Surf City: The Final Wipeout

In Southern California, history tends to be perishable. The writer Carey McWilliams once remarked that Southern California re-created itself so often that history never had the opportunity to take root. The past seemed to provide no comfort to people here, McWilliams wrote, and so the evidence of our history was regularly obliterated and forgotten.

That gets us to Huntington Beach. If you drive through downtown Huntington Beach you will see a familiar scene: block after block of brick buildings being mowed down so a new downtown can rise in their place. Seaview Shores and Town Courts are everywhere in Huntington Beach these days, all of them tied together via a Santa Fe-style mall going up next to the beach.

You have seen this happen everywhere along the coast and, the fact is, the new stuff in Huntington Beach will probably serve better than the old. Not for nothing did this town have the reputation of a squalid backwater. The old Huntington Beach was a little piece of Oklahoma plopped down on the California coast. It reeked of crude from a hundred oil wells, and the hovels behind downtown had all the charm of a railroad yard.

But that’s the interesting thing about history. Sometimes it doesn’t come wrapped in the picturesque. And as we obliterate the brutish downtown of Huntington Beach, we will also obliterate a place that created one of the great mythologies of Southern California, a place that helped define us to the rest of the world. Because this downtown, with its beach shacks and rotting pier and brick storefronts, was Surf City, U.S.A.

We don’t think of surf stuff as history, of course. We think of it as cultural junk. We think of Gidget and Moondoggie and, later on, of The Brotherhood running drugs one day and riding waves the next. It all has a disposable quality.

Allow me to dissent on the value of that heritage. I am not a surfer and don’t plan to become one. I grew up in Tennessee, about as far as you can get from a proper curl, and the closest thing we had to recreational water was a TVA lake that took the odd shape of a horseshoe.

But I knew about surfing . We all did. In the afternoons we would listen to the Ventures on the juke box and wonder about the place that had bred this music. Clearly, it wasn’t like Memphis. There were photo spreads in Life magazine of the surfing scene and the beaches seemed to be populated by members of another race. They were more beautiful than us and had a mute quality, as if language had become obsolete.

And out there beyond the break line was the surfer himself. He was a lonely figure, lolling on his board, as arcane and mysterious as the world in which he lived. For a while, most of what I knew of California came from these scenes, and I imagined a place unattached from the rest of the continent. Sometimes, even now, those images return when I pass a surfing beach.

These days, you can go to New Zealand, or France, or Nigeria and see the same scenes plastered to the walls of airports, carrying the same message. The California surfer has gone worldwide and entered the mythology. Based on my own personal experience with airport posters, the surfer seems second only to the cowboy in his universal appeal. I suspect no one knows exactly why.

That mythology was created along a narrow strip of shore from San Diego to Santa Barbara. There were shabby beach communities everywhere in the ‘50s, places where you could live cheap and still hear the surf while you slept. These were the towns that first stole the sport from Hawaii, then wove the sport into the music and finally into The Look and The Life.

But one by one these places disappeared under the waves of new money. Now only Huntington Beach remains, and that’s fitting because this was always the central place, the core. You might want to come down sometime and spend a morning in Huntington before it, too, is gone.

You will probably sense the irony. The beaches will be filled with surfers, more than ever. Yet the pier that was the judging platform for the first U.S. Surfing Championship is now closed and due for demolition. And the surf shops and shacks have been forced into one tiny island of downtown. Soon even this island will slip away and the members of the community dispersed. Surf City, as a place, will be history.

There was no saving it, everyone says, and probably they’re right. In the next year or so the city of Huntington Beach will sponsor a small, surfing museum as a gesture to the past. At this point, it’s about all the city can do. There will be some vintage surf boards, an original Woody or two. And, who knows, maybe they’ll throw in a few pinups of Gidget.