Now Comes ‘The Beach’

The Beach crawled out of its cocoon last week. Just like always. You could argue about the exact day, but at some point during the week, Southern California passed through an invisible portal. The mornings acquired a peppery heat and, suddenly, you knew: The Beach was back.

In other places, when summer arrives, people go to the beach. Or they go to the shore. All those things are fine enough, but they’re different from The Beach.

Only Southern California has The Beach. It’s not a strip of sand but a contained universe that emerges each July and then vanishes in the fall. The Beach is a separate reality.

That reality operates under its own rules and behaviors. It has its own economy, with a GNP the size of a small country. It plays different sports and has its own sports stars. It flaunts its own clothing fashions and makes millions doing so. The Beach, one of our contributions to world culture, is a mysterious place.

Exactly how we invented The Beach is an interesting story, and we’ll get to that later. But on Wednesday, Arthur Verge was starting the first day of his 25th summer at The Beach. He was talking about how you know when the moment of The Beach has arrived.

“You can smell it,” he said. “You catch whiffs of sunscreen in the air. It’s a pure joy when it happens because you know you’ve broken out of spring and, finally, it’s here. The whole season is in front of you.”

Verge is a county lifeguard. He’s 42 and, off-season, a professor of history at El Camino College. That The Beach can attract people like Verge, year after year, is a measure of its cultural power. Among the lifeguard corps there’s also a physics professor at USC, several physicians and some artists.

On Wednesday, while I watched, Verge opened the Avenue 18 tower in Venice. All around us, an incredible polyglot civilization had gathered on their blankets while, offshore, the boys of summer bobbed on the boards, waiting for the next wave.

The scene had an eternal quality.

“You look out there, it might as well be 1974,” he said. “The bathing suit styles are a little different, but otherwise it’s the same. That’s the reassuring thing about it.”

For example, Verge points out, beach volleyball first appeared in Hermosa Beach, Manhattan Beach and Santa Monica in the 1920s. To this day, those stretches of beach still contain the volleyball action and other stretches do not. The Beach honors its traditions.

Or consider the lifeguards themselves. Their rescue techniques have changed little, if any, over the past 50 years. They use neither helicopters nor other fancy equipment. Each of the thousands of rescues each summer is accomplished by a lifeguard in a red swimsuit trailing a plastic buoy. And nothing more.

Along Hermosa and Manhattan beaches, where the apartments extend onto the sand, it even seems that the same college kids appear each summer to rent the apartments, display their perfect bodies, and sip Chihuahua beer on their patios. They are not the same kids, of course, only interchangeable with those who came before and will come after.

In fact, immutable as it may seem, The Beach was only invented in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s. Some purists argue that it started decades before, when, say, George Freeth first brought surfing from Hawaii to Southern California. Or when Henry Huntington’s Pacific Electric Railway delivered huge crowds to the Redondo and Santa Monica beaches in the 1920s, inspiring the volleyball craze.

But none of those developments, by themselves, congealed into The Beach. That waited until the late 1950s, when postwar America spawned a restlessness in its young people and a desire to create separate cultures.

Then it began. Surf music, a precursor of rock ‘n’ roll, appeared around 1956. Surfing itself changed to a lifestyle cult. The Beach became a refuge for the young, with its own language and rules.

Ever vigilant, Life magazine noted the change in 1961. Describing the Southern California scene, the magazine wrote, “This summer, it isn’t enough just to go down to the water, jump in and swim.” No, you now entered another universe when you entered The Beach.

Several years ago I spent an afternoon talking about those days with Dick Dale, the guitarist who first created instrumental surf music. When we talked, Dale was living a secluded life in the desert. But in the late 1950s, he was the king of the Rendezvous Ballroom in Balboa.

“Everyone could see that a huge cultural thing was happening,” Dale said. “If you lived in one of the beach towns then, something new was coming along every day. Reporters were swarming around, trying to figure it out.

“The first night we played at the Rendezvous, about 17 people showed up and they were all surfer friends of mine. Within a month or so, we were getting 4,000 people. That’s how fast it was happening.”

As Dale told it, he and a few others quickly made another discovery about The Beach: You could sell it, or at least its cultural artifacts, and get rich.

Dale, and later the Ventures and the Beach Boys, grew wealthy from selling the music. For a brief time, until it was swamped by mainstream rock ‘n’ roll, surf music sold more records than any other genre. Dale’s own masterpiece, “Miserlou,” is still played and formed part of the soundtrack for the movie “Pulp Fiction.”

Hobie Alter made a fortune selling surfboards and catamarans. Bruce Brown grew both rich and famous making the classic movie about surfing, “The Endless Summer.” And dozens of others built an entire industry out of beach fashion.

About a decade ago, I got off a plane in Palermo, Sicily, and began walking down a long airport corridor. Along the sides were the usual travel posters of distant cities. When I got to the Los Angeles poster, what do you think was pictured thereupon?

That’s right. The Beach. The poster showed a timeless scene of the boys and girls of summer standing mutely on the sand, at the edge of a continent, enclosed in their separate world. They appeared serene, beautiful, and blessed. You saw that picture and you wanted to be one of them.

At that moment, for the first time, I understood the meaning of The Beach as opposed to a beach. I understood that we had invented something unique, something mysterious, a mythic place that projected a message beyond language. It could inspire longing in millions of people around the world.

Arthur Verge, in his tower, often sees that longing in foreign visitors when they first visit The Beach. They come onto the sand and try to absorb the meaning of the place. They want to identify whatever it was that drew them to The Beach.

“They receive the California dream here,” he said. “You can’t really put it into words, just like you can’t put the dream into words. But they stand here on the beach, and they get it.”

Well, if it’s that good for foreigners, maybe it’s good for us, too. I could use a little of the California dream. And this weekend I just might get some.