A Place to Chill Out

It’s cold--cold for a day at the beach, cold for Southern California, at least, something like 50, maybe 55--and Bobby Ruiz is still making milkshakes, scooping vanilla ice cream into paper cups and setting them aside for later. Outside the tiny Orange County coast snack shop where Ruiz prepares chilly treats hours before anyone will eat them, the horizon is a pale blur of white and gray, sky and Pacific. Up and down this coast, volleyball nets sway empty, early risers cruise boardwalks in knit hats and heavy jackets, acres of sand lie empty, and it’s cold, cold for a day at the beach. Despite the gray, the fog, there is still a sign in front of the Shake Shack, the yellow hut atop a cliff where Ruiz makes milkshakes, boasting the unspoken slogan for this misunderstood, wintertime shore: “Open All Year.”

The coast of Southern California in this, the off-season, defies its Jan and Dean mythology, and the rugged, clear-your-head oasis that many leave Los Angeles to seek along the northern coast, away from everything, can actually be found right here, in the traditionally teeming skin bazaars of Manhattan and Huntington and Malibu. During what passes as winter here, bikinis and Boogie boards and shoulder-to-sunburned-shoulder crowds give way to a different place altogether--some say a more inviting, more real place. The water moves in strange directions and takes on deeper colors, the waves sound louder, the sand appears often unspoiled, the wildlife features a winter-only cast, and the few humans who seek out this place come here not for the ocean, but something deeper.

“The beach is the only place you can really go--other than the movies, I guess--alone, to just think and meditate, and you see a lot more of that in the winter,” says David Cooke, a Laguna Beach oil painter who has spent many hours simply staring at the ocean, winter and summer, painting its textures, replicating the way the water catches light, throws shadows. Lately, Cooke has moved away from traditional outdoor plein-air art--the paint-it-while-the-light-is-good views of, say, a Laguna sunset--to focus on the people who come to the beach, capturing how they congregate, how long they stay, what they do. For many, he says, the almost artificial need to party, to have fun, eases in these off-months, and those who come here do so to get away from everything, rather than to find more of it.

“In the summer, there’s a lot of static and interference, there’s a lot more energy and distraction,” Cooke says. “In the wintertime, you see that there’s hardly anyone out there, and those who are, they’re kind of quiet and solemn. And they’re local people.”

This might well be the more vital of the seasons, when nature steals the spotlight from culture and offers a clear view of both wonders and wrongs, both the winter-only migratory animals and the rainy-season runoff from a nearby civilization. Those who gravitate toward this neighborhood, those who recognize this other face, have found the beach for the rest of us. No longer an activity or a day trip, it’s home.

On a recent morning, a generically beachy stretch of Manhattan Beach known as the Strand looks like an expensive, abandoned movie set: Alfredo’s All-Natural Smoothie Bar is shuttered, and three people sitting in beach chairs almost literally have this place to themselves. Within a mile of beachfront here, as the temperature approaches 60 degrees or so, not exactly cold, not even for the beach, only one woman sunbathes and three men play volleyball. They all wear shirts. Up and down the coast, there are similar scenes on vast sandy playgrounds left for the locals.

On the Strand, Rick Fehnel is there with his dog Josephine, a cell phone and a pile of newspapers. He’s sitting on a bench looking at the water, thinking about his work, his future, “where it’s all going.” He lives right around the corner, he says, and this is pretty typical chill-out time.

Nearby, Annie Riveron sits on a blanket with her shoes kicked off, eating a burrito, feeding bits of it to the half-dozen sea gulls crowded nearby. “I like to come out here and set my goals,” she says, breaking from her silent strategy session for her business as a personal finance consultant. She is distracted by a flurry of gulls fighting over bits of burrito. “They’re very competitive,” she says, lost in thought, “these birds.”

Thinking, it seems, is the volleyball of the off-season. Many of those I encounter, in fog and sunshine, admit to having a lot--or, as the case may be, nothing whatsoever--on their minds. Carol Moss, who has lived on a beachfront stretch of Malibu for more than 30 years, hosts a weekly meditation session at her house, inviting a half-dozen people to sit near the ocean and do absolutely nothing, in absolute quiet, for 45 minutes.

“One of the things you do in meditation is try to be aware of things, and anything to do with the waves and the environment becomes part of the mediation,” she says. “It’s very, very quiet.”

In the off-season, she says, the clear minds in these sitting sessions can find a deeper sense of seclusion and peace, as her neighborhood becomes a ghost town, as almost everyone else returns to their “first” homes somewhere else and the students--she doesn’t know most of them, as they found her through word of mouth--sit behind her house and just listen to the water. “It’s funny,” she says, “how you can be silent with somebody and it can be a very intimate relationship.”

For others, this season of quiet is a chance to actually get to know your neighbors, to share your great big backyard--the baseball yard, the barbecue yard. “There’s definitely a huge difference: Less lifeguards, less people, less helicopters--and you don’t have planes with banners selling beer and whatever’s onstage at the magic club,” says Rod Riegel, a very tan 20th Century Fox executive who, at nearly noon on a Thursday, sits in a folding chair near his house on the Strand, wearing shorts and a sweatshirt. “In the winter, it feels like you’re skipping school. This is the great undiscovered season, and we’d like to keep it that way: secret.”

He sees the beach as an extension of his own house, and that molds the dynamic of the entire neighborhood. Nobody has a traditional yard here. This means, he says, that “the beach is the final point of congregation, and people tend to think of this as their backyard.”

