Pacific Beach, California

We had planned on living in the Gaslamp Quarter of San Diego for a full month, but after some unseemly moments on our block, decided to pursue an early exit strategy. Thanks to very accommodating Airbnb hosts, who I think understood that the devastation of Covid had truly changed their beloved block for the worse, we were able to bow out early without losing any money. This did, however, put us in the position we had worked hard to avoid: a last minute search for lodging. 

What was available in Pacific Beach within a one week timeline were short term vacation rentals rather than longer-stay Airbnbs. The kind of rentals that fill the place with the bare essentials and send a cleaner in to work as quickly as possible, for as little as possible. In that moment, I didn’t care. We’d been side stepping stoop squatters every evening in Gaslamp and, one night, Stefan found himself stuck inside the apartment building when a homeless man threw food at the glass door, an invitation to leave him the f* alone on the stoop. When Stef had to sneak out of the garage entrance to let Hazel relieve herself, we agreed to move forward rather blindly to a vacation rental.

Found Time

Thus, we arrived to Pacific Beach about ten days earlier than expected, giving us a full six weeks to live there. We had been on the road for six weeks by that time, with Gaslamp hardly feeling like a comfortable resting place, and so the idea of a longer term stay in this ocean-side town hugged my heart like a kid getting off the school bus. I rejoiced in routine, heading to the grocery store, walking Hazel at the same time each day, and reorganizing our things for this summer-time stay. Stefan worked during the day from a more comfortable spot at the dining table and I split my time between cooking and other life logistics and my new copywriting project. We resolved to eat better, move more, and maybe, just maybe, learn to surf. Bare essentials in the kitchen were plenty to sauté veggies and bake fish as we tried a no-meat week. Stefan barely noticed the shift; I was embarrassingly in pain, which proved just how much I needed to try this pescatarian diet. Life in this vacation rental didn’t have the comforts of home per se, but the neighborhood of North Pacific beach is quiet, friendly, clean, and smelled like the brine of the ocean. I was happy and life was sweet.

On our second night at the vacation rental, we sat on the front patio to enjoy baked salmon with couscous and a mediterrean side salad. The scenery had changed so much during our trip, my eyes started to feel like there was a green screen in front of me and someone was flipping through different slides of film. Here, sky-high palm trees reached up, dotting the block in ten foot increments like shaggy haired Dr. Suess characters. The sky was always clear, a periwinkle blue with passing wisps of clouds. The sameness of it all made time seem less marked. On the East Coast, a person wakes up, checks the weather, peeks through the curtain at the day, and decides what clothes to put on. Here in PB, weather was simply not a factor. The air felt like my skin, neither here nor there. Each day felt a little bit chilly and wet in the morning, bright and warm by early afternoon, with a dry, clear sky until sunset. Evenings were comfortable in those August weeks. With fewer trees and high buildings above, the moon became a marker of time. Six weeks in PB, we’d see the moon wax and wane one and half cycles. Each night, it grew a touch fuller, a pregnant woman’s belly against the midnight blue sky, and later, thinned out, an orange rind atop an Old Fashioned cocktail.

The moon was bright and full when we sat on the patio eating our salmon and couscous. My eyes were facing Stefan towards the house, when I noticed small, dark, round figures streaming down the side of the stucco house in ones and twos. Very quick, almost falling. I looked up at the palm trees surrounding the house. Were they dropping seeds? I sipped my Sauvignon Blanc. Stefan and I breathed the salty air deeply and chatted. Processing so much movement together became an intimate bonding experience in our young marriage. To see so much with someone else and walk away with so many of the same perceptions and so many different; to realize your own vantage point can be interlinked and yet distinct from another. Another beetle — maybe they were beetles? — dropped down the house. We went inside. One ran across the floor. I did the dishes. I brushed my teeth. I got ready for bed, pulling the window curtains closed in the bedroom. One jumped onto my shoulder.

Cockroaches.

Dozens.

