Swamis to “Swamis” and My Movie

The documentary Annie Fergerson produced featuring me, old fat me surfing and philosophizing, is still available on Vimeo. You have to go to: https:/review/9855582/42dd5c63de or, if you’re a Vimeo person, Erwin_Final_240715 I know, it’s a bit of a hassle.

In trying to promote my novel, “Swamis,” as I wait for responses from the literary agents I have sent submissions to, I cannot help but wonder, “Why am I not in ‘Surfer’s Journal?’ I have art and eleven years of ‘realsurfers.net’ writings. There just have to be some gems in there.” SO, I set about to write something to send to them. Another submission, another attempt to describe my novel in less than 90,000 words. Here is what I came up with:

Swamis to “Swamis”

You are at Swamis Point. It’s 1969. Yes. Horizonal lines, energy in motion, beyond the kelp beds, are bending to match the shoreline, redirected and reshaped by the pull and drag of ancient reefs. As waves rise and wall up, peaks become more defined; steepening, feathering, braking, peeling across the almost-soft, fingered ledges. Your path paddling out along the shoulder of each incoming wave, is as close to the break as possible, always looking over your shoulder to check your lineup spot; that one palm tree for the inside peak, wherever the crowd is sitting for the outside peak. You are ready to spin and go if a rider on increasingly short equipment blows the takeoff, is too deep, slides out on a bottom turn, or oversteers on a cutback.

You have a front row seat of surfers dropping in and turning, crouched and driving across the first section. Longboarders are getting in early, going for fin-first takeoffs, side-stepping to the nose; pulling out on the shoulder or cutting back; juking and cruising, tucking into that calf high barrel on the inside inside.

When it’s your turn, you drop and drive and weave through the sections and other scrappers, would be shoulder hoppers. Approaching that final tube, arms out in a subtle celebration, your arch becomes a full body twist, shoulders to ankles. The fin breaks free. Your speed while side-slipping allows you to punch the nose into and through the wave. Your properly executed standing island pullout provides the perfect punctuation mark. Yes!

In surfing, in 1969, there were few qualities more important than style. Or none. Whatever else Swamis was or wasn’t, it was magical.

There was always a swell. The water was always warm. It was rarely blown out or crowded. It was magical. And there were, along with the witnesses and the dealers and the posers and burnouts and the liars, other storytellers in the parking lot, magicians spinning tales of epic days and mystic spots; magicians spinning images of even greater magic.

The view from the bluff, the balcony, the upper deck of a sometimes surf amphitheater, is almost unchanged: The point to the right, Boneyards just around it, the outside and inside peaks, the beachbreaks along the rip-rapped base of the bluff, Pipes, the curve of La Jolla in the distance.

The walls of the Self Realization Fellowship compound were there; brilliant white, crowned with gold lotus flowers. A dirt pullout just to the south of the parking lot entrance that served as a check out spot now has luxury homes, soundproofed, behind security-gated walls, squeezed between101and the bluff; millions spent for a view we got for free.

The Swamis parking lot was smaller. A green outhouse under the trees has long been replaced by the brick shower/bathroom facility. The wooden stairs, replaced twice since, had some unremembered number of steps; well over a hundred. It featured two main sections. The upper flight went straight down, perpendicular to the bluff. A landing, where the stairs made a ninety-degree turn, offered a from-the-shoulder, up-the-line view of the lineup. “Old men stop here” was carved into the waterside top rail.

My earliest memory of Swamis as a surfer is from 1965. Almost fourteen-years-old, I was doing the kook’s blind paddle for a wave someone else was, no doubt, on. Sorry.

Other images: Walking out to the point when one of a group of Orange County interlopers responded to a man claiming he’d surfed Swamis since 1949 with, “Then you should surf it… better.” Wailing over after school, only five locals out, and my friends from Fallbrook complaining that they couldn’t get a wave. “Well. I caught… some.” “Fuck you then!” Going out on a day with the tide still too high, beating the crowd for a while as the swell built. In my mind, I was in sync and wailing. Falling from a high line on an outside wave on a big day, whatever breath I had lost when I hit the trough; bouncing off the bottom, sucking in more foam than air when I reached the surface. Coughing, choking, swimming, going back out. Surfing, with various degrees of thrill and success, every day of the still-famous December 1969 swell.

1969. I graduated, not yet eighteen. My surf friends were moving on. The draft was coming. Vietnam was real. Surfboard design had gone radical. The completion of I-5 made San Diego’s North County commutable. Marijuana, grown in backyards and avocado orchards and purchased from friends of friends, was becoming a cash crop. Dirty money had to be made clean.

There was, perhaps, *“An acceptable level of corruption.”

A person can drive past Swamis and never realize it is on the map of a world they are not a part of and know little about. Yes, surfing represents freedom on TV commercials, unwaxed boards on shiny new cars. Beautiful, fit, underdressed surfers play the smiling outsider, the anti-nine-to-fiver if not antihero; too cool, too perfect. Mass marketed magic.

It is the magic, real or perceived, that pushed me from imagining and remembering to writing “Swamis,” my surf/detective/coming of age/mystery/romance novel. I had a story line: A surfer, involved in the drug trade, is murdered, burned next to the wall. I had a narrator: Half-Japanese son of a Detective with the County Sheriff’s Office. My age. I had his love interest: Surfer girl, her parents are involved in the trafficking and money laundering. Both main characters are damaged; both have been protected and shielded.

Sounds clichéd, huh?

I have written four versions. Not that I wanted to. I had to edit out the peripherals, narrow the scope and the timeline. I can, if asked, explain where each of the many characters in the novel came from. All are based on placing a real person I have, in my time, encountered, or combinations of people, into fictional situations. I can give you a backstory on any of them.

The narrator, Joseph Atsushi DeFreines, is not me. He does know what I knew and has chosen to not know things I could have known; particularly about the growing, processing, and selling of marijuana. I have three brothers with intimate knowledge of plays and players of that era. One brother, under threat, ran away from operations in Northern California. One turned to Jesus. One went to work for the Border Patrol and on to I.C.E.

It is the best imaginable coincidence that a Swami, like a detective, is a seeker of truth. I am still, while trying to sell the novel, holding on to as many characters as I can. I still have work for Joey and Julie, for Jumper Hayes and Gingerbread Fred, and others. Second novel- “Beacons?” Third- “Grandview?” Both spots are mentioned in a work in which I am still trying to capture the magic.

I mean recapture. Of course.

*The quote comes from San Diego County Sheriff’s Office Detective Joseph Jeremiah DeFreines, increasingly unable to control the corruption in his jurisdiction.

THE REASON I am posting this here is that I ran it past my friend, surfer/librarian KEITH DARROCK (and yes, the Port townsend Public Library does subscribe). He didn’t say he hated it, BUT, he said what I really need to do is talk about me. “ME?” Paraphrasing, it was, “Yeah, like examples of your art, some poetry, your video of you surfing; that’s what they have in the ‘Profile’ section.”

Keith is right, of course. I started writing about myself. It’s not working. The best self-recommendation I could come up with, for my being so consistently described as ‘a character,’ is that I fail, frequently, and keep trying. It is true in my art, my writing, my surfing, my work as a painter, my relationships with others.

So, yeah, I’ll come up with something. May as well put a couple of artsy things I’m proudest of: