Beach Blanket Birthday Burn

By Steve Sabatka

For the TODAY

I turned 60 a few months ago, and on that chilly, foggy day, I woke up earlier than usual, hours before my first-period Zoom class. I felt jittery and was haunted by images from a nightmare I couldn’t quite remember, something about being chased by a murmuring army of colon polyps.

So, hoping to shake the feeling of doom and fear — and, just as important, hoping to find some kind of sign, some hopeful omen, a positive portent for the rest of my life — I hit Highway 101, the main vein, the Mekong River of the Oregon Coast, and headed for my favorite local beach because where better to put the remainder of one’s life in perspective?

First, I stopped at a local coffee hut and ordered a Katana Grande, a large green tea — straight with no sweetener — intending to fuel up on bitter Zen wisdom and cultivate some sort of Bushido courage.

As I left the coffee joint, I saw a banged-up Civic — same year and color as mine — out in the parking lot. The windows were covered from the inside with cardboard and electric tape, so I couldn’t see the occupants. There was a denim jacket on the ground next to the car. The jacket had been recently vomited upon, and two large crows were picking through the bigger chunks. If this was a harbinger of the balance of my days, it was not an encouraging one.

I proceeded to the Devils Punchbowl, and sat down on a bench there above the beach, and looked down at the churning winter sea. As I took deep pulls of grassy tea, I grunted like Toshiro Mifune, and tried to imagine myself, for just a calming moment, as a bent and scarred Samurai from 500 years ago, a survivor of many battles and many injuries, hoping to live out his life in enlightened peace. I looked back on 60 years of trying to be a good son, brother, friend, soldier, husband, and now school teacher, trying and succeeding most of the time, but failing, too. I grunted again, but this time it came out weak and nasal, and I realized that of course, I wasn't Toshiro Mifune. I was Woody Allen, whining, rambling, and worse than that, afraid — of failing health and mind. Of that bad biopsy. Of pain. Of the dying of the light.

So I focused on the ocean below me, which was the pale, cool color of ancient jade that day — and the half-dozen surfers, up early, too — and I was suddenly heartened, invigorated. Because surfers know how to live. I know several surfers, fellow teachers and friends, and they are all reborn, self-actualized, kind-hearted Obi-Wans of The Deep, totally in tune with the rhythms of the sea, and very nice people, besides. Have you ever met a surfer that was a jerk? I have not. I think the ocean does us all a favor and drowns jerks.

I especially admire Oregon surfers. After all, anybody can crash around in the soothing, placenta-warm, Coast Guard patrolled waters of La Jolla or Oahu on a sunny June day. It’s easy. I’ve done it. Oregon surfers are a hardier breed, though. They laugh at our savage rip tides and water temps that never rise out of the ’50s. They don’t listen to wimpy surf songs by Jan and Dean. And no Oregon surfer has ever had the name Moondoggie. Ollie, maybe, but never Moondoggie.

(Speaking of Moondoggie, none of those “classic” surf movies, like “Muscle Beach Party” or “Beach Blanket Bingo” could’ve been filmed here. Why? Because our dark craggy coast is a Bergmanesque, film noir kind of place. That, and Frankie Avalon was by all accounts, a notorious, cold-water wuss with a kelp phobia. There is a subgenre of surf flicks, though, all shot in moody black and white, that could have been shot on the Oregon Coast: “Horror of Party Beach,” “Monster from the Ocean Floor,” directed by that great auteur, Wyatt Ordung, and of course, “The Beach Girls and the Monster,” which is in the permanent collection of New York City's Museum of Modern Art.)

More relevant to me on that day, Oregon surfers have a true Samurai fearlessness. Where does that bravery come from? Could I have some of it? As I pondered these questions, I watched a kid, a boy, maybe eight years old, 52 years younger than me, as he paddled out into the white-green water. I was taken aback. It was a school day, after all, but more than that, this lad wasn’t old enough to get a legal tattoo, let alone go toe to undertow with the Mighty Pacific. Was he aware of the creatures that were lurking down below him, eyeing him, sizing him up as if he was one of those La Choy mini egg rolls? I wanted to warn him, fill him in.

Sharks, son, sharks. My dad found the tooth of a Great White shark, not two miles from here. It was clean and ivory colored and a tad larger than a Bugle — corn chip that is — and when you run your finger along its serrated, steak knife edges, you can almost feel a mouthful of those teeth slicing into your calf muscle and yanking it free from the bone. It wasn’t a fossil tooth, either. That shark is still out there.

Killer whales. Don’t be fooled, youngster. Orcas aren’t the grinning, benevolent plush toy cartoon characters you’ve been led to believe they are. How do you think those rubber-smooth wolves of the sea earned such an ominous name? How did Cape Foulweather get its name? Or the Kansas Strangler? Explosive Diarrhea? Things are named for a reason, you know.

Scariest of all are your cephalopods — your octopuses, your squids, your cuttlefish. The Oregon Coast is home to the Humboldt Squid, which I grant you, doesn’t grow to giant, Jules Verne proportions, but they travel in tentacled, beak-biting packs which are considered by fisherman to be more savage and bloodthirsty than a like number of sharks. And never forget about our very own Giant Pacific Octopus, a true-life sea monster, an underwater tarantula, with a tentacle span of 16 feet, an intelligence that is thought by some scientists to be of alien origin, and cold, almost sleepy eyes which will stare at you — completely emotionless — as those iron-cable tentacles curl around your ankles and then your waist and then your neck, and then pull you down and down and you make hope you drown before things get all beaky up in here.