If you can believe it, I didn’t care. I had been so uncomfortable in Gaslamp, so unsure of what might happen at any given corner or turn, that I did not care about the cockroaches here in PB. When one landed on my shoulder, I yelped, killed it, and then went to bed. Stefan, however, was disgusted. He hadn’t really been freaked out in Gaslamp. He’d lived in San Francisco, where the same type of gritty block was commonplace in some neighborhoods. He took Hazel out late each night and wasn’t stressed about it. We really left early because of me. But here, with a cockroach sneaking out of the fireplace, one hiding beneath the bathroom vanity, one in the bottom of the kitchen garbage can, and one, yeah, hopping onto my shoulder, he was disgusted. He was crawling with them. He was livid with this rental company, uncaring and unapologetic. He got on his hands and knees and scoured every inch of the place, finding food and trash underneath the couch. The house had merely been surface cleaned before our arrival.

Stefan couldn’t wait until the rental was over. He barely slept. I slept like a baby, the window curtain flowing smoothly in the cool night air, the lapping waves of the ocean lightly audible through the screen.

In no time, we were moving again, this time to our pre-booked, longer term Airbnb — “Carla’s Casita, 3 Blocks from Ocean” — which just happened to be across the street from our vacation rental. It was so close that we couldn’t decide whether to pack everything into the car and drive it over or just drag our things piece by piece across the street. Check out was at 11 a.m., check in not until 3 p.m., so we resolved to pack the car and be Pacific Beach nomads for four hours.

Luckily, by then, we had come to know and love the little town. Our perfect block on Wilbur Avenue ran East-West within a large grid of streets, almost all quiet and residential with a house on each quarter acre. West of us, Wilbur Ave. dipped down and curved until, not even three blocks down, it simply loped into a bluff and then became a beach. We could walk to the ocean in five minutes time. These waterfront homes and rentals were more grand, but to the east of Carla’s Spanish bungalow, away from the water, each block became more full with modest family homes, eventually reaching a community park with basketball and tennis courts and Pacific Beach Middle School. Along the way east was Cass Street, the heart of North PB. A row of businesses running five blocks long North-South create a sweet, walkable community of cafes, shops, restaurants, small businesses, and our favorite spot, an outdoor gym, which we joined for the month.

Don’t get mad, get fit

PB inhabitants range in age, but most are in their twenties or thirties, love to hang out at the beach, value their work-life balance, and party hard on the weekends. Stefan and I kept promising each other that we’d make it to the bars on the “fratty” south side of town tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow. We kept blowing the candle out for bed too early to make it. We didn’t really care. We would, however, rise and shine for a morning coffee at Java Earth, the local coffee shop, where remote workers sip and type on their laptops under the shady canopy. Friends in work out gear, totally ubiquitous in PB and California in general, grab breakfast together after a class. Everyone was slowed down and pretty happy, a supercharged, seismic shift from the grind of New York. We were unwinding with every face full of sun and came to feel out of place for only one reason: everyone was in shape. We were less than, as the English say, “mad fit”.

It was time to get in shape. We were astounded by this little gym in the center of town, where, from our iced coffee & iced tea dates at the cafe, we could see people working out on the rooftop across the street. Treadmills, bikes, and barbells sat in view with joggers and lifters doing their thing at all times of the day. We checked it out. A small entrance area branched off to the right and to the left. To the right was a yoga studio crafted from an old garage, the door always lifted, creating essentially an outdoor space. To the left was a flight of stairs that wound up to a rooftop. Up on the roof, we stood six blocks back from the ocean, high enough to see the water. Treadmills and bikes faced the ocean view. This was SoCal, baby. What we couldn’t see from the cafe was everything populating the center of the gym, a large turf area with myriad accouterments: kettle bells, dumbbells, bands and blocks, bosu balls, mats, foam sliders and a few TRX. The heart of the gym was here, where, three times a day, six days a week, a trainer led a circuit class to a small group. The proprietor, Katie “YaGirl” Cardozo, wrote the programming. We first met her moniker, YaGirl, on the schedule with a scrunched, quizzical brow — but then we took a class.

Katie is a spindly, short-haired goofball; she is light-hearted, exacting in her coaching, and tireless in her enthusiasm. “YaGirl is here to push you!” She’d yell and smile as we sweated through ten sloppy burpees in our first week there. “YaGirl won’t let you down!” What seemed like odd branding soon became a hilarious tactic of levity; every time she yelled about herself in the third person, we laughed through our sweat, through our struggle, and class became that much easier. We got to know Katie ‘YaGirl’ and a top trainer, Lauren, and I now find that I miss them, no one here to push me but myself (blerg).

