps six feet. I made it across the face, and then I rolled under to escape the closeout. As I stood up, I was able to see Bill ride his last wave, an even bigger swell that probably peaked at a ten foot face. He rode the wash off the rocks and sped into the peak, actually lifting out of the water as the two breaks came together. The wave of the day.

           Bill and I are both 63, born a day apart in 1944. He moved to Orange County this year and with the help of some wetsuits, we have renewed our quest for the perfect wave, having both found the perfect girl.

 

 

 

Diane Warren