The Idea of California
Chasing triathletes and memories in Southern California
I’ve been in an online travel writing workshop once a week for the last six weeks. I promised I’d share the result. Here it is!
The Start
7:08:49 am. Beep! My wife and three other athletes run down the boat ramp from the forty-five degree air into the sixty degree water for the start of the swim stage of the Oceanside Ironman 70.3, followed a few seconds later by another four. One of the three thousand participants in this race, my wife Brenda is an age-group triathlete. The 1.2 mile swim should take her about forty minutes of dodging feet and arms while sighting the marker buoys against the sun glare. The swim is in the harbor this year because of high surf left over from yesterday's cold wind and rain storm. It has now passed and has left sunny, though still cold and windy, weather behind. The harbor start and finish are not spectator friendly, so after waving goodbye in the line-up, I'm back in the beach view rental condo already, following progress on the Ironman tracker app.
The Swim
It's so chilly this morning that even the surfers have given it a pass. Still, this classic coastal California surf town, with its wide beaches, palm trees, and pier, reminds me that I first learned of California through surf music, the reverb-heavy guitar style of Dick Dale and the Del-tones, the vocal harmonies of Jan and Dean and later the Beach Boys.
But it was not until a few years later, under the covers late at night, that I fell in love with the idea of California.
As a teenager in Portsmouth, England, I listened late at night on the family's transistor radio to my favorite disk jockey, John Peel, and the music he had brought back from his stint at a radio station in romantic-sounding San Bernadino. He introduced me to edgier stuff than the Beach Boys, artists like The Doors, Country Joe and the Fish, and Captain Beefheart.
In 1967, at an all-boys school for imperial overlords, my classmates were still all about the Beatles and the Stones. Americans, too, were welcoming the British Invasion. But outside of Swinging London's Carnaby Street, the Britain of my youth was monochrome. The BBC was broadcasting the now-unthinkable Black and White Minstrel Show on black and white TV. Even the Beatles' A Hard Day's Night, movie and album cover both, were in black and white. We were just Day Trippers, with a Ticket to Ryde on the Isle of Wight ferry.
We didn't have a record player at home, but that didn't stop me lingering for hours in record stores looking at the gorgeous color album covers of my favorite bands. If Britain was in black and white, California was in Technicolor, and music was my late night portal between the two. There were school uniforms and short haircuts on one side, and freedom on the other.
Music gave me permission to be myself and be somewhere else. I knew that the two were connected. If I was ever to be myself, I'd have to leave England. It would take me another dozen years to reach escape velocity, and another six to make it to California.
T1
I come back down to earth as Brenda comes back to shore for T1, the swim to bike transition. A wetsuit stripper helps pull off the wetsuit, then it's a run to the bike, stripping booties, swim cap, and goggles, donning bike shoes, gloves, glasses, helmet, and race belt, then a run with the bike to the mount line.
I'm waiting just after the bike start, and I'm getting nervous. It's been 50 minutes already, and the tracker has her still swimming. Just I start wondering what might have happened, there she is, passing me on the bike with a smile and a wave.
The tracker finally reports the swim, with a time of 43:33, not bad for the conditions, and 9th in her age group against some stiff competition. The bike is her strongest stage. She'll be hoping to move up a few places.
I won't see her for the three hours she's out on the 56-mile bike stage, as almost all of it is inside Camp Pendelton, a US Marine Corps base where no spectators are allowed, so I walk back to the condo again. The tracker updates. A fast transition time of 7:28 pulls her up to 7th.
Following these races means checking the tracker as athletes start according to swim speed and order on the course is not the same as place order. Brenda started later than the leaders, but other fast athletes started behind her. And so, at the 12.2 mile bike checkpoint, she's 6th on the course, but has already moved up to 3rd place behind Linda and Lynne, oops 4th, as Lynette who started later but swam faster passes the checkpoint. Will Brenda be able to pull back up to 3rd, or better? Will I have any fingernails left? It's a good day for names beginning with L. Should Brenda race under her middle name, Lynne?
The Bike
When I finally left England, it was initially for Holland. After six years there, I had an opportunity to move to the US, to New Jersey, not California, although I'd soon visit.
We always remember the first time. Mine was a business trip on the now-defunct World Airways from Newark to Oakland to visit a customer in Silicon Valley. I'd been an early adopter of computers. To see the companies whose products I'd worked with - Hewlett Packard, Intel, National Semiconductor - in real life was as moving to me as visiting the Statue of Liberty and the Lincoln Memorial. There was just time for an evening in San Francisco - a cable car, Fisherman's Wharf, the Golden Gate bridge - before leaving again, longing for more.
There were many trips to California over the next six years, mostly to Silicon Valley. When possible, I'd stay over a weekend, usually alone, sometimes with a friend or partner. A disproportionate number of firsts happened in California. My first mountain, Mount Hamilton, is not all that at 4,205 feet, but it's still a thousand feet taller than the highest mountain in England. It features an observatory with a seismograph, where I saw the trace of another first, my first earthquake, which I'd felt just the day before down in the Valley.
I was there to work on a project with a customer in Mountain View. The team ate lunch each day at Chubby's Broiler, where I saw on a newsstand that the Space Shuttle Challenger had exploded. That entire block, 59 acres of it, with customer and broiler, was later declared a Superfund site and demolished, as software displaced hardware in the Valley. Gone, but indelible to me.
