Don Winslow - Dawn Patrol

Living to surf, surfing to live.

Along the 101.

It must have been heaven then, Boone thinks as the road plunges down toward the ocean like some kind of water slide, like it's going to dump you right into the water, but then at the last second it veers right and hugs the coastline. Paradise, Boone thinks-long, lonely stretches of beach with legends walking on water. He knows his surf history; he knows all the stories, knows about Da Cat, Da Bull, the Guayule Kid, and dozens of others. You can't not know them and be a real surfer; you can't not see their stories every time you drive this road, because that history is all around you.

You drive right past Hobie's old shop, right past the break where Bob Simmons died in a wave back in '54, past San O, where Dora and Edwards went out together and combined their styles and created modern surfing.

In that golden age.

Like all golden ages, Boone thinks as he veers right again, crosses the railroad track, and climbs up to the famous old beach town of Del Mar, it had to end.

The golden age was done in by its own success.

As the culture of Highway 101 became the culture of America itself.

Gidgethit the screens in 1959, creating a new kind of sex symbol-the “California girl.” Fresh-faced, sun-tanned, bikini-clad, sassy, healthy, and happy, Gidget (“It's a girl.” “No, it's a midget.” “It's a gidget. ”) became a role model for girls all across America. Girls in Kansas and Nebraska wanted to be Gidget, to wear bikinis and cruise the strips of the 101 beach towns.

Gidgetbegat a slew of beach movies, which would be forgettable except for lingering images of Annette Funicello, previously of the Mickey Mouse Club, who swapped her mouse ears for a bikini. These movies featured handsome guys like Frankie Avalon and bodacious babes like Annette and had just a suggestion of sex about them- Beach Blanket Bingoin 1965 never revealed what was happening on or under the blanket. And they usually had a “beatnik,” replete with beret and goatee, wander on playing the bongos, and they always featured the “kids” dancing on the beach to music.

Surf music.

It also came right out of technology.

In 1962, Fender guitar developed a “reverb” unit, which produced the big, hollow, “wet” sound that became the trademark of surf music. In the same year, the immortal Dick Dale and the Del-Tones used the reverb on “Misirlou,” featuring the classic Dick Dale guitar run that sounded like a wave about to break. The Chantays responded the same year with “Pipeline.”

In 1963, the Surfaris released the first breakout, national surf hit- “Wipe Out,” with the sarcastic laugh, then the famous percussion riff that every teenage drummer in America tried to copy, and the surf music craze was on. Boone inherited all this music from his old man, all those old surf bands like the Pyraminds, the Marketts, The Sandals, the Astronauts, Eddie amp; the Showmen.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, and The Beach Boys.

They just blew it up.

The Beach Boys had kids all across the world singing “Surfin' Safari,” “Surfin' U.S. A,” and “Surfer Girl,” mimicking a lifestyle they'd never lived, mouthing the names of places they'd never been: Del Mar, Ventura County Line, Santa Cruz, Trestles, all over Manhattan and down Doheny way… Swami's, Pacific Palisades, San Onofre, Sunset, Redondo Beach, all over La Jolla…

All along Highway 101.

Boone doesn't know the answer to that old Ethics 101 question from his freshman year in college-if, knowing what you know now, you had a chance to strangle little Adolf Hitler in the cradle-but he's clear about the answer for Brian Wilson. You'd splatter his baby brains all over the bassinet before you'd let him make it to the recording studio to turn the 101 into a parking lot.

By the mid-sixties, every kook with a record player or a transistor radio was hitting the surf, crowding the breaks, jamming the waves. People who never wanted to surf wanted the lifestyle. (There's a messed-up, inbred mongrel of a nonword, Boone thinks. Lifestyle-trying to be both and ending up neither. Life style-like pseudo life, a bad imitation of something worth living. Like you don't want the life, just the style.) So they headed out to sunny Southern California and fucked it up.

What was it the Eagles sang-“You call some place paradise, / kiss it goodbye”? Well, pucker up for Highway 101. So many people moved to the SoCal coast, it's surprising it didn't just tilt into the ocean. It sort of did; the developers threw up quick-and-dirty condo complexes on the bluffs above the ocean, and now they're sliding into the sea like toboggans. Those little beach towns swelled into big beach towns, with suburbs and school systems, endless strip malls with the same shit in each of them.

You had traffic jams- traffic jams-on the 101.

Not people trying to go surfing-although it can be hard to find a parking space at some of the more popular surf spots nowadays-but commuters on their way back and forth from work.

So Boone missed the golden age of surfing. He figures maybe he got in on the bronze age, but to him, the 101 is still the Highway to Heaven. “I never saw the golden age,” he explained to his dad one time. “I only see the age I'm in.”

There are still some golden days along the 101-particularly during the week, when the road is relatively free and the beaches aren't crowded. And the truth is, you can still find an empty beach some days; you can still have a break all to yourself.

And there are days when that drive along the 101 is so beautiful, it will break your fucking heart. When you look out the window and the sun is painting masterpieces on the water, and the waves are breaking in a single white line from Cardiff to Carlsbad, and the sky is an impossible blue, and people are playing volleyball, and your brother and sister surfers are out there just having a good time, just trying to catch a wave, and you realize you are living in the dream.

Or drive it at dusk, when the ocean is golden, and the sun an orange fireball, with dolphins dancing in the break. Then the sun flames red, and it slips quietly over the horizon and the ocean slides to gray and then to black and you feel a little sad because this day is over, but you know it will begin again tomorrow.

Life on Highway 101.

This is the road that Boone takes, following Teddy north along the coast.

Boone needs to be on his game going through Del Mar, because there are plenty of side streets for Teddy to turn onto, but the doctor doesn't turn off toward the beach or up into the hills; he stays on the main drag and heads north, across the old bridge over the San Dieguito River, on past the famous old racetrack, then up through Eden Gardens and Solana Beach.

Now the road, old Highway 101, parallels the railroad track on its right, through the town of Solana Beach, and then onto the narrow open stretch of coastline at Cardiff, which is one of Boone's favorite places in the world, where the highway edges the beach and you feel like you could reach out the car window and touch the water. The whitecaps are already peaking, tall, but nothing to what they'll be this time tomorrow. Even from the van, he can hear the ocean getting ready to go off, the big swell starting to build, a heavy heartbeat that matches his own.

The big swell.

Sunny's shot.

Onewave, one macker, and it changes her life.

One great photo and she makes the net, the magazines. She gets the sponsorship she's been working for and it's her takeoff. She'll be all over the world, making the tournaments and the big wave contests. She'll surf Hawaii, Oz, Indo, you name it.

“Where did you just go?” Petra asks.

“Huh?”

“Where were you? You looked like you were a million miles away just now.”