At 5:45, the pulse of the day was already beginning to press against the thin canvas walls of the camper.  A few planes passed overhead.  There were none of the usual sounds associated with the morning:  the chirping of birds, the random cawing of a few crows, the German neighbor waxing his surfboard in the alley for twenty-five minutes before strapping it to his ten-speed bike.  On this morning, no one had locked their dog in the garage and allowed it to bark for the next five hours.  All was mostly still.

There’d been a dream involving a colleague from a past job.  He’d angered me to the point where I went pushing my way through a desk drawer to get at him, but now I couldn’t remember why.   Anxiety pushed me into a sitting position and I cursed.  It was like the first few days of the pandemic all over again.  I was desperate to escape, but getting away was no longer an option.  Huntington Beach had become my haunt.  I sat twenty-five yards from my mother’s cottage, next to the plum tree that had been planted over my father’s ashes.

My phone had stopped charging the night before and I hadn’t been able to transfer any photos to my laptop.  That was just wonderful.  After restarting it six or seven times it started charging again, but the laptop still wasn’t recognizing the phone.  I’d have to pick up another cable and hope that did the trick. 

On the camper table sat my father’s old ukulele.  The pouch on the case was big enough to stuff all my postcards, signs, a notebook, and an Anker Bluetooth speaker that I thought I might broadcast some of my quiet songs over, if the phone didn’t fail to charge and die before I even got the chance.   Things were not going particularly well, but when had they?  My first record, Ghost on the Roam, had sold zero copies and only led to poverty and disappointment when I’d released it twenty-five years ago, and here I was, getting ready to go out and celebrate that fact.

If there was one bright spot on the already unpromising day, it was that I had a new bike to ride down to the pier, a black cruiser, the Cruiser, if you will, that I’d spotted outside of Huntington Beach Pawn a few days earlier.  It was my fourth bike in the past two years and the timing could not have been better.  Only a week earlier, a spoke had sprung on the rear tire of the Muley, the Huffy bike which serves to tote my longboard around, and when I went to get it fixed, the cable to the gear shifter snapped, leaving it stuck in seventh gear.  

No bike is safe this close to the beach.  They all become living monuments to rust.  The Cruiser was still spotless and well-oiled, however, the right bike at the right time, about to have its own little moment in history.   I couldn’t wait to sail it into the day.

Not many people notice me, but the cashier at 7-Eleven, Hilda, from Guatemala, has been greeting me and calling me teacher for the past two years.  I’ve been unemployed for so long she assumes I’m retired.  She let me know that the new coffee cups were in and didn’t need sleeves.  They were done stocking sleeves.

Outside the store I saw two poltergeists I recognized from the pier, sizing up a bike that was locked to a street sign.  Ghost culture is bike culture at the beach.  Ghosts deal in bikes like cowboys deal in cattle.  They sell them, trade them, steal them, brand them.  I’d have to be extra careful with the Cruiser.  When the Muley had been brand-new someone had come along and stolen the seat, leaving their destroyed seat next to it, with the gel spilling out all over the sand.  At first, I thought it had just been vandalized, yet the seat post no longer fit the bike.   That took a long time to figure out.

With my coffee in one hand, I went cruising down Main Street, spotting another poltergeist I knew hiding out in front of Rocking Fig’s, facing the shop window, muttering incantations to himself.  During the pandemic they’d allowed some of the restaurants to put tables and doors outside, and now one block of Main Street remains a pedestrian zone, prohibiting bikes and skateboards.  I dragged a flip-flop to slow my bike to a crawl.

Sitting at the stoplight on PCH, I could see a blue welcome sign at the entrance of the pier.  Blue banners were strung up on the light poles, all the way to the end.  The sun was just now rising in the east, and outside of a few photographers, bustling to stake out the best positions on the south side of the pier, the morning was quiet and calm.  It wouldn’t stay that way for long.  It was the first day of the Van’s US Open of Surfing. 

My plan was to place myself right in the middle of the action.

Considering it was the first day of the Open, the lineup was pretty sparse when I reached the outside break, which was barely crumbling at that point.  The forecast for the weekend was small, 2 to 3 feet waves, with some heavy surf picking up on Monday and lasting the rest of the week, thanks to Hurricane Frank, which was presently marauding past the Panama Canal. 

I picked out a bench on the north side of the pier and then reached for my ukulele, deciding not to get out my signs or postcards, or even attempt to sing any songs that first day.  Rather, I would sit there and quietly pluck the uke, a more fitting tribute, perhaps, to a record that had attracted almost no attention, as well as a life that had mostly been spent in the shadows.

