Our apartment had ants. Food-covered dishes left in the sink overnight would be swarmed black in the morning. We were from Nebraska and didn’t know how to stop them from coming in. The three of us had been in North County San Diego for three months. My engineer roommates were flush with cash, but I was working at a Birkenstock store on the Coast Highway selling sandals to aging hippies and old ladies for minimum wage. “I’ve got this bunion?” a customer would ask. “Do you guys have anything to help me with that?”

I worked with three women: One toured with the psychedelic southern rockers Widespread Panic, one had also been a hippie but burned out completely, and another was a swinger who drove a green Volkswagen van, and also was a, well, that’s obvious. While the three of them would retire to the parking lot to hit the bong in the van, I would man the store. They slept off hangovers on the floor in the back room between the shelves of Birks, Keens, Danskos, Chacos and Tevas. They would repay me with surf time when the waves were good.

The girls didn’t like it when I played Elliott Smith on the CD player. “I like his voice, but it’s so sad,” the Swinger said to me, months before she would rub her breasts against my back in the storeroom under the guise of trying to put a box of shoes back on the shelf and ask if I wanted to join her in the bathroom.

My phone calls to a girl in Lincoln, Nebraska went out full of contradictions and hypocrisy I couldn’t help but commit. I was 23. Not a man. Obsessed with personal freedom and unwilling to say yes to anyone and mean it. I would have gnawed my own leg off to get out of the promises I made. The only courage I had was facing a 12-foot wave with a surfboard. Braver, and more dumb, if you consider at that point I had spent my entire life in a land-locked state and was now surfing winter swells. But any idiot can drown in the ocean. Being a decent person is much harder to learn.

~~~

My roommate and I had gone surfing after work. The waves were like silver silk draped over boulders. We weren’t very good but we were trying. And we couldn’t get enough. We would stay out until it was so dark all we could see was imagined Great White dorsal fins. That day, after realizing we were the last ones out, shark food, we went in and started drinking a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. When that was gone we walked the block to the Saloon.

The bar was populated with groups who stood together and only spoke to the people they came with. We played pool, not talking much, wanting to make friends but not knowing how. Living in a new state at such a prone age made all of us desperate for connection. We had gone from a college social network of hundreds to a handful of friends spread throughout Southern California and we were out of practice.

A guy on his own recruited my roommate for a pool partner. When it was their turn I went for another beer. I looked down the long wooden bar at all the faces I didn’t recognize, wanting to feel like I was part of something again. That I wasn’t just another guy who moved here for the weather. My phone vibrated. The Heiress. The 19-year-old daughter of an oil tycoon, she had come to San Diego to live with her brother, a professional polo player who rented a condo in Solana Beach.

~~~

I met a girl. Snowball in hell.

I had “No One Deserves It” written in Sharpie in big black letters on the wall over the desk in my bedroom. The Heiress saw it there and asked “What does that mean?” in a way that sounded defensive. I couldn’t explain it, but I knew it was exactly what would come between us. And I would be foolish enough to put that unexplainable thing there.

I developed a habit of hiding behind my writing. I wasn’t making enough money to keep up with my roommates or maintain the lifestyle I wanted so I tried to live simply. I sold sandals, surfed, sat behind my desk and wrote. I worked on the first draft of a novel listening to Arcade Fire and drinking $2 bottles of wine from Trader Joe’s. And this even before I started reading Bukowski. Thinking back on it now, it should have been enough. The Heiress would say things like “I really want to take to you Paris. I think you’ll love it. It would be really good for you.” I would laugh and she would look at me like “I’m offering to fly you to France. Why aren’t we already on our way to the airport?”

On the phone, the Poet would say things like “You remember what I tell you, but you don’t remember the things you tell me. How can we get anywhere if you can’t remember what you say?” People come into our lives and show us where we’re deficient. The Poet showed me I had embarrassing taste in music. She gave me mixed tapes at first, then, when expecting someone to have a tape player became unreasonable, mixed CDs. She had been listening to Elliott Smith since high school and rightly knew that, of all of his songs, the one that fit a mix that lacked a sad or a happy theme was “Independence Day” from XO. She put it on more than one tape for me.

When you’re young you make mistakes and people tell you not to worry. “You’re just a kid,” they say, “it won’t matter when you look back on it in 10 years.” What person with any type of working memory could ever give that advice? We don’t outlive our past. Everything matters. Lives don’t end and then simply begin again. The people who matter to you will always matter even if you do everything you can to get rid of them. We’re never truly free of other people.