We also got to know our fellow gym goers, as it was the same group of about fifteen people who cycled through the 6 o’clock class each day, all wrapping up the work day in their home offices (couches, bedrooms, kitchens) and jogging down just in time for the class, as we were. We met Chelsea, Victoria, Lynn, Michael, Rakin, Ariana, Allie, and a woman about eighty years old who worked out harder than anyone. She asked each of our names and bossed us around some — “Grab me that towel, will ya?”, “Hey, hey, you can’t leave before you stretch!” — but always moving onto to the next matter at hand before mentioning her own name. These people became pals, people who, had we stayed there longer, we might have invited to a housewarming party. When Allie went on vacation to Greece to visit her long-distance boyfriend, we asked her how the trip was when she returned. We learned that Chelsea had a bum knee and that Lauren had almost swam Division 1 in college, but ended up losing her scholarship. It was a month of getting stronger and doing so with community; it had been a long time since either Stefan or I had had that feeling — health first, in community — and it felt damn good. Moves that were hard for him were easy for me, and vice versa. Seems like our bodies are built squarely opposite one another, an upper-abdomen crunch no problem for me, where he grinds through effort; mountain climbers nimbly defeated by him where I basically end up wobbling on the ground (you can laugh, it’s okay). Stamina, stability, and agility improved for us both. His abs got tougher and muscles in my shoulders finally realized they existed. As health and fitness are a serious goal we share this year, PB Fitness was beyond a gym, it was a supportive, motivating, and fun place to work out.

Sinners, saints, and surfers

And it’s a good thing that we did, because three weeks in to our stay in PB, we tackled the mother-load of physical output: surfing. San Diego Surf School was a group of experienced surfers who offered wet suits, big ol’ foam boards, and lessons to novices. On an uncharacteristically overcast day, we met Brooks on the beach for our lesson. He was mad fit. All of the serious surfers were, which told us something about how challenging this activity might be. Brooks was an East Coast native and had lived and worked in New York for many years as a corporate salesman.

“One day, I just realized how I burnt out I was” he explained to us, a fully-embodied caricature of The California surf instructor, “and I decided to call it. Moved out here and haven’t looked back since.” Brooks was golden tan with a thick slab of sunblock across his nose. His sun-kissed brown hair stuck out of his cap. He took us through the basics on the beach. Imagine us in full-body wet suits, laying on massive foam surf boards. These were double the size of a cool guy surf board and had rounded edges. We laid on our bellies. “Paddle paddle paddle,” Brooks said. We brushed the sand with our finger tips. “Use the shoulders. Push your hands all the way through, passed the hip. There you go.” I was already out of breath and couldn’t help but laugh at myself. My lunch sat uncomfortably in my smushed tummy.

We practiced popping up, bringing our bodies into plank position, dragging the front foot forward into a runner’s kneel, and then — just like that — pop! Up. “No no no,” Brooks said to me. “You’re skipping a step.” I wasn’t planting my foot for that brief kneel but moving from plank to standing in one unstable motion. Rocking on my feet, I looked like a kid at Ron Jon’s, pretending to surf inside of a fake wave. We practiced until there was a touch of fluidity and muscle memory in the movement, then headed out into the ocean. PB is a wondrous place to learn to surf, the ocean floor is all sand, no rocks; the gradient to depth is gradual; the waves are low and long and break slowly on most days. Brooks warned us of the only real danger in the water, sting rays just under the sand which will flip and bite if stepped on. Glide through the water, he advised, shuffling, shuffling, not stomping. Shuffling through ocean currents and waves takes an abdominal girdle that is tightly knit, engaged as a flat board to resist the movement of the water. I shuffled for a bit, lost steam, and stomped my way out with a nervous little jerk each time my foot slammed the sand. I had to laugh at myself once again. We found the wave break and Brooks steadied himself for his job to really begin. He’d stand in the waves for forty-five minutes, stabilizing our boards and pushing us off into a breaking wave. This support allowed us to focus on the pop up rather than the paddle. I took my first wave.