The off-season also makes it clear that this playground, the beach, is also an ecosystem, a fragile breeding ground, a hunting range and habitat on the edge of a massive metropolis. Never is it more obvious than after a winter rainstorm, less frequent this year than in most, how much complex chemical waste and simple bag-and-bottle garbage washes from the city streets onto the beach. “Most people aren’t aware of the effect the city has on the beach, but the people who are regulars, who go to the beach all year, see how much trash there is,” says Cassie Carter, a biologist and program director for Heal the Bay, a watchdog and education group focused on cleaning up the coast. “There’s a sense, a feeling of helplessness, though. It does feel overwhelming.”

She talks about cans and cups thrown on city streets, and toxins freed from asphalt crevices by the rain, and the tiny bits of plastic, “microplastics,” she calls them, that just build up in animal stomachs, making them feel full, possibly killing them. She also talks about how you might see, this time of year, the brown pelicans in their breeding colors (note the red on their beaks) and large osprey hawks, hunting for smelt and anchovy just offshore. The border between city and nature, during this season of rain and fog, becomes all too clear. Stand on the rocky shores of San Pedro, and maybe you will catch a glimpse of gray whales turning the bend, headed north from Baja, or porpoises and, more rarely, seals. And maybe do your best to find a Western sandpiper, a whimbrel, a marbled godwit or, at the very least, a ruddy turnstone--birds that spend the spring and summer north of here, unseen by most beachgoers, says bird-watcher and Santa Monica Bay Audubon Society member Chuck Bragg.

“Seeing them in the winter, too, you’re not seeing them in their breeding plumage, so they’re not as brightly colored,” says Bragg, who joins a monthly society trip to the Malibu lagoon, off-season or not. “The ruddy turnstones, for example, are off-brown in the winter, not ruddy at all.”

Keep an eye out, too, he says, for the snowy plover, a delicate white-and-gray fellow. Local bird-watchers report sightings of the endangered bird, seen in these parts only in the winter, to a central hotline keeping tabs on its movement.

Stop for a minute, as Bragg does, and look at this place. Listen to it. Anywhere’s fine, but maybe stop here at Zuma Beach, north of Malibu, where, late in the afternoon, the sand remains neatly combed from the morning cleaning and a woman runs between the ocean and hundreds of empty parking spaces. The waves here, now, in the winter, are the center of attention, rather than the sun. Even if Los Angeles seems to outsiders to have no seasons, even if we consider ourselves immune from the effects of the Earth tilting 23 degrees away from the sun, the ocean itself makes subtle changes.

“The shadows and the light on the water are a lot richer during more of the day,” says painter Cooke. During winter, the sun travels lower in the sky and so hits the water from a less direct angle, creating a more stunning play of light on the ripples and waves, more shadows and colors. “In the summer, it’s just bright and washed out, with no shadows. Right now, it’s almost like sunset or sunrise all the time.”

Rough water, driftwood and debris slide down snow-shedding mountains, bringing mild drama to those coasts near streams, and the ocean itself seems to move from the north instead of the south. The swells now come from Alaska rather than South America, as in the summer, and tend to be colder, though not necessarily bigger. So surfers wear wetsuits, or thicker wetsuits, or two at a time, and a few head to north-facing beaches that you simply can’t surf in the summer months, riding waves you can only ride this time of year in Ventura, in Palos Verdes.

The tides, too, reverse themselves, riding high in the morning, low in the afternoon, says Marine Safety Officer Tom Trager, one of four off-season lifeguards at Laguna Beach, compared with 100 in the summer. (In Los Angeles County the number of lifeguards more than quadruples in the summer.) So a few afternoon tide-poolers get stranded on Laguna’s rocks when the water retreats unexpectedly. But beyond rescuing them, Trager and the other lifeguards spend the winter running cliff-rescue and fire drills, saving overzealous scuba divers and, well, taking it easy. “Last weekend it was unexpectedly warm, so the beach was almost packed,” he says, “but almost nobody was in the water.”

As the sun rises behind Huntington Beach, one of the most famous and summery of all Southern California’s shores, Betty Peterson curls up on the sand, staring into the gray waves, her wetsuit on, surfboard beside her. The water teems with bobbing bodies and their fiberglass transports, and most of her team, the surf team from Long Beach’s Millikan High School, is already out there.

“It gets really cold,” she says, and sometimes, “it gets so cold that your hands want to fall off.” Still, she and the others come out here four times a week, before school, even when it’s so foggy that they run into each other, that Peterson can’t see the waves until they’re right on top of her. She stares at the waves for a few more minutes, her arms wrapped around her knees, and then she picks up her board and runs into the water.

Walking through the dawn past Peterson is a woman in pink tights and a purple knit hat, a scarf and running shoes and not much on her mind at all. “I try not to think very much, try to be one with the ocean. When you have too much on your mind or too much around you, you’re separated from this nature,” Leia Cha says, walking as she does every morning. She owns a boutique on Huntington Beach’s Main Street and so, for business reasons, would rather have the strip overrun with tourists in bikinis. But she also lives here. She gets along best with the beach in its off-season mood. “There’s something very mystical about it, and you get a lightness, you feel like nothing bothers you,” she says.

She keeps walking, toward the pier, toward rows of empty volleyball nets and unused parking spaces and shuttered bike rental shops, and she stops, every few feet, to watch the waves roll onto the shore.

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Glenn Gaslin is a Los Angeles-based freelance writer. He last wrote about Melrose Avenue for Calendar Weekend.