Orange County Winter: Born to Be Mild

At 2 in the afternoon on New Year’s Day, Steve Belna is standing next to his car parked on Pacific Coast Highway. It must be, oh, 70 degrees, and there’s no other way to describe how the water looks under the afternoon sun than to say it shimmers. Bare-chested and living large, Belna has just finished up three or four hours of surfing at Huntington Beach.

I was prepared to strain with all my might to attach a metaphor to Belna and his suntanned nonchalance, but it wasn’t that hard. All that was needed was to watch him cleaning off his white fiberglass board next to the water’s edge and picture him staring out over 3,000 miles of America--much of it caught in the grip of a cold, snowy winter--and thumbing his nose.

Of course, he was doing no such thing. He was just a guy wrapping up another trip to the beach. Another day riding the waves. Another 70-degree day to start a new year.

“I can remember the last couple of new years, pretty big swells,” he says. Then he pauses and says, “I’m trying to remember if that was last year or not. They all run together.”

Just another millennium underway in Southern California.

Belna is 39 and has grown up in Southern California. As such, the notion of surfing on Jan. 1--or jogging on the strand or driving with the top down--is not nearly as poetically romantic as it remains to a guy like me, who grew up in the Midwest.

Belna has never lived in a cold-weather climate. Can’t imagine doing it. He’s not gloating about it. It’s just that this is Southern California . . . and, hey, why not take advantage.

“I try to go surfing two, three, four times a week, depending on my work schedule,” he says. “I set my own schedule, depending on how busy I am.”

Belna is the facilities manager for a time-share resort at Newport Coast. The units are billed as “ocean-view villas,” and he has the good grace to acknowledge that when he goes to work, “it’s not too bad.”

Belna was raised in Downey, then moved with the family to Costa Mesa. He thinks he was about 10 when he got his first surfboard. In fact, he says, he got it right across the street at a surf shop that no longer exists.

“I surfed Seal Beach when I was real young, but from about 12 or 13 on, I surfed Newport Beach pretty much exclusively,” he says. “I just always had an interest in surfing. It was just a matter of getting old enough to where it’d be safe to go out by myself.”

As a Midwesterner who spent his wintry days shoveling sidewalks and crooning to Beach Boy songs, I accorded a certain mythic status to people like Belna and all those surfers who came before. I knew people like him existed and were living lives much different than mine, but if there’s such a thing as an abstract reality, that was it.

Seventy degrees on Jan. 1? No way. Put myself on the Pacific Coast Highway (if I even knew there was such a thing)? Not a chance.

Belna is vaguely aware that generations of Midwesterners and Easterners share these thoughts about Southern California. But to say he doesn’t spend much time thinking about it pretty much hits the mark.

He only knows he wouldn’t want to live out there. “I see [the cold weather] on the news, and it’s really hard for me to picture myself living there,” he says. “No ocean, no surfing, the weather . . .”

I ask if he considers himself lucky. “I guess I would consider myself . . . fortunate that I grew up here and was exposed to it early. Now I know better than to move back East.”

Again, no condescension or spite--just a sense that, by a lovely quirk of fate, this has been his life.

When you’re out there on the board waiting between sets of waves, he says, and you’ve picked a time when kids are in school and adults are at work and you’ve got the ocean pretty much all to yourself . . .

He doesn’t finish the sentence, but he doesn’t have to.

Yeah, a guy could consider himself pretty lucky.

But like he says, it’s not like he doesn’t have a job.

“Sometimes I’m buried at work,” he says.

“But then again, it’s not too bad.”

Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. Readers may reach Parsons by calling (714) 966-7821 or by writing to him at The Times, Orange County edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626, or by e-mail to dana.parsons@latimes.com.