Winter at the Beach

David Nash was quaking in his shoes. The Navy officer had left a Washington winter for a conference in California; now he was bouncing in sand so cold it might as well have been snow.

He wasn’t complaining, though. Washed clean by the past night’s storm, the beach along Oxnard Shores in Ventura County was practically pristine.

In the pink light of dawn, the shells and rocks and driftwood--even the Bic lighters and beer cans tangled in the seaweed--appeared purified.

“The solitude, the quiet--that’s why I run anyway,” Nash said. Then he jogged off, his footprints the first human impressions on a new day.

And what a day.

In summer, a day at the beach bleaches the edges off brain matter and bakes the body into a stuporous lump of contentment.

But a stormy winter day beside the Pacific invigorates and inspires. The air fills with wildly sensuous aromas. Renegade currents dredge the ocean bottom, and the sky becomes the stuff of Wagnerian drama, stirring up potent emotions from the brooding depths of the soul.

On days like this, the weekend cognoscenti scan the dismal horizon, and, without a trace of irony, proclaim: “Perfect beach weather.”

The idea is simply to immerse oneself in the richly gloomy setting. But most people prefer to rationalize their attraction to such perfect bleakness by coming up with something to do. Moving down the coast from north to south, here are a few excuses people use for being at the beach in winter.

- SURF

Fat raindrops pelted the glassy swells rolling through the kelp beds at County Line beach, sending concentric wavelets out through a cluster of surfers.

“(Expletive) cold,” one said, greeting a new arrival to this break north of Point Dume.

“Cold,” another said, conserving energy.

“Wet is wet,” said a third surfer whose tortured face reflected the fluorescent purples and blues of his wet suit. “This is the one sport you can do in the rain,” he said. Then he whipped around and launched himself down the face of a foam-sputtering wave.

On shore, steep hillsides caught light filtered through belligerent clouds, radiating neon shades of green. Surfboard-laden cars lined a dirt parking lot on a bluff, and sensible types watched the waves through foggy windshields.

“Ooohh! Ice-cube headache time,” a young man from Newbury Park said as a wave swallowed a surfer. Clapping his gloved hands, shifting from side to side in his wool-lined apres -ski boots, he watched the waves. But he and two buddies decided to forgo getting wet.

Instead, they jogged across Pacific Coast Highway to Neptune’s Net, a cluttered joint with a bumper sticker near the register reading, “Working is for people who don’t know how to surf.” All morning, tourists, local cowboys and shivering surfers wandered in. Most sat for a while and pondered the drizzly day, looking almost blissful as steaming clam chowder or hot coffee reheated them from within.

- BEACHCOMB

“Winter’s definitely the best time down here,” said Daryl Reiman of Woodland Hills as he scanned a gloomy stretch of coast below the J. Paul Getty Museum in Malibu. “It’s more exciting. . . . Anything can happen at any time. Anything can wash in on the beach. . . .”

Wearing rubber boots, heavy pants, a down jacket and headphones connected to an expensive metal detector, Reiman was a technologically advanced version of the standard beachcomber. Oceanographers say heavy winter surf creates “littoral currents,” which pull sand from beaches and carry it south, carving a more rugged and rocky coastline in the process.

Why nature decides to deposit its treasures where it does is a mystery, Reiman said. “There’s an infinite combination of factors. You match wits with the ocean, the moon, the tides, the alignment of the planets, the currents, the wind, the configuration of the bottom. It’s like a piece of infinity, and you’re there, the detective.”

Sometimes as Reiman strolls the beaches in winter, nature throws in entertainment. Recently, seven porpoises surfed the waves just off shore, he said. “They were doing back flips, somersaults. That was memorable.”

- TALK

“At first we thought, ‘What are we doing, going to the beach in the rain?’ Then we thought, ‘Ah! How romantic!’ ” a writer said as she sat with her father and a friend beneath the red-and-white striped canopy of the Sidewalk Cafe at Venice Beach Ocean Front Walk.

“What has really been lovely is watching the transitions,” she said. “It started raining, and everyone scurried inside. Then, when the rain stopped, we watched as everyone gradually re-entered the world.”

“I rarely go to the beach in summer,” the writer’s friend said. “I’m not a sun bunny. I can’t just go out and lie on the sand for hours and hours.” But the beach does have a “magnetic attraction.”

“This view is the magnetic attraction here,” the writer said, pointing to Ocean Front Walk.

“It’s a snapshot of California.”

Beyond a smudged plastic curtain, lowered to keep out the weather, roller-skaters sloshed through puddles and old ladies in shawls strolled beneath palm trees that were doing a hula in the wind.

In the gray afternoon light, it was all bleak--a perfect setting for soulful conversations.

“We’ve been talking about life,” the writer said with a smile. She took a sip of white wine and stared past the planters of red and white geraniums to storm clouds regrouping over the ocean.

- POETICIZE

Just south of Malaga Cove, hundreds of feet below the bluffs of the Palos Verdes Peninsula, four teen-agers sat on a ragged outcropping watching thick swells explode against the rocks. Froth blown by gale-force winds mixed with the mousse in their rebelliously styled hair and streaked their green eye shadow. Their self-described “gothic” attire--stark, wind-swept layers, mainly black--fit nicely in the angst- evoking setting.

One of the young men is a songwriter for a band “so underground we play with the lava.” The friends come to the rock regularly in winter “to talk and write poetry.”

Said Lorraine Westcott, 17: “What I think about the beach sometimes is, ‘It’s so beautiful, and so perfect.’ I come to get away from the bad part of my life. But it’s like a false hope. Reality is always right across the street.”

Laura Conrad, 16, offered this fragment from a poem she wrote:

. . . And out upon the

Beautiful languid shore

We dream and appreciate

When we’d come here once more

In a different life.

- FLY

“There’s something just plain spiritual about going to an isolated beach with a stunt kite,” said Roger Hyde, a kite “test pilot” and designer. “You have the sky to yourself. You can play with it. It’s just you and the sound of the wind.”

“You’re doing aerobics in the sky,” said Roger Chavez, the owner of Crystal Kite Co. in La Habra. “In a good wind, you’ll have trouble hanging on.” A big kite pulls so hard, “you’ll leave a 10-foot trail in the sand,” he said.

Up until that moment, the only stunt performed by the $150 kite they had been testing was a dive into the sand. At the same time, though, they had a dozen or so other kites--a life-size shark, a nylon man dangling from a hang glider, and rainbow models trailing spiraling wind socks--bobbing over Bolsa Chica State Beach. Bicyclists on the bikeway, bird watchers at the ecological reserve and windsurfers out on the waves craned their necks from time to time to watch.

- MEDITATE

Three fraternity brothers stood with their pant legs rolled and their sport coats and sweaters flapping in the breeze, their bare feet sinking into the sand with each wave.

The night before, the Arizona State University students had been sitting at the Dash-Inn in Tempe, drinking beer and watching a basketball game.

“It’s funny, for some reason we just started chanting ‘L.A.! L.A.!’ ” said Larry Kearsley, 21.

The bar’s owner asked them to quiet down. So they got up and headed west across the desert, winding up on the Balboa Peninsula. It was the first time two of them had been to the beach.

On a lawn beside the ocean, members of a related fraternity played ultimate Frisbee, as sea gulls stalked the sideline for worms brought out by the rain.

Two of the three ASU students wanted to stay, but the third hesitated.

“I have a physics exam tomorrow,” he said. “If I stay, I’ll have to drop two classes. I don’t know if it’ll be worth it.”