The beach is the only frontier where the living is easy. At the seashore, you can enjoy a high level of civilized comfort next to an immense wilderness. The ocean stretches before us with its empty illusion of freedom, but step into it carelessly, and you can die. It is unforgiving of our mistakes. It is the most dangerous thing on the planet. Yet we live beside our oceans in ease and contentment. In San Francisco, we can even forget that the abyss is at our doorstep. Here is the best civilization has on hand, just steps away from a wilderness that takes up half the planet.
Wade into the surf at Ocean Beach in San Francisco and you are at the mercy of the wild. Only surfers and a few fly fishers brave this oceanfront with the intention of actually going in the water. And unlike surfers, fly fishers won’t be going in very far. Not if they wish to go on living. This is the most treacherous urban beach in the country. Swimming is forbidden — the surf too strong, the water frigid, and riptides lethal. If you are fly fishing, you will have it all to yourself.
But you won’t be alone. A lot of the California coast is empty and open to anybody. A lot of it is urban and open to everybody. At Ocean Beach, there will be plenty of joggers, strollers, and dogs running off-leash. A metropolitan beach is a marginal zone where the social rules tend to be lax. Naughtiness can turn an urban beach into a kind of Coney Island. Think of sailors and dames and the band playing “In the Mood.” Playland at the Beach, a ten-acre amusement park across the Great Highway from Ocean Beach, once lent a touch of squalor to the strand before it closed down. The amusement piers and boardwalks of seaside resorts, with their cheesy arcades and mirrored funhouses, often denote the extreme margins of society. Think of Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock or HBO’s Boardwalk Empire. You can pull stuff on the waterfront that you might not get away with a little farther inland.
While some go to the shore to indulge in wanton behavior, others are there for the mystical union of sea and sky. Ocean Beach is the raw edge of what used to be called the Outside Lands. That was the name given to the western half of San Francisco when it was still covered in sand dunes and thought to be completely uninhabitable. Except for its beachfront, nowadays, the Outside Lands are called “the Avenues” and are crammed with houses and apartment buildings standing shoulder to shoulder. But the ocean’s edge remains au naturel — raw and naked as it ever was.
There is even a stretch of oceanfront in San Francisco where you can forget you are in a dense urban area, impossible as that may seem. Fort Funston stands at the extreme southwestern end of the city, right where Ocean Beach terminates at some bluffs. With the sea cliffs at your back, the buildings and the streets disappear, and there’s nothing in front of you but a blue wilderness stretching all the way to Asia.
Catching fish in the surf on fly tackle in this unruly ocean can seem overwhelming at first. The Pacific can leave fly fishers dumbfounded and wondering why they didn’t stay home. The key to getting away with this in the rough surf at Ocean Beach or Fort Funston is to know when wind and water conditions will allow it. And to understand that this kind of fishing isn’t exactly relaxing, if that’s what you’re after.
My preferred beach is right below the fort, a former harbor defense installation perched on bluffs two hundred feet above the Pacific breakers. Fort Funston was built to withstand an invasion that never came. It’s my go-to beach when I want to escape my daily routine. (I like everything about writing except the paperwork.) The artillery batteries have been beaten into plowshares, and the windswept headlands are now part of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area. Hiking trails crisscross the bluffs, a part of the California Coastal Trail. These are just about the last remnants of the dunes that once covered the Outside Lands. Ice plant clings to sandy soil, there are marine fossils in the rocks, and in springtime, a colony of bank swallows nests in the sandstone cliffs.
To get there from my apartment in the fogbound Richmond District out in the Avenues, I take Geary Boulevard west to Sloat and follow it straight down to the historic Cliff House at the ocean. Then I swing south along the Great Highway that parallels Ocean Beach for four miles. I pass on my left the two windmills that bookend the northern and southern boundaries of Golden Gate Park. Here is the countryside inside the city. Coyotes are denning and hunting in Golden Gate Park. They slink around my neighborhood at night unseen. For all I know, one is drinking out of my toilet bowl. Nature is the gift that keeps on giving.
I drive past the stucco sprawl of the Sunset District, the city’s largest and least charming neighborhood. A wave of tract homes rolls hopelessly toward the sea. The developer Henry Doelger birthed a million identical floor plans out in the Avenues. His ticky-tacky sprawl spreads all the way from the Sunset District into Daly City. He inspired the hit single “Little Boxes” sung by Pete Seeger. Herb Caen called this neighborhood “the White Cliffs of Doelger.”
