I’m spending the summer after freshman year working in an old school surf shop in a small beach town in the South Bay, where I grew up. I work two days a week for minimum wage, and business varies— mostly slow in the afternoons, despite the droves of tourists who have discovered this idyllic pocket of suburban Los Angeles where my father, and his father, grew up.
This summer is particularly hot; the kind of heat where you are only ever half-comfortable submerged in the ocean’s soft waves, watching the menacing heat shimmer far away on the on the volleyball courts where players dance, hopping from side to side as their feet burn. The beach is a block down from the storefront where I stand sweating, and sometimes I close the shop for half an hour in the middle of the day to cool off in the water, compelled by my merciless allegiance to the power of those waves.
As a third-generation Angeleno, the beach culture is as ingrained in me as the surf-wax is pressed into the smooth fiberglass of the longboard hanging on the ceiling of our garage. Most of my childhood days, like those of my dad and my grandma, were spent on the beach. My twin sister and I would stay on the sand for hours, the air heavy with the scent of Coppertone, until our hair turned blonde and our skin turned brown. The salt, from hours of diving into the whitewash, dried and clung to our eyebrows and eyelashes like beads of early morning dew.
The shop sells only surf trunks. Their fabric is slippery and thick, practically indestructible with virtually no stretch—the brand, Birdwell, is from ‘61, and the store, with surfboards and photographs adorning the wall, is a time capsule. Stiff, unforgiving shorts don’t seem ideal for cutting into the clear Pacific on a hot day, but people love them. Customers come in and solemnly declare their love for the brand, the ocean and its magic. Countless stories spill from the mouths of every person who walks in, how they’d worn these all summer, every day, as a kid, in SoCal, the east coast, Biarritz. Their shared love for the water connects their separate stories and gives life to these blazing afternoons.
In the bantam town of Manhattan Beach, everyone knows each other, and my family, who has been here since the 30s, is at the center of it. My grandmother’s perpetually tanned skin and salty hair carry the stories of a now evolving city, and I’ve always called her the unofficial mayor. As a kid, she’d often walk me home from school along the bleached sidewalk near the water, and we’d make a game of counting how many familiar faces and friends she’d run into. The count seemed to be ever-increasing and constantly impressive, especially for the 7-year old I was, whose world, by comparison, felt hopelessly small. In its earliest days, the beach town was a ten-mile stretch of ocean frontage, a hotspot for volleyball and surfing, with a wooden pier on Marine Avenue. Downtown was once a hardware store, a movie theatre, drugstores, and a post office: a seaside town with no real plan, just the water, and a place to buy a five cent burger before falling into the sand. The pier’s still there, volleyball is ever-popular, and my grandmother still knows everyone, somehow. But it’s difficult to ignore the inevitable changes the small town has gone through in even my lifetime here, as tourists come from everywhere, and coffee chains, designer boutiques, and real estate offices replace local storefronts and icons. In the past twenty years it’s become a destination for professional volleyball tournaments, fine dining, and designer shopping. Manhattan Beach feels less and less like our little secret, where waves and boardshorts rule- the only worry ever really being when we’ll get down to the water where the pier stands grounding the city.
It isn’t surprising when a woman, Kerry, walks into the store and says she knows who I am from photos she’s seen: the granddaughter of Rose, the daughter of Matt. Another familiar face, a friend my grandma would recognize if we still walked the journey from school to home together. We talk story for several too-hot hours, both of us standing huddled in the doorway, her passionate words like colored ink splashing onto the pages of a simpler city I have never quite known like she has. Her brother was my father’s childhood best friend, the three of them inseparable. Their days were an endless cycle of riding bikes in a circuit, home to school to the beach, ending at the volleyball court on Marine Street to meet my grandparents with a bucket of KFC, before getting one last swim in before sunset.
I have heard stories of Manhattan Beach in the 60’s before—a much more laissez-faire vibe than today. My father shares memories of Birdwell-clad surfing and broken-armed skateboarding, stories of proms in white polyester jackets, snippets of college life paired with a diet of M&Ms. But Kerry’s stories and passion surprise me. She moved away from the South Bay before even entering the fifth grade, to somewhere up North, Sacramento maybe. Yet she expresses a love for this place in a way I don’t usually hear, even from my grandmother who’s been here for almost 70 years. She feels a magic even more defined than when she lived here years ago—a love for the city, a fire fed by nostalgia and longing, a spell she cannot shake, despite the changes she’s seen. I was five years old when my parents told me the sand crabs had left on vacation to Hawaii so that I wouldn’t be afraid to get in the water. Our conversation reminds me of my parents’ white lie, and I pinpoint it as the moment I too began feeling the magic of this place, and fell in love with the water, the sand, the beach.
It was easy to believe that the magic of this town had left when new shops moved in and parking became impossible to find. After all, it wasn’t the beach my family had known, and I was ready to go, without a second thought about leaving behind the gritty sand and salty spray of the ocean. But I’ve come to know that the magic of this place is real and true. Like a siren’s song luring wayward sailors, it is strong, especially when I have left and come back again. When I first landed, I drove south from LAX on Pacific Coast Highway, heading home after my first year away. The ocean and its briny scent beckoned to my right, the vast highway dotted with glowing taillights stretched before me. The air was warm and heavy with that special midnight fog, and I took a sharp right down Marine, heading for the Pacific.
by Camille Jacobson ’19
