On Being a Girl

In 5th grade, girls couldn't wear pants. In 6th grade we could wear pants every other Thursday as long as they weren't Levi's brand jeans. By 7th grade, pants were a daily occurrence. In 7th and 8th grade we had separate PE classes for boys and girls. By 9th grade we were co-ed.

I've spent a lot of years doing things that "girls don't do." When I had a life (before my mom's stroke) I used to work on cars, slam dance in the mosh pit and surf (a lot). I also liked to sew my own clothes, bake my own muffins, kiss boys and garden.

I'm still here only now I work with computers (me and the guys on my team, but the other team has a couple of girls who wore pants to school starting in Kindergarten and didn't even know there was a time when that wasn't allowed). I still surf from time to time. Last night I saw friends surfing together and sharing stories with each other about the inside wave they caught or the one that caught them by surprise and bounced them off the sand. They looked so happy together and I wanted that. They were all male.

I have female friends that will go to the beach with me, but they don't surf. I've had that story sharing with male companions before, during and after surfing, but I've never in my entire life gone surfing with a woman and the worst thing is I just realized that yesterday.

When I started surfing, I was recruited for Surfrider's Paddle for Clean Water because I was a woman surfer and they needed more balanced energy. I tried to explain that I suck, wipe out and am basically not physically coordinated, but off I went to paddle around the pier at the second paddle in OB and I've been doing it ever since. These days it's families, young girls, older women and me.

Since I've been locked in a house taking care of my mom, San Diego Surf Ladies has come into existence to foster that type of camaraderie with other surfing women - although they are quite a bit younger than I am. When I go to the beach, I sees women in their twenties surfing in groups of 2 or 3 and having fun as only good friends can do out on the water.

All these things make me very happy. But maybe before I die, I could meet just one woman my age who likes to surf Black's (and maybe isn't that great) to bond with and walk up the road telling stories of the triple bounce off the bottom or the 6 foot wave she caught because she was too scared not to take the ride.

Thought for the day

Went Surfing at Black's. Got pounded. Exhausted but happy.

On the trail up someone had posted a sign, "Don't go with the flow, be the flow."

~ ~ Words to live by ~ ~

Full Disclosure

In the interest of full disclosure, I went to Black's on Friday with an out of town friend (who used to be a local) and the lifeguard tower was gone. My first thought was that I was loosing my mind, but in the interest of proving myself sane, we went and talked to the lifeguards - the ones in the palm thatched hut. Apparently Hollywood was filming a television pilot and had the lifeguard tower on the sand (with 24/7 guards) for a few days.

The rest of the story is true, just this slight update. And thankfully the beach is once again lifeguard tower free.

Friday night the water was incredibly warm, the dolphins came out and frolicked in the surf and even did a few back flips for us, and I caught a couple of waves.

Life is good.

An Unstable Bluff

In more cliched terms, what I have to talk about is a slippery slope, but in the case of this particular cliche, we're also talking about sandstone bluffs and what was once one of the last wild beaches in Southern California.

A long time ago in a galaxy far away, there was a beach in San Diego where nudity was 100% legal. Black's Beach is at the bottom of a bluff. On top of the bluff are bizillion dollar homes for the rich and not so famous. Just to the south is the Scripps Institute of Oceanography and the biggest children's beach I know of (aka La Jolla Shores).

In 1977, voters approved an ordinance banning nudity on the city owned portion of the beach (the northern chunk of Black's falls under state jurisdiction). Life went on as before with people frolicking naked along the entire stretch of Black's Beach. Technically illegal, but in practice Black's was a nude beach. From volleyball to surfing, all the in nude, or in swimsuits if you preferred.

Black's was great. No hordes of touristsfrom Iowa and Nebraska only the nudist variety. Great surfing. Community. Full moons on the beach and a steady stream of dolphins feeding offshore.

A few years back, the City of San Diego decided to start enforcing the wearing of swimsuits on their portion of the beach. I don't know all the details of why, but it probably has something to do with the bizillionaires who live in the neighborhood - and what bizillionaires want, bizillionaires get. The state continues to allow nudity on it's portion of the beach.

At first, life rolled as it has at Black's. But then things started going downhill. First hordes of freshman UCSD students started appearing on the beach in swimsuits with IPods. Then tourists from the hotels in the area started wandering around. Not nudist tourists, but tourists who pay $500 a night for a motel room and drive Mercedes tourists - the death of any cool place.

Then last year, the families started showing up with lots of small children and strollers. I'm not talking hippie families whose idea of a mini-vacation is spending the night on the beach, but people with jobs and brand new cars. People who think that their kids are more important than anything else and who completely miss the idea of a wild beach where you manage on your own and with your friends.

Then on Monday the previously unthinkable happened - the City of San Diego installed a lifeguard tower to watch, I'm assuming, over those middle class families and their children. It's not like we haven't had lifeguards on Black's for ever - we have (or at least almost forever). But the lifeguards used to come in with a camper on the back of a pickup truck, or hung out under their palm thatched shade structure they built on the cliffs. Like everything else about Black's, it was homegrown, not part of some big industry.

I feel violated - like something amazingly precious has been destroyed so people don't have to be responsible for keeping their own kids from drowning. I know the clock never turns counter clockwise, but I wish we could go back to the old Black's full of fat naked men with tiny penises and surfers sleeping on the beach so they could be up for the first light and catch those early waves with the dolphins.

In mourning.