Down in the corner

Miles, the author’s son, stands with a piece of American history.

I am honored to have my book “Voyage of the Cormorant” selected by the Carpinteria Library for the “One Community, One Book” program, with discussion events planned and a reading I will give at the library this Sunday, Aug. 20, at 3 p.m.

It’s a funny thing to lay one’s inner thoughts on the page and distribute them to the world. My hope is that truthfulness offsets the inherent egoism of this practice. That’s how I thought of Voyage: if I was to write a first-person narrative of my sailing expedition, the least I could do as an author would be to represent myself honestly.

Now, more than ten years later and looking back on the book, I feel good about the writing while wondering sometimes if my “honesty” hasn’t given me a certain status: the Prozac-popping, wounded loser, roving the coast in his homemade plywood sailboat.

Too harsh?

Spoiler alert: I weaned-off the Prozac on that voyage 14 years ago, but it did help me to get over an emotional chasm at the time. Part of being honest of course is looking at oneself clearly, admitting foibles. But beating-up on myself doesn’t necessarily equate to honesty, either. Perhaps a kinder characterization would be (as I wrote in the book): “I am romantic; I dream up radically impractical journeys just to try and feel or intuit something from a past that may well have never existed.”

Voyaging by sail and oar is distant from me at this time. The new house in Ventura and a new vehicle that I have yet to equip with a trailer hitch keeps Cormorant dry docked in my mother’s side yard up in Santa Barbara, carefully stowed beneath a canvas boat cover. I’m deep in this kind of life now, planting and weeding, raising our kids.

It’s good, I love my family, and I love my work shaping surfboards – all of which makes a five-day sail down the Malibu coast (which is the expedition I want to make) difficult to arrange, even though I am well aware that a voyage is one of the things that actually expands time.

I may have already used my five-day window this summer however, driving with my son down to San Diego last week. I’d first thought to take one of the roads off Highway 395 on the east side of the Sierra, find a creek, make camp and cruise around in the high country. Then I realized that my eight-year-old and I, without the proper gear, wouldn’t be able to access the real backcountry anyway and would likely get stuck in ugly heat rising from the Owens Valley with clouds of mosquitos emerging from the runoff mud.

So, our friend’s condo a block from the beach in Leucadia made a great base camp. I surfed a bit, but even more enjoyable was just swimming in the waves with Miles. I taught him to open his eyes underwater and we watched the whitewater roll past overhead, then turned and high-fived each time before surfacing. That was the highlight of the week, in addition to checking out the Air and Space Museum in Balboa Park, and enjoying evening barbeque with my old friend.

The Air and Space Museum has an amazing collection of WWII fighter aircraft. A Marine Corsair in deep Navy Blue, wings folded up, sits adjacent a British Spitfire. There is a German Messerschmitt and a Japanese Zero as well. I know I’m always writing about my old dad here, but man did that WWII stuff make me think of him.

It’s the war that brought about resin and fiberglass of course, and in surfing we’re living a post-colonial amalgam of industrial infrastructure and indigenous practice. Born in 1932, the war was formative for my Dad’s generation, and their West Coast response was to hit the beach in the reverse of what the Marines and Army did across the Pacific.

San Diego contains multiple worlds: the Navy, with ships, aircraft and special warfare units that operate amongst the sunbathers and recreational fishermen; the surf breaks where some of the last holdouts of bare-knuckle localism still lurk; and a per-capita rate of fitness that borders on mania, with a good measure of homelessness and party culture too. The city could feel more international, resting in view of Mexico just minutes away, but San Diego seems somehow more intensely American by its proximity to the thronging masses just beyond the gates.

Three of my favorite surfers – Pat Curren, Mike Diffenderfer, and Richard Kenvin – have San Diego roots, the break at Windansea in La Jolla formative in their development. With the eye of a yacht designer Pat Curren shaped beautiful big wave guns for Waimea Bay in the 1950s, his distinctive nose outline a thing of beauty and function. Diffenderfer made perfectly balanced Hawaiian guns also. And Kenvin, though not a shaper himself, brought the work of Bob Simmons (whom my Dad knew), back to present-day consciousness from its late- ‘40s/early- ‘50s heyday.

The 1950s era, despite its societal strictures, nevertheless provided a niche for those who were situated to exploit it, who were willing to go cheap and go far in search of waves. But there is a long ang ugly history in our country that by and large still determines which children grow up in beach towns. And this isn’t a rant against rich white people, either – this stuff operates above the level of individual family choices, as most people just live near where they were born after all. But policy is real, policy makes the world we live in: I’m talking about redlining and housing covenants in the not-too-distant-past, and book banning today.

My work in surfboards taps into an earlier era even in the more-modern, high-performance shapes I do. Shedding the extraneous might be my mantra, more beatnik than hippy. I’m playing the same “industrial-indigenous” game that the surfing-pioneer generation played: making my niche in a complex world with both the future and the past pulling me forward and providing ballast.

Christian Beamish took leave of his position at Coastal View News in October 2020, to pursue his surfboard business, Surfboards California, full time. He continues his monthly column, and shapes at the surfboard factory showroom at 500 Maple Ave., in Carpinteria. The former Associate Editor of The Surfer’s Journal, Beamish is also the author of “Voyage of the Cormorant,” (Patagonia Books, 2012) about his single-handed expedition down the coast of Baja California by sail and oar in his self-built Shetland Isle beach boat. He now lives with his wife and two children in Ventura.

Christian Beamish took leave of his position at Coastal View News in October 2020, to pursue his surfboard business, Surfboards California, full time. He continues his monthly column, and shapes at the surfboard factory showroom at 500 Maple Ave., in Carpinteria. The former Associate Editor of The Surfer’s Journal, Beamish is also the author of “Voyage of the Cormorant,” (Patagonia Books, 2012) about his single-handed expedition down the coast of Baja California by sail and oar in his self-built Shetland Isle beach boat. He now lives with his wife and two children in Ventura.

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