00016 · Degenerate Days
When my then-girlfriend and I graduated from college in 1990, we worked all summer to put away a little cash and purchase a 1979 Westfalia Volkswagen camper van. And at the end of summer, we began a months-long road trip around the American West.
Having our water and food and shelter instantly available opened us to new ways of traveling. We could simply pull off in any public land and be settled within seconds. If we had a lot of miles to make for the day, she’d continue to sleep in the back and I’d ramble the van an hour or two down the road. We’d make coffee and breakfast when the urge to awaken and eat struck. A good life.
One particular stay we called our Degenerate Days. By then we’d been on the road for a few months, and the carousel ride of landscapes and cities and adventures had become a bit dizzying. We were in somewhere in Washington or Oregon or California, making our way south along the coastal roads, when we pulled over to check out a strip of Pacific Beach. The highway was thirty feet to our left, the beach started right outside our door. The length of parking strip was filled with RVs and cars and vans. We liked our isolation, and we certainly weren’t going to stay here.
We took a walk around the beach, which was roughly one hundred yards from road to highway, and a half-mile long. The hum of traffic got swallowed by the roar of the ocean as you approached landfall. The surf here was vicious, never-ending stands of white crashing waves. You could hear the grind of pebbles and stones underneath—an infinite rock tumbler. No one dared step within 20 yards of the sloping edge into the sea.
The air was cool and misty. The beach had endless driftwood. “We could just start a fire, and then put it out before we find a campsite.”
We coaxed some wet wood to flame, and set more driftwood above it to dry and alight. We sat low in our camp chairs, poking the flames, watching the surf. The horizon held us, a flat line distinguished by the dark grey of the ocean and the light grey of the sky. A whisper came from the white noise of tires and engines and water and sea birds and hissing wood: “A beer would be good.”
We’d just discovered Henry Weinhard’s, the classic beer of Portland. I quickly drove to the store at the end of the beach, got a six pack and some chocolate covered peanuts, and got back quickly. The logs in the fire and my girlfriend hadn’t moved at all.
We opened our beers. We opened the peanuts. We were staying the night.
I made another beer run before the store closed at sunset.
In a few days, we would be off the road for a while, staying with her sister in Berkeley, and we’d have a real bed and shower and laundry and normal bathrooms. Her dad, an accountant with a big fat credit card, was going to fly out as well. He told us to be ready for an eating tour of San Francisco. We couldn’t wait for the break from the van.
The next morning, we rued our departure, but we had to keep moving to get south on time. Laying in the dim grey of the morning, we imagined what it would be like to spend an entire day at this beach. The thought delighted us.
“Let’s stay.” We were young kids figuring it all out, that all these expectations of us were just made up. Our freedoms made us giddy.
I offered to sacrifice myself to hours of nonstop driving: three long days on the road compressed into two brutal days, in order to get this one full day on the beach.
We got the fire going again, chocolate nuts and coffee for breakfast. When we finished our coffee, we cracked open a beer.
We always made sure to sweep out the van every night and morning. We’d skipped the last night, and we decided to skip this morning as well. Sand clung to everything, as every piece of fabric and metal was wet with condensation. An agreement was made that we would ignore the standards of civilized hygiene and cleanliness. The term “degenerate” was spoken, and it became a mantra.
That day was one long monochrome moment. Sunrise to sunset: fire, ocean, sky, surf, sand. Coffee, beer, and chocolate covered peanuts were our monastic sustenance. I have never paid more attention to the nuances of one view in my life. That frame of view seared into deep memory: a visio divina. We reached an animal state, perhaps the way a soaring vulture will hover and observe a landscape for hours.
By night, the fire was epic, as we were able to heap greater and larger sizes of driftwood without smothering the flames. We’d moved beyond language, and spoke to the universe with blinks of our eyes.
