The California Myth Lives On, if You Keep Facing West

The coastal breeze had ice on its breath Tuesday, rendering Huntington Beach more like Cape Cod in March than the site of endless summer. In our haste to herald the inevitable coming of the sun, we tend to forget that June must run its course.

Roger Bowman is in no such hurry. “I figure summer starts the end of June,” he says. “Then this foggy crap leaves us, and we start having bright mornings and clear days.”

At 67 and having spent the last 30 years in Huntington Beach, Bowman knows a thing or two about the coming of summer. He’s one of the beach town’s employees who collects your parking fees at the city beach.

For a mere five bucks, you, too, can enter the sanctuary of the California beach. You, too, can stand at water’s edge and reflect on the splendor of the ultimate California experience.

You might call Bowman the Gatekeeper to the Myth. And a jovial gatekeeper he is, quick with a smile and the kind of guy who starts laughing halfway to the punch line. If he even thinks you’re about to say something funny, he gears up for a guffaw.

From his booth, he sees the springtime parade of campers and RVs from out of town and out of state that descend on the parking lots of the city’s 3-mile stretch of beach, with their inhabitants seemingly content to sit for hours and gaze into the ocean and the setting sun. This is the California they had heard of, where it’s always warm and life is easy and uncluttered. Of course, the key is to make sure you point your vehicle west so you can spend your entire day looking dead ahead--into the majestic expanse of ocean and the mesmerizing sunlight. If you do that, and resist the temptation to look back over your shoulder, you will never see the evils that lurk behind.

But now that summer is approaching and the parking lots must be reserved for the daily traffic, the RV crowd has returned to its natural habitat, and the true revelers begin their migrations to the shores.

As a teen-ager in the Midwest, I would sit in my bedroom for hours, listening to Beach Boys records and name-dropping the California towns in the songs as if I knew them all intimately. The Beach Boys’ heyday as myth makers exactly paralleled my teen years, so as my own awakening to the wider world was occurring, there were the Beach Boys to offer glamorous faraway possibilities.

To a kid living in the Plains, lyrically paired names like Huntington and Malibu/Laguna and Doheny/San Onofre and Sunset/ sounded, if not like Heaven, then surely its golden suburbs.

I asked Bowman if the people who pass by his gate still seem to buy into the California myth about eternal summers. It turns out he, himself, once did. An industrial engineer by trade, Bowman went to hear a pitch 30 years ago in Michigan by the Mattel Toy Co. and decided to move his family, which eventually grew to nine kids, to Southern California.

“They do,” he says. “They definitely do. About one out of every five out-of-staters will ask where they can go to see some surfing.”

A man in a minivan pulls up to Bowman’s booth and says, “Is it gonna get warmer?”

“The last few days, the sun’s been coming out around 1 o’clock,” Bowman tells him.

Apparently content to defer the dream another hour or so, the man pays his five bucks and drives on in.

Some aren’t so sure. The other day, Bowman said, a woman paid her $5 but decided a few minutes later that she wanted to leave. She also wanted her money back, apparently having second thoughts because of the weather.

“I gave it back to her,” Bowman said. “I figured I could always collect it from the next guy.”

Indeed. There will always be the next dreamer to come along, wanting access to the California he always heard about. Whether it turns out to be the same California that exists in reality, who is to say?

Certainly not the merry Bowman.

After all, he is just the Gatekeeper. He makes no guarantees, no promises. The myth is what you make of it.

As I prepared to leave, I thanked him for his time. “I’ll let you get back to work,” I said.

He gave me that look again, as if he had just heard a terrific joke.

“What work?” he said, with a big smile.

And I knew exactly what he meant.