The flatness of Ocean Beach peters out right where the sea bluffs rise. The Great Highway becomes Skyline Boulevard. Ignoring a sign for Fort Funston at the traffic light at John Muir Drive, I drive on to a second sign for the fort and turn right onto an access road that takes me straight to a parking lot high above a sea bluff.
The view from up here is like something out of a Robinson Jeffers poem. It’s all hawk and rock and grand vistas out to sea. The headlands are visible from Point Reyes down to Pacifica. The ocean is a blue eye staring at the universe. Below me are miles of fishable beach. Ocean Beach remains crowded, as usual, but the shoreline where San Mateo County begins looks largely deserted. I know in which direction I’ll be heading — and it won’t be toward humanity. I don’t dig the Anthropocene any more than Robinson Jeffers did. “I’d sooner, except the penalties, kill a man than a hawk,” wrote Jeffers, our last clear-thinking poet.
Changing into waders and joining my fly rod at the ferrules, I check the windsocks that are flapping on the wooden paragliding platform. I figure I’ll get in at least a few hours before the onshore winds pick up.
Two hundred feet below me is a quarter mile of beach that lies directly under the fort’s cliffs. To the south, I see Mussel Rock, a sea stack two hundred feet offshore of Daly City, where the San Andreas Fault heads into the ocean before emerging again at Bolinas, a mesa visible to the north in Marin County. The epicenter of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake was about two miles offshore of Mussel Rock. John McPhee chose Mussel Rock for the opening of Assembling California, his engrossing narrative of our evolving and dissolving geology. The future is writ large in that sea stack. Two footpaths lead from bluff to ocean, and I take the steeper trail to the bottom. Good cover down there, though not from the kind of temblor that flattened San Francisco.
The waves are rolling in like measured installments of eternity. These breakers began somewhere in Asia as wind wrinkles on the surface tension of the ocean, embryo waves originating in the western airstream over the Pacific. Long after the wind stopped, they kept on going as pulses of energy. It took these waves about two months to reach our continent. Long before they come ashore, they feel the drag of the sea bottom. Entering shallow water, they crest, drop, and pulverize the beach.
The sand reorganizes under my feet as I walk out to meet the water. I reach the hard littoral, and incoming and outgoing sea foam washes over my wading boots. The air is filled with a contrapuntal whoosh and thumping. Far from monotonous, it sounds like an organ recital. This fugal dirge is punctuated at intervals by a flat oboelike sound. It is the distant diaphone of a foghorn. The waves seem to be taking the measure of time and space. Sea birds wheel like sunlit ornaments above me, their cries carried aloft on wind and ocean sounds.
The surf looks daunting. Two sets of breakers out there. Even the nearest is too far off to reach with a fly rod. The Pacific Ocean can look stupefying to the casual fly fisher, but it only seems unfishable. There is a point where the breaking surf begins to reorganize into new and smaller waves thirty or forty yards out. Fish like to hang behind these wavelets where they break. The biggest misconception is that you have to make a supremely long cast. It helps, but isn’t always necessary. If you can cast forty feet, you can probably catch fish in the surf, conditions permitting.
It’s a surfperch morning. I will be fishing parallel to the beach in a swash of glistening seawater that runs for thirty yards or so in between dry land and the last collapsing wavelets. The swash looks as thin as cellophane, but I scoped it out at low tide the previous day, and I know where the depressions and troughs are. I expect to find surfperch feeding in these gullies and depressions and maybe even in the swash right up to the beach.
My plan is to fish close and gradually work my way farther out, if conditions permit. Mainly I’ll be moving parallel to the beach in a southerly direction. My first cast is a mere thirty feet. I feel ridiculous in the face of this huge ocean. It’s best to begin short and explore. My fly lands in churning water that is alternately incoming and outgoing. It’s like trying to fish in the turbulence of a washing machine. Controlling the line and working the fly in the constantly shifting water is no easy task. Even though the swash is shallow, I am using a sinking shooting head to get my fly down quickly through the froth and turmoil. My fly is small and weighted and has a flash of orange in it to suggest crab roe. Sea life thrives in the chaos of the surf, and these ocean perch feast on small crustaceans churned up by constant wave action. My 8-weight graphite rod is perhaps more than I need for these rather runty surfperch, but just enough rod to match the marine environment.