It was hard to believe it had been twenty-five years since we’d driven up to downtown Los Angeles to record Ghost on the Roam.  Although the producer had been in my graduating class at El Rancho High, I hadn’t known him or anyone else back then, since my family had only recently moved to California from North Dakota.  I’d never met the musicians he’d recruited to play on my record either.  The bass player was in a punk band from Newport Beach and the drummer played in a surf band from Fullerton.

We’d only had a few days to lay down the basic tracks and then nothing happened on the record for a long, long time.  At one point I’d been so desperate to see it finished that I’d snuck into the producer’s apartment complex and cornered him in his laundry room.  When it came time to master the project we weren’t even speaking, so I got ahold of the DAT tapes and put the artwork together on my own.

El Rancho High School is in Costa Mesa, close to Newport Beach.  That’s where all the popular, preppy kids went to party and hang out.  Since I didn’t understand any of them, and was full of anger and depression, Huntington was always the beach I headed to when I was looking to escape for the day.  I’d load up a backpack with four or five warm beers, a can of Skoal, and a few cassettes to crank up on my Walkman.  Then I’d jump on my orange Schwinn and get on the bike trail at Moon Park, invariably heading straight into the wind, the whole five miles to the sea.

At the river jetty, I’d head north and pedal, somehow still straight into the wind, until I reached the pier.  I knew nothing about Huntington Beach and its importance to the world of surfing.  It just seemed like a mellow place to hang out, with an arcade under the pier and a scattering of vans in the parking lot, smoke billowing from their tinted windows.  I’d sit drinking my beer on the beach, a rebel among rebels, beginning to bask in defiance and grandiosity, then go whooping down to the ocean, regardless of the season, for an unhinged session of redneck wave-stomping.

When it came time to shoot the album art for Ghost on the Roam, my brother Luke was living in Huntington, with a couple buddies at a house on Twelfth and Olive.  I’d brought along a white sheet with eye holes cut out of it, as well as a cowboy hat and my guitar case.  We shot a few rolls of me, walking up and down the beach in the sheet, but when it came time to select a picture for the front of the album, I chose one without it, just a black profile in the cowboy hat, with the sea in the background.

Since the producer and I had fallen out, I had no idea what to do with the CDs once I’d ordered a thousand of them and went to pick them up in ten big, heavy boxes.  This was in the days before the internet.  The only contact information in the CD jacket was for a mailbox in Costa Mesa, across from the Mesa Verde Center.  My summer job back then was driving big rigs in the San Joaquin Valley, so before heading back to Yuba City, I embarked on a West Coast tour for my record.

I remember getting a ten-dollar tip in Portland and setting up to play on the street a few blocks from the Pike Street Market in Seattle, but without any contacts or real gigs I was lucky to even have a few postcards waiting for me when I went to check my mailbox after the trip. 

When the truck driving season was over, I returned to downtown Los Angeles and moved into a hotel above a bar called the Rock and Roll Hole that I never would’ve known about if we hadn’t cut the record across the street.   There I met a bunch of musicians and, like most of them, considered myself lucky to get any gig I could, even if it meant playing for free in front of nobody.

The most memorable performance during that time was probably the midnight slot at Banana Crushers on the Sunset Strip on a Sunday night.  The only ones left after a long night of singer/songwriters were the soundman and the bartender, and when I decided to wrap up my set after a few songs so we could all get out of there early, received the only standing ovation of the night.

The fact is I never made a dime off of the record or any of the gigs, and to add insult to injury, still had about 850 CDs of that unloved record to cart around with me wherever I went.  Eventually, most of them ended up in a landfill. 

I’d come up with the title Ghost on the Roam, based on the nomadic lifestyle I’d been living in the ten years leading up to it, just me and my guitar, driving off in search of freedom in a five-hundred-dollar pickup truck, roaming the pine forests of the northwest alone, riding trains and buses across the country, heading up to Alaska to work the salmon season, moving as much and as often as possible, and if not possible, just bouncing off the walls. 

I was hoping when I made the record that it would give me a license to roam.  My idea was to try to get on the folk music circuit where I could travel, meet people, and make music as a way of life.  Instead, the world ignored that record and all the ones that came after it.  My response was to travel and just keep traveling.  I tore down fences and escaped from cages.  I left Los Angeles.  I left the United States.  I spent years in foreign countries, crossing oceans, on distant mountaintops, in humid jungles, and dark hotel rooms, gathering my powers. 

Perhaps, music had never been my destiny, but no one could keep me from wandering.  By now I truly was that ghost on the roam I’d once only sung about, that was a fact, but it wasn’t until I’d been totally broken and humiliated to the core by the pandemic that I discovered I wasn’t quite as alone, or unique, as I’d always felt.

