Walk across Great Highway toward the water from Noriega Street in the misnamed, terminally overcast Sunset district, peek over the sand dunes and witness the only break that ever scared the bejeezus out of me. The frigid juice of Ocean Beach on a big winter day rumbles with the roar of a felled redwood. On a good day, Noriega Street’s world-class beach-break forms up clean, but inconsistent swell.

No need for a line-up. Triangulation doesn’t help when you don’t know where the next peak will form. With no point break, changing wind conditions, and a shifting sand topography, the breaks are as fluid as the water that forms them.

Ocean Beach is not for the timid or weak.  The bone chilling water keeps most people out.  Its reputation as part of the “bloody triangle,” a wedge shaped, shark infested sliver of ocean real-estate spanning Monterey to the Bolinas Lagoon, is probably responsible for keeping the rest out.  But the real threat is the strong rip tides that can wear out the most capable swimmers.  This triple threat keeps the waters of Ocean Beach largely abandoned.  It is the solitude that attracts me.  It is my great escape. To enter the water at Ocean Beach is to enter a lonely place.  On a big day, with double over head swell, it is no place for the long-board, social-surfer crowd that litter Pacifica’s Linda Mar.

Surfing Ocean Beach is a collection of extreme adrenalin inducing experiences.  Growing up in So*Cal, I was unaware that surfing was not something that everybody did.  As I got older, I realized not only was surfing not part of the state of nature, but that the youthful magic of living in the moment slips away as you grow up. Surfing allows me to live for the moment and escape from the future. That early adventurous innocence, polluted by adult worries and concerns, is cleansed each time I surf.  When I stand up on the board and I carve down the face of a wave, it is the culmination of power, perception, experience and most of all, the realization of how insignificant I am.

On a good day Noriega Street is beautiful. I once almost got hit by a huge surfing sea lion who dropped in only a few feet from me — I can still picture his mouth gaping into a crude toothy smile coming right at me. The two sandbars that make up the underwater topography create big, clean surf conditions when O.B. gets going. The problem is that the inconsistency of the breaks requires you to be constantly aware of the conditions. To set up for each new peak, you have to swim some distance to get into position.

The absurdity of surfing Ocean Beach is in the attempt to gain mastery over that which you have no control.  Just getting past the spit of the first sand bar can be a drag.  One day, me and this other dude were the only two souls in the water. We tried for the better part of an hour to duck-dive our way past the white water and sandbar mini breaks. Finally, he turned to me and said in exasperation, “This is fuckin’ ridiculous.” “Goddam right,” I thought to myself. Ocean Beach can be brutally twisted with an eerie violence that I’ve experienced nowhere else.

In early January, I went out to Noriega Street. The conditions weren’t crazy. The surf was 6-8 feet, with occasional 10 foot faces. For the most part, the lines were clean, but occasionally the water turned inconsistent. I hadn’t been out since late October, and that was down in So*Cal. My body was weak. Making it out to the promised land, past the second sandbar break, to the place before the sinister green water tumbles down can seem like a mirage. When a break in the sets would appear, I would look in disbelief at the flat, placid looking waterscape. I’d start paddling like an Olympic swimmer when all of a sudden a magic wave would appear. The magic wave is that wave that materializes from nowhere, huge and positioned to break right on you. That’s when I start yelling obscenities out loud. “Fuck! Mother Fucker.” I am always amazed about how rapid and consistent the sets come — at a place where nothing else is consistent — to crash on me, as if to purposefully keep me from getting out.

In my weakened condition, my struggle to paddle out tired me prematurely. I’m accustomed to the conditions at Ocean Beach. I’ve been denied there before, and I’ve come to realize that when you don’t make it out within a reasonable time it just wasn’t meant to be. When the stinging salt of the spit causes your eyes to blur, like something approximating snow blindness, and you’re unable to focus on the next white water obstacle rumbling toward you, you know you are going to be denied access to the promised land. But on this January day, as I realized that I wasn’t going to make it out, I was unaware that I was being pulled southward, toward the Noriega Street Punch Bowl.  I was out in the water by myself.  I couldn’t make it out. And when I decided it was time to go in, I couldn’t make it back to shore. I’d been sucked into a topographical trap, between the first and second sand bars, out far in the killing zone. It was a crazy situation where I literally got sucked into a crucible of big, double overhead surf, polluted with the brown color of liquefied sand that resulted from previous crashing waves exploding onto the sandbar. The water looked like sudsy, filthy dish water.

I thought I was going to die.  Every time I stood face to face with another brutally ugly wave face, I would abandon my board, shoving it off to the side and dive under.  I’d get sucked under the liquid twists of Ocean Beach’s spin cycle.  I’d rough and tumble under water, swallowed in icy darkness.  I’d feel my leash snap tight and twist with the board, jerking me back, positioning me for another round.  I’d popped up only to face another assault.  I was getting sucker punched at the Noriega Street Punch Bowl. The punch is served up cold, and it had been spiked hard.

With a break in the swell, I mounted my board and started paddling toward shore.  I wasn’t making progress.  I looked back toward the horizon, to see another wave form up, and tried to utilize the energy from it to help push me back to shore.  But the waves, when not big enough to crush me, only formed up enough to crumble at the tip, but wouldn’t break. The waves would smack me as they crumbled, and then abandon me as they raced toward shore. The water chopped up. The wind shifted, and the chop formed a lot of white water. The process started all over again. Big wave faces crushing down with inconsolable anger.

Six or seven times in rapid succession I’d pop up, only to fill my lungs a couple of times and down again.  I was tired.  The cold was beginning to affect me.  I looked toward shore.  I was in trouble.  I could see several people on the sand dunes, looking down at me. One looked like the beach patrol. I started to panic inside.  As I flailed in the unforgiving winter water, I was trying to untangle myself from the surf I entered in order to escape from the very people I was now trying to get back to.

There had only been one other time that I was really afraid while surfing. As a kid, I sat in the water at Redondo Beach. The water was flat.  I saw two dorsal fins coming at me.  I panicked inside, remained motionless, and hoped for a wave to form. When one did, I paddled hard and rode it back to shore. I stumbled onto the beach, sat down and looked back to see two dolphins porpoising.

There were plenty of waves now, but none would carry me back to shore.  I was stuck in a rip tide.  I knew I had to swim parallel to shore to escape.  Weakened by exhaustion and cold, I unenthusiastically abandoned the shore and paddled south, attempting to climb out of the punch bowl. I paddled south for about twenty meters, and turned back toward shore.  I turned my head and looked back to see a large wave forming.  With everything I had left, I paddled my self made 6′1″ California thruster.  As if God himself had reached down and picked me up, the wave lifted me and threw me toward shore.  I’d made it.

Like San Francisco, Ocean Beach from a distance is deceptively beautiful.  Up close, it can be unpredictable, dangerous and ugly. Like the song of a siren inviting you to shipwreck against the rocks, each has been known to attract people to their own destruction. No one ever again sees those who have been swept away by Ocean Beach.  On this un-extraordinary day, I went surfing.  When I managed to stumble up onto that beach, I came away from the experience with a newly profound respect for the beach I’d surfed so many times before.