A weekend layover allowed a drive across the Golden Gate bridge and up the curvy stretch of the Pacific Coast Highway made famous by Tippi Hedren's drive with two love birds in Hitchcock's The Birds. Stopping at the Stinson Beach Inn, I experienced another first, Sierra Nevada Pale Ale, the first decent beer I'd tasted since leaving England. That's one small step for mankind, one giant leap for me. Almost topping that, the trip featured my first, and so far only, hot air balloon ride over the Sonoma Valley wine country.
T2
For the second time today, I bring myself back down to earth.
The second bike checkpoint is a repeat, and the third a threepeat, Brenda crossing in 3rd place, only to be pulled back to 4th. Andrea's now closing in too. Brenda is banking time against Amy, but will it be enough? Amy's the faster runner.
When it's time, I head over towards T2, the bike to run transition. Ten minutes past her predicted time, Brenda's still not in, and I'm starting to get concerned. First, I think it's a tracker problem, but then I decide I must have missed her. As I start heading towards the pier, the message comes that she's finished the bike in 3:14, 7th on the bike and 5th overall. She runs to the bike stall, removes helmet, shoes, jacket and gloves, and puts on her running shoes. I see her a few minutes later out on the run. But something's wrong, she doesn't have her usual spark.
The Run
The Marine Corps helicopters from Camp Pendelton buzzing by me just off the beach remind me that Southern California’s other signature industry besides entertainment is defense. Naval Base San Diego is the state's largest employer, with the Army, Airforce, Marine Corps, and even Space Force also well represented. Defense contractors follow the services, and formed the majority of the customers I'd visit in Southern California back in the days when I had a proper job.
A weekend layover featured another first; Joshua Tree National Park, my first desert, and a not-to-be-missed piece of roadside Americana, the Cabezon Dinosaurs. The twice life size t-rex and brontosaurus were rescued from the New York World's Fair and put out to pasture at a desert highway gas station. While looking out through the t-rex's teeth was discontinued after featuring in Pee Wee Herman's Big Adventure, you can still visit the gift shop in the belly of the brontosaurus.
New Jersey in the eighties was in the orbit of New York, home of the twenty-four-hour career and mad-men ethics. We had an unofficial competition for the last to leave the office. On a visit to one of those defense contractor customers in Anaheim, our hosts were packing up to leave at 4 pm. I asked, incredulously, where they were going so early. "Surfing!", they said. I knew then for sure that I'd moved to the wrong coast.
Seven years later I'd meet Brenda. In a dozen years more we'd move coasts to Washington, her former home state. While we'd visited California maybe twice together from New Jersey, we now visit at will, flying or driving down once or twice a year from the gloomy Washington winter for a few days or weeks in the sun, or, like this time, for a race.
The Finish
11:51. My phone rings, a Florida number I don't recognize. I miss that call and three more as it's noisy at the pier. Then there's a text "pick up the phone, it's Brenda". I call the number back and the owner tells me that's Brenda has pulled out and is walking back. I feel a confusing mixture of concern that she had to drop out and relief that she made the call.
At the pier we meet, we hug. As we start walking back past the lifeguard towers along the Strand towards the condo, she talks through the race. The swim was really rough with a lot of people kicking and flailing. She swallowed a lot of diesel-flavored seawater and didn't feel quite right afterwards. I assure her that she made the right call. As a former figure skater taught to push through pain, respecting her body is a skill she's had to learn the hard way.
We pick up the bike from the marina and head back to the condo to rest and relax. Brenda catches up with phone calls and I catch up with writing. I text the owner of the Florida phone "Thanks for helping Brenda. All is well." She texts back "Aww good I'm glad!!! Tell her I said I'm proud of her!" and adds a heart emoji. I'm proud of her too. She's only been doing this for five years, interrupted by COVID and a run in with breast cancer, and has already qualified for Worlds twice. A great excuse for travel!
The sun moves around far enough to reach our balcony. As it sinks into the ocean, we witness sun and sea, heaven and earth, past and present, and dreams and reality, all come together for an instant in an ephemeral green flash.
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I enjoyed reading your essay on the idea of California. It stimulated my own recollections of growing up there. My parents and I came as refugees from Europe when I was just a year old, and we landed with a sponsoring family in a very rural part of Los Angeles, on a Mexican chicken farm. It took my family some years to work their way out of poverty, but for me growing up in southern California was profoundly influential on my perception of life. My parents could not have given me a better gift than bringing me to this land of huge blue skies, perpetual sunshine, gorgeous landscapes and the endless beaches of the Pacific Ocean.
I wasn't really aware of California's influence on me until I left, at age 19, to study in Quebec. There I was struck by the smallness of everything. Small mountains, small trees, small opportunities, small ways of thinking. In California, at that time, the landscape was vast, opportunities unlimited, and one's imagination and aspirations never stifled. Years later I was living in England, where my children were born. I had the same perception of smallness there. When we returned to California it felt like climbing out of a box I had been stuffed inside of for several years.
At that point, however, California was no longer the same. The endless traffic jams, growing crime and pollution overrode my earlier sense of freedom. It didn't feel like a healthy place to raise my children, so we left for Seattle. Now it too is beset by endless traffic jams, crime and pollution. My current outpost on an island in the Puget Sound is, for now, a respite from all that.
What my early upbringing in California really represented for me was freedom - freedom to dream big, supported by a spacious landscape. Yes, California is an idea, one that doesn't die, even when living elsewhere. The mindset of a psychologically small place is that aspirations are pointless because the obstacles are too large. But for a Californian, even when removed, nothing is ever impossible.
I listened to your story as opposed to reading (having a lazy day) and was totally transported. I love the interweaving of the two stories crossed with your background moving from the UK to Cali. Very well done. 👏