As that truant kid came gliding back to shore, laughing and oblivious to the snapping sucking death he had so narrowly escaped, and as I envisioned a terrifying Hieronymus Bosch underwater hellscape, a blurred and shifting montage of snapping teeth and grasping suckers, an old dude sat down on the bench next to me. I didn’t recognize the man at first. He was bone-thin and wore a stocking cap and his face mask barely covered his chin because his nose was very large.

But then Commandeur Jacques Cousteau spoke in that familiar, gentle, uvular French voice that I knew from all those television specials. “What if, on a pleasant Oregon Coast day like this one, you paddled out, just past the breakers, stuck your head underwater, and then just listened for a minute. What would you hear?”

I could almost hear the rush and surge, the pulse of the sea, millions of gallons of water washing over sand and rock. “The heartbeat of the sea?”

“Exactly.” Cousteau nodded. “And if you strained your ears, you would also hear the roars and snarls and shrieks of predators and prey.” 

I was curious. “What does a Great White sound like? Do they growl like underwater pit bulls?”

The commander shook his head and narrowed his eyes. “They have a very deep, very cruel laugh.”

I couldn’t help myself. “Do they hum that “Jaws” music when they come after you?”

Cousteau glared at me. “I hate that movie.”

I quickly changed the subject. “You spent much of your life in the ocean.” Cousteau filmed three dozen episodes of “The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau.” I watched all of them when I was a kid, watched the commander go face-to-face with every razor-toothed and tentacled monster in the sea. “Weren’t you ever scared?”

The Ghost of Jacques Cousteau said something that really threw me: “Ask Kirk Tice about fear. He knows.”

Mr. Tice teaches English at Newport High. He is also a world-class surfer, one of the coolest people I’ve ever met — and the only person I’ve ever known that uses the words like “totally,” and “gnarly” in a sincere, completely non-ironic, way. (I can do a pretty fair imitation of Mr. Tice, but it usually lapses into a bad Jack Nicholson for some reason.)

“And tell Kirk I said hello.” Then Cousteau was gone.

I needed to split, too. But as I stood up and knocked back the last of my tea, another old man, this one alive and breathing, came up from the beach. He looked like a slightly older, dripping wet version of me, and he carried his surfboard like Moses carrying the Commandments. Was this finally the optimistic omen I’d been looking for?

Before I could ask this man, this Moses, this future me, if he knew that even now, a monster octopus is waiting to wrap pale suckers around his waist and then drag him under, screaming like Sam Kinison in divorce court, he held up a finger as if to fend off any question, and quoted lyrics from an old Kansas song: “Carry on my wayward son. There’ll be peace when you are done.”

I felt much better, but I was only halfway to enlightenment. I had to talk with Mr. Tice.

On the way to school, I followed a dark blue pickup truck that had a shark frostily airbrushed onto the tailgate. Tiger shark, if I’m not mistaken. I passed that coffee joint and saw that the darkened Civic was gone, now. The crows were gone, too. When I got to school I had just enough time to swing by Mr. Tice’s classroom.

You would think a surfer-teacher’s classroom would be all decked out like Don Ho’s rumpus room. (Whatever that is.) Mr. Tice is more of a minimalist, though, so the only thing in his room that reflects his passion for the sea is that famous Hokusai print, “Under the Wave Off Kanagawa,” hanging on the wall behind his desk.

I stood in the doorway, maintaining appropriate social distance, and mumble-shouted through my mask. “Sharks! Orcas! Giant Octopuses!”

Mr. Tice sat at his desk. Below his mask, his Posidon beard was still damp — because Kirk Tice goes surfing before school, after school, and pretty much whenever the sea calls to him. “Agate Beach, just a few days ago,” he said. “My son and I were out giving surf lessons to a local optometrist.” His eyes got wide. “My son saw it first: a churning swirl of bloody water just a hundred yards away. It was a Great White dismantling a seal!” And then he said it, true and sincere and slightly muffled. “Gnarly!”

For some reason I turned to see if there was a Great White in the hall, sneaking up on me, which looking back, was unlikely. “Have you gone back out there?”
Mr. Tice pointed at that Hokusai print behind him. “The Way of the Samurai, and of the surfer, can only be achieved when one truly accepts the inevitability of death.”

Whoa! I stared and rocked back a little. Because that’s how you react when your mind is blown. Everything fell into place and life made sense, so I didn’t ask Tice if he’d just made that up.

I saluted my wise surfer friend and hurried to my classroom to fire up my first-period Zoom class. And I vowed to be braver and to focus on living like a Samurai, like an Oregon surfer — because life can be so gnarly sometimes, and because I knew that there’ll be peace when I am done.

A few hours later, during a break between classes, Mr. Tice stuck his head in my doorway and said, “That optometrist never came back for his next lesson!”

Steve Sabatka teaches at Newport High School. His young adult novel, Mister Fishback’s Monster, is on sale at better bait shops, seafood joints and garage sales.