I feel a tug and come up on a small fish. Its silver gleam makes it out to be a jacksmelt. It is small, but tugs hard, as does everything in the surf. These jacksmelt are wild. They are no more hatchery byproducts than the great white sharks and whales. The silverside struggles in the effervescent swash. I bring it quickly to hand. Its colors are fresh and pure. Fish and amphibians have a kind of iridescence that lasts just moments after they’ve been taken from the water. This gleaming little fish is resplendent.
Nothing more happens for about an hour. I am moving parallel to the beach, alternately stripping the fly back in short retrieves or letting it swing on the current. If there are any more fish around, they have lockjaw. I am thinking of calling it a day. And then I get another tug. The pull is steady and true. It is a runty surfperch, the “bluegill of the sea.” Most people don’t think of the surfperch as a fly-rod fish. Their oval shape is not inspiring, but surfperch fight harder than trout of similar size, especially in the surf ’s white water. Ocean fish are stronger than freshwater fish, as a rule. The marine environment ensures it.
Another tug gets my attention. I’m on to another redtail. These and their cousins, the barred surfperch, are the two most common species out here. The perch I catch in the ocean surf tend to be brighter than the ones I catch in San Francisco Bay. The color receptors in fish are sensitive to turbidity.
The tide is rising, but I continue moving south down the shoreline. Fishing under these bluffs at high tide can be risky. The rising ocean can press against the cliffs and trap beachcombers. That wasn’t always the case on these beaches. Cliffside palisades are crumbling from Fort Funston down to Pacifica. Due to erosion, Burton Beach, next door to the fort, has become much harder to access. It sits at the foot of an open hillside near the Olympic Club, a swanky golf course that straddles the boundary between San Francisco and San Mateo Counties. Burton is best accessed by walking along the sand from Fort Funston, as is Thornton Beach, due south in Daly City. Thornton is officially closed, due to cliffside erosion, but you can still get there from here at low tide. Some oceanfront homes in Daly City — ones built by Henry Doelger that sold for bargain prices back in the fifties — had to be demolished. One fell into the ocean on the day the bulldozer pulled up. Nobody saw it coming. California’s coastline is being devoured by rising seas. We have disturbed the homeostasis of the earth. From his eagle’s nest in the Carmel highlands, Robinson Jeffers bitched and moaned about “the crop of suburban houses” ruining his views. The poet had come to believe that mankind could be saved only by the very thing we were destroying. Jeffers called the human race a virus. In his poem “Carmel Point,” California’s greatest poet describes humanity as “a tide that swells and in time will ebb.” And when we are gone, he said, the beauty will still be there in the rock, “safe as the endless ocean that climbs our cliff.” A tad extreme, perhaps, but maybe on the money. I say give the devil Henry Doelger his due. At least he made housing affordable. And anyway, no one ever called
Robinson Jeffers the life of the party.
I’m tempted to press on toward Burton Beach, but it’s getting blowy. The onshore winds tend to pick up around noon. And the tide is rising. I don’t want to get trapped between ocean and bluffs at high tide. It’s a flat forenoon out here anyway. Surfperch like cloud cover and low light. The best fishing for them is early and late. I’m having trouble casting into the wind, and the surf is getting rough. I’m getting knocked silly even though I’m not wading over my knees. One thing I learned is never to turn my back on the ocean, even for a second. A sleeper wave can sneak up out of nowhere, even on a calm day, and suck you out to Japan. I look for the trail back to the bunkers.
Robinson Jeffers wouldn’t approve of this fort. He was an isolationist. His unpopular views on the war caused him to fall from grace, but he liked the way the blackouts darkened his coast and returned everything to nature. Yet Nature Boy was never without a drink by his elbow. Like all of us at the seashore, he enjoyed his creature comforts.
I arrive at a corner where the shoreline curves outward and a cliff rises abruptly. The beach is getting narrower, hemmed in by waves and crowded by rock. A few surfers are out there, waiting for a big one to bring them in. They look as if they have given up on civilization and are ready for anything or nothing.
I find the trail and make the long climb back to the parking lot. It’s hard not to feel ambivalent about all this. Civilization began in the world’s great cities, but the ocean gave us the mouse in the wall and the mind of Aeschylus. So said our best and truest poet. But Jeffers was a humorless misanthrope who didn’t know how to have fun. He had no time for our comedies and revels. He was the last person you’d ever find at Playland at the Beach. Speaking for myself, I like the Outside Lands and civilization. And civilization began with fermentation.
So I drive to the Beach Chalet for a beer. If mankind crawled out of the sea, it’s because somebody needed a drink. All terrestrial life began at the seashore. Now we need all our wits to figure out how life can continue here.