It was a slow morning, quiet in the store, the faint odor of saltwater in the air. I was in the back re-organizing the Tevas when I heard the clang of the chimes on the front door. I went out and a nice-looking middle-aged lady walked to the counter. She asked for the store manager. They had arranged to discuss an ad package in the Del Mar weekly.

“I’ll tell her you came by,” I said.

As she turned to leave I asked “are you hiring reporters?”

“Buy an ad and we’ll see.”

~~~

Every wave is tidal. If you hang out long enough you’re going to get wet.

On October 21, 2003, the X song stopped halfway and the radio announcer cut in.

“I regret to inform you that we’ve just received word that the singer/songwriter Elliott Smith has died. Reports say from a self-inflicted stab wound. According to the police report, Smith was found dead in his L.A. home, allegedly having stabbed himself in the heart.”

I looked out over the racks of shoes, the foreground blurred, past the two customers — a waitress who worked at the Italian restaurant down the street and an obese man was getting fitted for the sandals his doctor had recommended for his diabetic feet — through the glass windows of the front door in the middle ground, to the thin strips of Pacific Ocean between the buildings. I managed to mutter “going out for a minute” and walked through the door. I needed the horizon to settle me.

As I crossed the Coast Highway, I passed the carwash with the classic ‘70s-era sign, the pair of blue ships converted into houses, and walked two more blocks until I was at the J Street lookout. Some days I went to that spot to check the surf — you could see the waves breaking at Swami’s to the south and D Street to the north—and that day the horizon worked the way I needed it to. A line of pelicans glided by from left to right, moving up and down over the water in a fluid agreement like a slowly cracking whip. I looked out west as far as I could and fixated on the point where the ocean ended and the sky began, all of America behind me, background history to my new life.

It was the Poet’s face that I saw in the clouds over the Pacific that day, that floated in front of me when I walked back to the shoe store and called the DJ at 94.9 and asked him to play “Between the Bars” and “Pitseleh.” The sad singer stabbing himself in the heart snapped me out of it. To take your hatred of yourself that far exceeded rationality. It was too much to comprehend.

~~~

An hour of white-knuckled-for-a-Nebraskan, stop-and-go freeway traffic into the center of San Diego and I was at the Whistlestop in North Park. I had pitched the Editor of the city’s new alternative weekly, Fahrenheit, a feature on Death Cab For Cutie, who were playing at the Casbah in a few days, and the Editor hadn’t responded. Fahrenheit was trying to unite the culture-hungry indie kids into a scene. They were tastemakers in all forms: music, fashion, art, and it was a chivalrous fight. San Diego has long been thought of as a city of stupefied sun-worshippers, but they were trying to wake everyone up. I knew the Editor would be at the bar for a company party, so I went looking for him.

When I found him sitting in the smokers’ hallway, he seemed uncomfortable with my aggressive approach at first. The tactic had some gall, I’ll admit that, but after talking a while he relented and gave me the assignment.

I did a job interview on the phone with the newspaper in Del Mar on a Monday. On a Tuesday I did an interview with Chris Walla, the guitarist for Death Cab. On Thursday the story ran with the headline “They Looked Like Giants” across six columns. I took the story to the Del Mar Times, dropped it off and went back to selling sandals.

The next Monday the phone rang. I got the job and had to be at work in a week. Looking at it now, it was a perfect gig. What better job could a beginning reporter ask for? A weekly deadline. Wide-ranging responsibilities, including photography and editorial writing. Every week I would walk down to the park that sat up on the cliffs overlooking the Pacific and interview five people about a current events issue. My commute took me seven miles up and down the Coast Highway, watching the surf break. I read “Ulysses” in my downtime.

