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June 2007 Issue

Wavelengths
Text and Photo by Michael Kew
A Wave Runs Through It

Owls hooted in darkness, frogs croaked in the marsh, wind swooshed loudly through the pines and gnarled cypress. At the campground it was a cold, heavy night—nights behind storms are always so, the sky impenetrable, moonless, starry, and with cold hands I held cold bottles of beer, drinking one after another, until finally the frogs and wind and roar of surf knocked me out.
At first light I smelled cow dung—the wind was offshore. I rose quickly and walked out to the beach, where large swell broke with mass confusion. There was no one around, no runners or dog walkers, no coffee drinkers, no fishermen, no surfers. It was six-thirty on a freezing Tuesday morning in late January, night mist still clinging to the beach, gulls huddling together at the mouth of Salmon Creek, flowing fast and fat with rain and brown farm silt.
East was a psychedelic sunrise, orange and pink swirls painting the sky above the ridges of Mount Roscoe and Irish Hill, the grassy slopes specked with silhouettes of sheep and black beef cattle. To the north was rocky coast easing eastward into these soft hills, unspoiled by homes or wineries, and to the south lay a thousand acres of sand dunes, rimming Bodega Harbor, leading into the low sheared mound of Mussel Point, piercing the Pacific at the south end of the two-mile-long beach.

Camping in winter eliminates creature comforts and outdoor cooking, instead replaced by hot smoky campfires, tipsy postprandial walks, rough slumber without good shelter. It is time best spent alone. And so driving along Highway 1 in winter too may harken of times preceding Sonoma’s chambers of commerce and expensive Sea Ranch homes, before the vintners and abalone pickers and gargantuan RVs, before elegant art galleries and bed-and-breakfast romance, before retirees and southerners en masse fled their suburban sprawl, which people actually needed to escape so they could revisit nature. But when the south was rural, why go north? It was much colder, much darker, vastly remote—decades ago, to Southern California surfers, Santa Barbara was a fringe, Santa Cruz was arctic, and nobody seemed to know what lay north of San Francisco.
That night I ate cold pizza and drank beer in fogbound darkness on the south bank of the Gualala River. The campground was flooded with rain beneath dripping redwoods, bordered by the fat river’s muffled rush. There was no noise from insects or animals—only water. I sat on a wet picnic table and watched the wide river when the fog broke, illuminated dimly despite the absence of moonlight.
Around three in the morning I woke thinking a jet airplane was landing nearby. It was heavy shorepound, the booming thundercrack funneled to my campsite along the river corridor. Since dusk the wind had died and the swell had hit—a giant westerly with a twenty-five-second period, strong and orderly, undoubtedly the winter’s best swell.
At dawn I parked in a pullout above the river, which was separated from the ocean by a narrow spit. The surf was huge, the sight impressive — because of the high tide and the beach’s severe drop-off, sets were slamming full-force onto the sand, immense wave energy accumulated over thousands of Pacific miles at last terminating in violent fashion.
Suddenly a rogue wave flooded the spit, scattering a flock of gulls and spilling into the river, the wake quickly forming a riverine version of what had created it. This chest-high river wave peeled flawlessly for dozens of yards in both directions before expiring into the riverbank, one of the most bizarre acts of nature that I had ever seen, in the middle of a Northern California river, an occurrence so rare it was an incredible stroke of luck to capture it on film.

Posted June 2007 Blue Edge Magazine. All rights reserved.

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