A French couple walked past me, but didn’t glance over.  They were assessing the condition of the waves and it seemed safe to assume that either one or both of them were surfing in the preliminaries that weekend.  I didn’t have my signs or postcards out and wasn’t even going to pretend to be looking for tips.  No.  I just sat there and plucked a little tune about a man who returns to a city where the houses are the same but the faces have changed.  Did it matter that people couldn’t hear me or understand what I was trying to communicate?  Not one bit.  I just sat and played for the ocean and the sky.

Eventually, a face floated into focus, however, that recognized me and was coming towards me, smiling, all teeth, the top lip gone, shredded years ago, after colliding into the barnacles on a piling, possibly the one right below the bench I sat on.  I knew Jiminy from the Gathering.  His accident had made national news in 2016.  His friends had tramped a giant peace sign in the sand and filled his van with flowers, remembering him as a true innocent.  Even in his present dislocation, he seems able to maintain a permanent stoke.

I asked him how surf contests are judged, so I could follow along and make some sense out of the next nine days.  He explained that every surfer gets judged on their best two waves.  The top score on a wave is ten so the highest score possible is twenty.   The heats at the beginning are four surfers and the top two advance.  As they get closer to the finals, it’s just two surfers going head-to-head in a heat.  On the last day, only one remains.

A few minutes after Jiminy had stumbled off I spotted Lydia, also from the Gathering, in her black track suit, her fingernails clenched into her palms, her smile a determined grimace.  The rumor about her is that her son and some friends had decided to make a midnight swim around the pier a few years ago and, with his head down, he’d kept going when they reached the end of it, never to be seen again.  She’d been keeping her nightly vigil, tersely walking the graveyard shift, looking for clues.  Another morning had arrived and still no answers.

These days, it may seem like I know a lot of people in Huntington Beach, but the truth is almost everyone I know is a ghost.  I can only speculate why that might be, but am sure it has something to do with the seizure I experienced after arriving back from Vietnam during the height of the pandemic.  One moment I was talking on the phone with my sister, the next I was in the back of an ambulance.

Since then, things haven’t been the same.  My family set up a camper in my mother’s backyard that I’ve been staying in, but it would be hard to claim I’ve had much of a life.  All I do is surf, somehow never getting any better, ride a bike against the wind all day long, and go to the Gathering every morning at Tower 7.

After getting out of the hospital, I stayed in the camper for a long time, afraid that the neighbors would see me, afraid someone would accuse me of being a COVID super-spreader, since I’d been all over Indochina at the time the pandemic broke out.  The days were sixteen hours long and the crows would start cawing at five-thirty.  My nerves were shot.  Eventually, I started sneaking out the back gate at the first light of dawn and going for long walks, usually as far as the river jetty at Newport and back.

Although the beaches were largely deserted, as most of the country was under lockdown orders, there was one group I kept seeing at the base of Tower 7.  They would sit in a circle and seemed to be taking turns telling stories.  A few of them were getting a lot of laughs.  I was dying to know who they were and what they were up to, but was too disoriented and shy to approach them.

One morning, however, I reached the pier at the same time they were disbanding.  I hastened forward and was able to catch a few of them crossing the bike path.  They seemed to recognize me and were surprised I’d never met them.  How could I not have heard about the Gathering?  They’d been meeting for a few months now.  Did I think I was the only one of my kind?  Of course not.  I was right where I belonged.  They invited me to join them the next morning.

This morning I was going to be late.  The Open didn’t kick off until 7:35, and I wanted to be there to watch the first surfer catch the first wave of the contest.  Sitting on the bench, vacantly strumming, I was suddenly approached by an old man in a Hawaiian shirt, some kind of ukulele enthusiast wondering if I knew anything about the ukulele group that used to meet on the plaza every summer.  Funny he should ask.

The ukulele I was holding had once belonged to my father.  The summer after his stroke I’d gone with him to a ukulele class at the Senior Center.  The teacher, Big Island Bill, had recommended a ukulele shop on Gothard called Island Bizarre that we’d gone to check out.  My father bought me a ukulele and we began attending a Hawaiian music night together.  That was the same group that regularly met on the pier until the pandemic forced them to take a two-year hiatus.

Right before my father passed away, he’d given me his ukulele.  It had never really served him well, as his fingers were too thick to fit easily on the fretboard.  There’d been a magical connection when I’d picked it up, however, and in a short while it had become my main instrument.  The old man liked that story.

While we’d been talking, the southside of the pier had cleared out, leaving just four contestants in colored jerseys.  The announcer came over the PA, welcoming the world to beautiful Huntington Beach and first day of the Van’s US Open. 

Then it was 5..4..3..2..1.. and the contest was on.