I can’t remember whether I got it or not, there’d be so many more in that lesson and in the subsequent five Fridays that we spent surfing on our own, renting boards and wet suits from SD Surf School and dragging our fitter and fitter butts into the sea. We did catch some waves that first day, at some point. “Woo hoo!” we’d hear from Brooks. What a pal. The feeling of catching one is a hopeful feeling, like in elementary school when you walked into the classroom on Valentine’s Day and you weren’t sure exactly what would happen but you knew, for certain, that there would be chocolate, that your friend or your teacher or maybe, just maybe your little crush would give you a heart-shaped box of chocolates. That kind of hope. The kind when you wake up for an early morning flight and it’s still dark out and you’re groggy when your alarm goes off but you also feel your heart lift a little — hopeful, excited, a little nervous — and you hop out of bed to get going. That kind of hope.

Look Ma, No Hands

You pop up, your hands and feet lifting from the wet water into the dry air and the wind that you are creating, that the wave is pushing you forward to create, moves against your wet skin and blows the water off. The wave lifts you up and then all of sudden forward and maybe in that moment you have what it takes to stay stable or maybe, you don’t. It’s pretty fun either way, at least here, where the bottom is all sand and you’re likely not to hit it anyway. If you catch the wave, the ride feels like the last days of school, the last chapter of a good book, or the last pour of wine from the bottle. If you catch it, if you manage not to dip and flip (copyrighted), you can fly. You are the water and you are headed home, to shore. Stefan and I caught one “party wave”, riding it together. Because we ride opposite one another, him ‘regular’ (dominant foot forward) and me ‘goofy’ (non-dominant foot forward), we’re able to ride a wave looking at one another. We caught one of many tries and, gliding with smiles, I shot him a ‘hang loose’ with a laugh. I have never been so cool as that moment, hopefully someday will be so cool again, and I will not go to my grave until my children andgrandchildren revel in the coolness of that moment through my stories. We bailed before the water became too shallow, victorious as we hit the water.

Surfing for about two hours the following five Fridays, we became incrementally more skilled, popping up faster, paddling with more force and ease, and even graduating to (slightly) more sleek boards. On our fourth time out, the sun was high and the waves were bigger; three, four feet. We were catching enough waves that we had to fight more often to get back out, and noticed that the more experienced surfers bailed long before they rode all the way in. The trek back was exhausting. Resisting, resisting against tides, currents, the weight of water. The bigger the waves, the more you get tossed around on your way back out. A wave comes and you press down on the back of the board, like you’re playing seesaw with the ocean. Better surfers with smaller boards dip under the waves like birds, but beginner boards are too big and buoyant for that — up and over, you must. The board goes up, over, and you are right behind it, face full of crashing wave. White wash in the eyes, the nose, the mouth if you lose your wits for a moment. You are beholden to the waves and your board and you better just keep going if you want another ride. We fought through the afternoon and caught some epic rides, hooting and hollering in glory which didn’t seem in line with surfer etiquette but was entirely involuntary every time it happened. We caught some epic wipe outs, too. The sleeker boards meant that dropping from the crest to the break was a much finer maneuver, one that we certainly hadn’t mastered. Dip and slip and flip and tumble. Lean back, lean back, lean back! You tell yourself, too slowly. The nose dips. The hopeful movement of down then forward becomes down and — whoop! — you hit the water, feel the board tug your ankle with the breaking of the wave, and then tumble like clothes in the dryer in the swell of the water. Your feet or face or hands find the bottom or the top and at some point, you feel air on your skin. Deep breath. I came up like this at one point during this fourth time out to find a massive, biggest-of-the-day wave headed for me. Six feet. There’s only one way through this, I thought. You can catch it or let it pummel you, but either way, this is happening right now. Before I could even collect myself, I was back on the board on my belly, paddling, paddling, and I caught it. I flew into shore. Brooks had said, the less you think, the better you are. Turn off your brain.

The surfer attitude is no attitude at all, but a trusting meditation that fear will not serve you.

Pacific Beach was all of these things. Community, water and waves, sun every day, the waxing and waning of the moon, lifting kettle bells, dropping into squats, planks, push ups. Writing and working, cooking in Carla’s kitchen, and making some friends. There’s more to tell about those friends we made, the food we ate, and the visitors who came to stay in our little Spanish bungalow by the sea.

More to come!