December 1994 was the best month of surf I’ve ever seen at Ocean Beach. It was double-triple overhead+ for three weeks straight with consistent, moderate offshores and well-groomed sandbars. Mavericks was breaking for much of that month too. The last week of that three-week stretch was particularly notable: Monday was “Jay Day” at Mavs, with Santa Cruz teen charger Jay Moriarty taking gas on a giant wave that made the cover of the New York Times magazine; and Wednesday was huge and perfect everywhere.
It all went south on Friday. I was surfing Sloat at Ocean Beach with one or two other people in the early afternoon, and it was still surfable, but not quite as good as it had been. The wind was light, it was still sunny and semi-glassy, but it felt like there was a storm brewing, or a rumbling off in the distance. Nothing you could put your finger on, just a vague impending shift. I remember feeling like I was late for something, like a party or holiday celebration. Then I caught a weird one that sort of doubled up and sectioned off, so when I got to the bottom of the wave, I straightened out and kicked my board up and out of harm’s way as I went under. I didn’t get ragdolled, but when I came up, my leash had broken, so I started the long, moderately stressful swim in. (There are not usually any real channels at Ocean Beach.) When I got to the beach, my board was washed up right in front of the parking lot, but when I went to pull my car key out of the leash pocket, I found that the key had broken into three pieces! Not in half, but into three separate pieces.
Luckily I had a Hide-a-Key stashed inside my car’s wheel well, so was able to get in. By that time it was late afternoon. As I was changing out of my wetsuit, someone rolled up to me and said, “hey did you hear? Mark Foo just died at Mavericks.”
Later that night, I was walking my dog through our neighborhood park just like I always did, along our normal route and everything. And he suddenly disappeared, something he’d never done before. I couldn’t find him, so I went home. An hour or so later he was at the front door. I know dogs sometimes do this kind of thing, but this one never had. And he only ever did it one more time — right before he died.
That night, the weather turned crappy, and so did the surf. We had stormy, crappy, rainy conditions for two months and the waves were pretty bad for the next year or so too. Mark Foo died (and my car key snapped in three) near the inflection point between two completely different phases. I don’t mean to suggest anything religious or mystical here, but I it would be the height of arrogance to think that we puny humans could never be nudged, tweaked, or caught inside patterns that are bigger than us, or more complicated than we can see.
On that note, another Ocean Beach local told me that he hit and killed a deer on Highway 1 at almost exactly the same time that my dog ran away (i.e. shortly after Mark Foo died and my key snapped into 3 pieces). Which was also something that had never happened to him before. Just saying.
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