Waves of Feelings : Passion, Peace, Awe--the Pacific Evokes It All

It happens more than 6,000 times each day. Buffeted by the wind and swayed by the rotation of the earth, the largest ocean in the world heaves, curls and then throws itself onto the Southern California coast.

About every 14 seconds the waves surge, ebb and surge again. Their color varies with the clarity of the water and the hue of the sky. But their sound is reassuringly constant, a rhythmic pounding that rises and falls, but is never silent.

But take a dip in those waves? What are you, nuts?

Ask Southern Californians about their big, dirty, cold, crowded, dangerous, wet neighbor to the west, and many will say it no longer lives up to its idealized image. Sullied by sewage, strewn with debris and increasingly marked by violence, the beach can be a serious bummer.

Still, people keep coming back. Like the desert defines Tucson, like the mountains make Denver, saltwater saturates the psyche of Los Angeles.

“If you look for the symbol of shared identity in Southern California, the beaches are right up there,” says Kevin Starr, a USC professor who studies the social and cultural history of California.

Today, on the unofficial end of the summer season, thousands upon thousands of people will crowd Los Angeles County’s 76 miles of coastline and then head inland until next year. But for many Southern Californians, the ocean is a year-round fascination.

The Image Maker

The sun was out on Hermosa Beach. The cameras were ready to roll. But Nicole Eggert, who plays a junior lifeguard named Summer on television’s “Baywatch,” was refusing to get in the water.

“Are you kidding me? Where are the hair and makeup people?” the petite actress whimpered, digging her heels into the sand.

Only later, after her trim limbs were oiled, her blonde hair brushed and her little dog handed off to an assistant, would Eggert even consider taking the plunge. “Might be a good idea to get in, Nicole,” a crew member coaxed. “Gotta get wet, Nicole!”

Of all the glorified images of Southern California that Hollywood has served up over the years, perhaps none has been so hungrily devoured as “Baywatch.” The hour-long drama about a bunch of scantily clad Los Angeles County lifeguards is among the most popular TV shows in the world. And the Pacific Ocean co-stars in nearly every scene.

Veteran lifeguard Gregory J. Bonann created “Baywatch” to tell the stories of the men and women who keep an eye on the ocean. His concept: “ ‘Hill Street Blues’ on the beach.” In early episodes, when the show aired on NBC, the network wanted to depict a fantasy beach free of crime, grit and danger, Bonann said.

“They didn’t want anybody to ever die,” he said disapprovingly. “They also didn’t like mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.”

Now that the show is syndicated and Bonann and his colleagues have creative control, he is happier with the results: more realistic scenarios against a backdrop of plenty of exposed skin.

Bonann grew up in Brentwood, a sickly kid who suffered from debilitating asthma. Even that close to the coast, pollen and smog kept him wheezing. So Bonann’s father, a doctor, took his small son to the sea.

“Whenever I had an attack, he took me out of school and out on the ocean,” Bonann recalled. “Every time I went to the beach, I got well.”

Soon, the ocean became “the focal point of my life,” he said. “When I woke up in the morning, I had to get to the water to know what the day was really like. Was the surf big? Was the water flat? Was the wind up? . . . The beach was my barometer.”

Now that his show is a hit, Bonann does not have to travel far to take a measure of the day. “Baywatch” has provided him with the capital to buy a house in Malibu. Now, if he can only keep his cast members in line.

“Can I take this stupid hat off?” begged Eggert, tugging at a brightly colored beanie that lifeguards wear during competition. She looked imploringly at her boss.

Bonann didn’t hesitate: “The hat stays on.”

The Wanderer

Ben is homeless. Every night for several months, the stocky 32-year-old has slept on the sand at Venice Beach. Every few days, he wades in, washing his clothes and himself in the frigid, salty water.

On this foggy morning, he is sitting in a discarded plastic beach chair about 15 yards from the surf line, looking west. He wears cutoff jeans, a UNLV Rebels T-shirt and a purple scarf wrapped around his head. He smokes Marlboros. When he talks, his mind jumps from topic to topic like a skipping stone.

“You know the sea is mentioned a lot in the Bible. They say the sea will give up its dead and be judged,” he says, eyeing the waves as he delivers a near-verbatim fragment from Revelation 20:13. Then, his thoughts jump forward again.

“I think about sharks sometimes when I swim,” he says. “I don’t go out that deep. I guess you can get in over your head.”

Ben grew up in Maryland, near Chesapeake Bay. He does not say how he got so far from home. He prefers to talk about Linda Blair (“She did the movie ‘The Exorcist,’ ” he says admiringly) and the Navy, which he believes is training tropical birds for battle. (“They’re always up to something,” he says.)

But the ocean is a subject he feels strongly about, and he wants to explain why. Right now, it is his home--his living room, his bathtub, his bed, he says. If you adopt the proper attitude, he says, it’s relatively safe. (“If you don’t think about it, it won’t happen.”) Besides, he says, he’s had a rough life. Being near the sea makes him feel good.

“It’s just peaceful to look out there. I don’t know why,” he says. “What fascinates me are the people on the other side. All those people over in China . . . they’re just sitting there like me.”

He pauses. “The sea has a mystical power,” he says. “I thought it was the people on the other side, thinking.”

The Old-Timers

Jean-Claude Picard, 68, salutes the ocean by flying his body from a flagpole.

To be precise, the pole Picard favors is attached to a set of monkey bars--one of several pieces of exercise equipment that protrude from the sand just south of Santa Monica Pier. When Picard gets ahold of it and kicks his legs into the air, there’s no mistaking the effect. With his compact body held taut and perfectly parallel to the horizon, he is a human flag.

“It’s like Jack LaLanne said: ‘Either use it or lose it,’ ” the retired industrial mechanic says, explaining his daily unfurling.

