Don Winslow: Dawn Patrol

The marine layer wraps a soft silver blanket over the coast. The sun is just coming over the hills to the east, and Pacific Beach is still asleep. The ocean is a color that is not quite blue, not quite green, not quite black, but something somewhere between all three. Out on the line, Boone Daniels straddles his old longboard like a cowboy on his pony. He's on The Dawn Patrol.

The girls look like ghosts.

Coming out of the early-morning mist, their silver forms emerge from a thin line of trees as the girls pad through the wet grass that edges the field. The dampness muffles their footsteps, so they approach silently, and the mist that wraps around their legs makes them look as if they're floating.

Like spirits who died as children.

There are eight of them and they are children; the oldest is fourteen, the youngest ten. They walk toward the waiting men in unconscious lockstep.

The men bend over the mist like giants over clouds, peering down into their universe. But the men aren't giants; they're workers, and their universe is the seemingly endless strawberry field that they do not rule, but that rules them. They're glad for the cool mist-it will burn off soon enough and leave them to the sun's indifferent mercy.

The men are stoop laborers, bent at the waist for hours at a time, tending to the plants. They've made the dangerous odyssey up from Mexico to work in these fields, to send money back to their families south of the border.

They live in primitive camps of corrugated tin shacks, jerry-rigged tents, and lean-tos hidden deep in the narrow canyons above the fields. There are no women in the camps, and the men are lonely. Now they look up to sneak guilty glances at the wraithlike girls coming out of the mist. Glances of need, even though many of these men are fathers, with daughters the ages of these girls.

Between the edge of the field and the banks of the river stands a thick bed of reeds, into which the men have hacked little dugouts, almost caves. Now some of the men go into the reeds and pray that the dawn will not come too soon or burn too brightly and expose their shame to the eyes of God.

It's dawn at the Crest Motel, too.

Sunrise isn't a sight that a lot of the residents see, unless it's from the other side-unless they're just going to bed instead of just getting up.

Only two people are awake now, and neither of them is the desk clerk, who's catching forty in the office, his butt settled into the chair, his feet propped on the counter. Doesn't matter. Even if he were awake, he couldn't see the little balcony of room 342, where the woman is going over the railing.

Her nightgown flutters above her.

An inadequate parachute.

She misses the pool by a couple of feet and her body lands on the concrete with a dull thump.

Not loud enough to wake anyone up.

The guy who tossed her looks down just long enough to make sure she's dead. He sees her neck at the funny angle, like a broken doll. Watches her blood, black in the faint light, spread toward the pool.

Water seeking water.

“Epic macking crunchy.”

That's how Hang Twelve describes the imminent big swell to Boone Daniels, who actually understands what Hang Twelve is saying, because Boone speaks fluent Surfbonics. Indeed, off to Boone's right, just to the south, waves are smacking the pilings beneath Crystal Pier. The ocean feels heavy, swollen, pregnant with promise.

The Dawn Patrol-Boone, Hang Twelve, Dave the Love God, Johnny Banzai, High Tide, and Sunny Day-sits out there on the line, talking while they wait for the next set to come in. They all wear black winter wet suits that cover them from their wrists to their ankles, because the early-morning water is cold, especially now that it's stirred up by the approaching storm.

This morning's interstitial conversation revolves around the big swell, a once-every-twenty-years burgeoning of the surf now rolling toward the San Diego coast like an out-of-control freight train. It's due in two days, and with it the gray winter sky, some rain, and the biggest waves that any of The Dawn Patrol have seen in their adult lives.

It's going to be, as Hang Twelve puts it, “epic macking crunchy.”

Which, roughly translated from Surfbonics, is a term of approbation.

It's going to be good, Boone knows. They might even see twenty-foot peaks coming in every thirty seconds or so. Double overheads, tubes like tunnels, real thunder crushers that could easily take you over the falls and dump you into the washing machine.

Only the best surfers need apply.

Boone qualifies.

While it's an exaggeration to say that Boone could surf before he could walk, it's the dead flat truth that he could surf before he could run. Boone is the ultimate “locie”-he was conceived on the beach, born half a mile away, and raised three blocks from where the surf breaks at high tide. His dad surfed; his mom surfed-hence the conceptual session on the sand. In fact, his mom surfed well into the sixth month of her pregnancy, so maybe it isn't an exaggeration to say that Boone could surf before he could walk.

So Boone's been a waterman all his life, and then some.

The ocean is his backyard, his haven, his playground, his refuge, his church. He goes into the ocean to get well, to get clean, to remind himself that life is a ride. Boone believes that a wave is God's tangible message that all the great things in life are free. Boone gets free every day, usually two or three times a day, but always, always, out on The Dawn Patrol.

Boone Daniels lives to surf.

He doesn't want to talk about the big swell right now, because talking about it might jinx it, cause the swell to lie down and die into the deep recesses of the north Pacific. So even though Hang Twelve is looking at him with his usual expression of unabashed hero worship, Boone changes the subject to an old standard out on the Pacific Beach Dawn Patrol line.

The List of Things That Are Good.

They started the List of Things That Are Good about fifteen years ago, back when they were in high school, when Boone and Dave's social studies teacher challenged them to “get their priorities straight.”

The list is flexible-items are added or deleted; the rankings change- but the current List of Things That Are Good would read as follows, if, that is, it were written down, which it isn't:

1. Double overheads.

2. Reef break.

3. The tube.

4. Girls who will sit on the beach and watch you ride double overheads, reef break, and the tube. (Inspiring Sunny's remark that “Girls watch-women ride. ”)

5. Free stuff.

6. Longboards.

7. Anything made by O'Neill.

8. All-female outrigger canoe teams.

9. Fish tacos.

10. Big Wednesday.

“I propose,” Boone says to the line at large, “moving fish tacos over all-female outrigger canoe teams.”

“From ninth to eighth?” Johnny Banzai asks, his broad, generally serious face breaking into a smile. Johnny Banzai's real name isn't Banzai, of course. It's Kodani, but if you're a Japanese-American and a seriously radical, nose-first, balls-out, hard-charging surfer, you're just going to get glossed either “Kamikaze” or “Banzai,” you just are. But as Boone and Dave the Love God decided that Johnny is just too rational to be suicidal, they decided on Banzai.

When Johnny Banzai isn't banzaiing, he's a homicide detective with the San Diego Police Department, and Boone knows that he welcomes the opportunity to argue about things that aren't grim. So he's on it. “Basically flip-flopping them?” Johnny Banzai asks. “Based on what?”

“Deep thought and careful consideration,” Boone replies.