I wrote for Fahrenheit on the side, trying to bring a little of what they were doing for the city to North County, which was an even tougher fight. Palm trees and 70-degrees on the beach most of the year doesn’t make people go seek art for solace.

~~~

I was sitting at a cafe in Del Mar interviewing a beautiful, young, rising, singer-songwriter. We were the same age and both had all of our mistakes and triumphs ahead of us. Even though she was born and raised in San Diego and surfed all the time she said could never sing about it. “Too cheesy,” she said.

Not me. For a young man from Nebraska, finding surfing was like finding religion. It was an entire universe I thought I would dedicate my life to. Something I never knew existed beyond the surf clothes I wore as a teenager and the Beach Boys songs I heard on the Oldies station while driving a pickup from farm to farm. Out in the country all I could tell was that surfing looked cool and conveyed a lifestyle of living somewhere warm. I had bought the culture lie at a young age. Around my freshman year of high school, like many kids from my part of the country, I started romanticizing beach life. It must be the snow and the winters that do it to us. Flip-flops, puka shell necklaces, Billabong and Rusty t-shirts, punk and ska band stickers on car windows — I wore these clothes and listened to the music through the summers and winters. It was a way of escaping to a vague idea of another place, another culture where no one had to scrape ice off of their car windows in below zero temperatures. Where everyone was tan, the girls all wore bikinis, and the fun never stopped. It could have been Florida, it could have been Hawaii or Costa Rica or Australia — anywhere with beaches and year-round warm weather.

That the Pacific Ocean was cold enough to require a wetsuit most of the year was the first crack in my dream California sand castle. The second fissure came when I learned that Californians thought people with tans were either too dumb to know the sun caused cancer, too vain to care, or obviously from another, colder, place and thereby had unknowingly branded themselves as a tourist or a foreigner. It didn’t take that long to learn Californians thought of themselves as different from the rest of the country. People whose parents or grandparents were often originally from those states with worse weather and geographical features but had believed themselves deserving of better so had left and never returned. Those who stayed in places like Nebraska had less ambition, lower standards, were of a different quality. Tougher, yes, maybe, but also lazier and dumber to suffer at the mercy of the weather and a poorer, less-educated populace. The third quake came when I met California Girls out at the bars and they said things like “I’ve met plenty of guys like you. You’re from the Midwest, or wherever, and you come out here for a couple of years and have some fun, then you leave. I’ve seen it happen a ton of times.” Added up, my sand castle couldn’t withstand the seismic events.

It quickly became apparent I’d never be a good surfer. There were seven-year-olds out on the break that were way ahead of me. That I could drive circles around them with a John Deere 4020 didn’t help much when I was getting out-positioned in the lineup every time. But the ocean was good exercise, and a day of poorly riding waves beat pretty much any other athletic activity I could afford. I didn’t care if I sucked. I didn’t know anyone out there and the ocean didn’t have an opinion.

After I’d been in California for half a year I came home for a wedding. It was November and I was tan, my hair bleached by the sun. I stood next to the bar at the reception, talking to some people I hadn’t seen since I moved. I felt like the love interest’s brother in A River Runs Through It, the one who comes back to Montana from California and has bogus stories about “riding the waves” with movie stars, the same guy Brad Pitt ditches in the woods when he gets too drunk to fish. Standing with a group at the wedding, out of the crowd came a guy my parents’ age who was born and raised in the country, angrily saying above the group, “you don’t know shit about surfing.” He was right, but I was too stubborn to concede that then.

That summer I surfed 45 days in a row, many days more than once. I wasn’t making enough money to live as close to the beach as I was living and the tires on my car were going bald. My bank account would go negative, then positive, then deeper negative, then shallower positive, and so on. I was hungry, but the ocean was free.

Sand coated the floormats of my car. A block of surf wax had melted on the console and gave the cabin an odor of synthetic grape. I wanted to identify with all of this somehow, to find a new way of living. The palm trees hadn’t lost their effect yet. There was a sense of pride driving down a highway lined with them. But, as I drove the Coast Highway to work, I still had a Mountain Dew habit from summers spent in a tractor.

~~~

Then, after about a year, just like the girl in the bar predicted, people started leaving. The Heiress went back to the oil fields of Texas. The friends I made at Fahrenheit moved north to Portland, Oregon. All I had was a manuscript and a car that still ran. I called my parents and asked them if I could come home to live on their farm and finish my book.

That same year I ran into other obstacles, other barriers. The beginning of what I now understand to be common in every life, that we experience a succession of rejections and that we are measured by how we let them damage us. How we survive, how we are diminished by failure and disappointment is the true measure of worth, of potential for success.

Where I once thought I was a rolling boulder, those first adulthood failures turned me into water welling up around an obstacle, building in impatience and frustration, until I diverted myself into an entirely new direction. Until I found another way to keep moving, to keep heeding the pulling of the earth to go farther. I packed up everything I had. Not much of any worth — books and a few clothes — left my surfboard with a friend and headed back east to the windswept Great Plains.

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Top image by Clark