Picard, a transplanted Canadian, is among a small group of self-described old-timers who gather each day at the site of the original Muscle Beach. They exercise. They chat. Sometimes, they just sit and gaze at the sea. It’s been that way for more than 40 years.

Nowadays, younger bodybuilders flex about a mile south, at the modern Muscle Beach Venice (founded in 1987). But the old-timers stay put. Their equipment isn’t as fancy--just some rings and bars. They never draw a crowd. But this is their stretch of sand, their meeting place.

Tania Israel, a 61-year-old retired hairdresser who lives in Culver City, met Picard here in 1961. “He was doing acrobatics on the grass, lifting his wife up, doing handstands,” she recalled as she wobbled on a pair of Roller-Blades that Picard recently taught her how to use.

Israel, a Los Angeles native, remembers the early days when LaLanne, the fitness guru, and stuntman Russ Saunders worked out here. But she says more than memories keep her coming out to the water.

“Search into your soul and say: ‘Where do I feel the best?’ The ocean. It’s like a symphony. . . . It’s a delight to your heart,” Israel says, gently resting her hand on the shoulder of another friend, 79-year-old Sam Josephson.

“He’s got Parkinson’s (disease). He’s not in the best condition now, and I want the rest of his life to be as happy as possible,” Israel says. So every day, she picks Josephson up at his Santa Monica apartment and brings him to this favorite seaside bench.

“The beach is like a reunion,” Israel says. “It’s like always knowing that there’ll be somebody that you know.”

The Youngsters

Jumbo, Lalo, Mobol and Alex are a close-cropped, baggy-pants-wearing, beeper-carrying foursome. On this afternoon at Dockweiler State Beach, where Imperial Highway meets the water, their tattooed bodies are dusted with sand.

James (Jumbo) Wilson, 17, has dug himself a throne and lined it with a purple towel. Lounging there in his gold chain, rhinestone earring, backward baseball cap and knee-length shorts, the Hawthorne resident offers a concise assessment of the ocean’s allure.

“Relaxation,” he says with a contented grin.

Gonzalo (Lalo) Franco, 18, flops down a few feet away. Surveying the crowd of mostly young parents and toddlers, he is the first to admit that he and his buddies stand out. But that’s the way they want it.

“Go down to Manhattan (Beach), it’s pure youngsters,” Franco says, as Michael (Mobol) Garcia, 15, nods in agreement. “But you always have to watch your back--because there are gangsters. We come here to kick back.”

Unwinding at Dockweiler takes a little practice. It’s hard to keep from tensing up when, every few minutes, an airplane takes off from nearby Los Angeles International Airport. But low-flying jets are less threatening than gang members, which is the reason these guys will not go to Venice Beach anymore. “Too rough,” Wilson says.

Dockweiler--however ear-splitting--is the perfect alternative. It’s friendly and just a single westbound bus ride from home. Franco met his girlfriend Jasmine at Dockweiler, and held his 18th birthday party there, complete with a bonfire.

“When I think about it, a lot of things have happened here,” he says. “Just now, we met some guy from Sweden!”

Often, people assume Franco and his friends are gangbangers--mistakenly, they say.

But what about the tattoos? Or Franco’s beeper? Franco explains that he is an aspiring tattoo artist and uses a beeper to keep in touch with clients. Proudly, he points out samples of his work. He etched siempre alegre-- always happy--on 16-year-old Alex Gomez’s shoulder blade. Wilson has “James” on his arm. And Franco is forever decorating himself.

Franco says he is careful to ink only parts of his body that clothes can hide. Knowing that people judge based on appearance, he wants to be able to control how much they see. Even his parents are not aware that their names appear in fanciful script on his chest.

“Only my best friends know about these,” he says, glancing at his handiwork. “Them, and people at the beach.”

The Poetry Lover

Eighty years ago, when Kate Frost was 3 1/2 years old, the ocean did her a terrible turn. Frost, her mother and brother were at the Corona del Mar Pier when her brother fell into the water. Panicked, her mother jumped in after him. Both drowned.

Frost remembers only little things about that day. She remembers staring at a wall of legs--a crowd of adults that had formed a tight circle around her mother’s body--and feeling frustrated when she was unable to push her way through. When no one realized that she was the drowned woman’s child, she wandered down the beach until hunger led her to approach a vendor.

Frost does not remember how she got home. But she recalls the story she heard growing up: that her father, a Hollywood physician, had been told--in error--that his entire family had perished. So when the authorities called to say that his little daughter had been found, it was as if she had come back from the dead.

Frost grew up fearing the sea. And she probably would have feared it forever, she says, but for the man she married, an accountant and poet named Kingsley Tufts. A natural athlete, Tufts set out to gently, patiently teach his wife how to swim.

It took some time, but Frost and Kingsley were swimming together in the ocean off Santa Monica. Once, Frost remembers, they got close enough to touch a dolphin.

They had a second-floor home on Ocean Avenue, and the Pacific was right out their front door. Frost came to love it--the way it moved, the way it smelled, the way it never looked the same two days in a row.

Even after they moved in 1966 into the Hollywood home where Frost grew up, the water remained a powerful lure. Kingsley would bring home fish and sometimes lobsters. More than once, he wrote about the water in his poems.

After he died in 1991, Frost sold their home and used the proceeds to create a poetry prize in her husband’s name. And then she moved to be nearer the ocean. Every day now, she walks from her Santa Monica condominium to the bluffs overlooking the Pacific.

“I just come out, stand here and breathe,” she said recently, staring out at the water. “There’s something about breathing air that you don’t feel that more than a few people have breathed. You sort of feel it came all the way from China and you got to breathe it first.”