Guest Post by San Diego writer Chelsea Batten explores her first visit to California and the legends of Swami Beach in Encinitas, just a stone’s throw from Viridian:
I have a freeze-frame image in my mind, that endures from my first encounter with California. I was probably twelve years old, and we were taking a family vacation to visit an uncle, who had broken away from the family enclave to move west, seeking something that, apparently, the rest of us had no need of. He was living in a little coastal town just north of San Diego. “It’s so beautiful, it’ll blow your minds,” he told us. “You’ll be staying right on the beach.” To my mother’s chagrin, he was not exaggerating — he had staked out a campsite on a bluff overlooking the ocean. His shoebox apartment.
My parents’ minds were definitely blown, or something like it, but my brothers and I were enchanted. We bolted down the steep staircase from the bluff onto the sand, with my parents behind us, gingerly picking their way down. I remember the first feeling of sand under my feet; it was warm as bread out of the oven, and fluffy as snow. The lazy hum of activity on the beach had both an excitement and a familiarity to it, that was somewhere between Shangri-La and opening day at Shea Stadium. We threaded our way along the beach among pick-up volleyball games, authoritatively manned lifeguard tilt-ups, and kids intently focused on digging holes. I was fascinated by the fleets of surfers riding the wave sets that rolled in like clockwork and curled around our ankles.
I heard my uncle telling my parents that this was Swami’s Beach, made famous by the Beach Boys in the song “Surfin’ Safari,” a bit of trivia that promptly blew me away. I knew that mountains, deserts and other natural landmarks had their proper names, but it had never occurred to me that the beach might indeed be a series of beaches, with their own identities and their own cast of characters.
Then we came upon the scene that has defined southern California for me ever since. It was a number of men, most of them my dad’s age or older, standing on the shore, holding their surfboards aloft and facing out to the water. Their faces were creased, their eyes squinted, and they were as motionless as monuments. As we approached, a couple of them broke from the group and jogged determinedly into the water, but the rest remained there, gazing stoically at the waves. Something about them, and where they stood, seemed impassable; we stopped just before we reached them and turned around to retrace our way to the campsite. But I lingered for a minute; in my eyes, failing from the glare of the sun, the group of them became a sort of immortal image, that had one foot in Hollywood and one in ancient Greece.
I didn’t know how intrinsic this image had grown with me, until circumstances brought me back to southern California. Long before I got on the plane, I had a plan–more of a quest, really, since a plan would have meant some attention to detail. I was driven by memory, and intuition was my only compass. I would make it my business to learn the beaches, their names, and their faces.
Naturally, I first returned to where it all began. I was half expecting to see the surfers still lined up in the same position, something like the monuments at Easter Island. On that day, however, the only surfers not in the water were the ones just pulling off Highway 101, parking their cars and shimmying into the slick casing of their wetsuits. The waves were breaking into five-foot whitecaps that I heard one guy describe as “mushy.” I had to take his word for it; it looked fine to me, but Swami’s is the homeground of surfing connoisseurs. Furthermore, I observed among the boardriders something that an outsider might call a pecking order. But “laid back” is a sacred virtue here; call it, then, an understood rule of deference, that shows itself in the younger shortboard riders pulling back until the longboards have carved their way past.
The provenance of the beach’s name is hard to miss–it comes from the massive, gold-domed temple that crowns the cliff overhead. Built in 1937, the Self-Realization Fellowship long ago crossed the line from eyesore to a source of local pride. But Swami’s exoticism is not confined to the temple’s Taj Mahal-inspired architecture. The cliffs are sculpted by outcroppings of rock and cascades of jewel-toned grass, with palm trees extending at improbable angles. When the tide pulls out, the reef floor of the beach is exposed, offering a rare close-up of microscopic marine life if you’re lucky enough to be around at the right time.
From Swami’s, I began to walk north. The next beach can only be reached on foot; it is well-obscured by the prime real estate that towers on the cliffs above. Known as Boneyard Beach, or just Boneyards, this stretch of shoreline is less well-known for surfing than for its tacit availability to nude sunbathing. This may explain the beach’s frequent desolation.
D Street, just off Highway 101, provides a natural proscenium for viewing the natives at play. A small alcove, with a few benches and a lone dwarf palm, is as good as box seats to watch shortboarders tear up the reliable barrels. The sand break makes it also a prime spot for surf schools to introduce newcomers to the sport.
The next beach to the north is Moonlight State Beach, one of the most popular beaches in the area. Moonlight sprawls out luxuriantly at the intersection of Fourth and B Streets, with a scene that could have been lifted out of “Beach Blanket Bingo”–volleyball courts, fire pits, a playground, a concession stand, and sheltered picnic tables offer a pleasing foil to the ocean’s charms of surfing, swimming and fishing. The beach’s name is said to derive from the generosity of an early 20th century land prospector, who built a dance hall, a bathhouse, and picnic shelters that attracted locals for nighttime diversions. At that time, it was a popular dare to drive a Model T on the sand from Moonlight Beach all the way to Oceanside when the tide was out.
Stone Steps is an imperious-sounding name for an unassuming beach just north of Moonlight. It is one of the few beaches with a stone staircase leading down from the street, rather than the admittedly rickety structures to the north and south. The waves at Stone Steps are less reliable than most; their quality is best at midday, when the tide is rising and .
The beach that follows upon Stone Steps is officially known as Leucadia State Beach, but locals refer to it as Beacons. The provenance of this name was hard to find–certain locals corrected me that its real colloquial name was Martini Point, after the overlook bluff that collapsed and slid 100 feet to the shoreline, whereupon they began again to refer to it as Beacons. Some say that the name owes to a Scottish family called Bacon, who owned a house that overlooked the beach, but most agree that there an actual beacon was posted just north of the path down the bluff, which guided warships along the coast during World War II. The surf here has many long-standing devotees, whose “day” continues uninterrupted.
Here the sheltering bluffs end, giving way to high sand dunes, which seclude South Ponto, one of the widest beaches in the area. Its name probably comes from a mispronunciation of “punto,” the Spanish word for point. The beach is marked off by stone jetties on either end, which have built up a sand bar over time and increased the spot’s popularity for surfers. When it isn’t crowded by opportunistic locals chasing its year-round break, the beach is congested by frequent national surf contests.
Beyond the South Carlsbad State Beach, another camping spot with reliable surf, comes a series of breaks that are exclusively populated by devotees: Terramar, Warm Water Jetty, and Tamarack, names that derive from street signs and landmarks. By that time the daylight was failing, and so were my feet. I took a seat in the sand, digging my feet down to find the last embers of the sun’s warmth, and watched the silhouettes of seagulls interweave with the distant figures surfing the glass-off. The water was tinged violet, and the breeze was getting cold. I held myself still to receive the scene’s impression, wanting it to endure like the memory from my childhood.
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