dedalus_1947 | Where the Kids are Hip (Reply)

I’m gettin’ bugged driving up and down this same old strip
I gotta’ find a new place where the kid’s are hip.
My buddies and me are gettin’ real well known
Yeah, the bad guys know us, and they leave us alone.
I get around.
(I Get Around - Brian Wilson/Mike Love of the Beach Boys: 1964)

I started writing this story four times over the last two months, and each time I seemed to run out of gas. I finally realized that I was trying too hard, expecting to find something in the story that wasn’t there. I’d forgotten that essential truism when making or planning something – KISS: Keep It Simple, Stupid! You see I had this crazy notion in my head that every time my friends and I got together something magical and unforgettable always had to happen. I vainly struggled to find something remarkable in the story I was writing. Now I see that although we’ve had our share of memorable events in the past, for the most part, our reunions have been fairly ordinary (see tag: amigos). So let me begin this time by saying that last month we got together to ride along the bike path from Marina del Rey to Redondo Beach. We had lunch at Tony’s on the Pier, spent the night at the Marina del Rey Hotel, and the following day had breakfast at the Venice Pier, before splitting up. The time we spent together was highlighted by stories of our adolescence, growing up in Venice, Playa del Rey, and Westchester, and going to the beach as often as we could. I suppose the only magic that happened was the fact that we still manage to get together – even for seemingly frivolous reasons. We don’t have to go to special places, or do something extraordinary to have a good time. So I suppose this is just a story of friends taking a bike ride.

On the morning of April 18, my friend John arrived at my house in Canoga Park, efficiently attached my bicycle onto his bike rack, and together we drove to the Marina Hotel, in Marina del Rey. There we rendezvoused with our friend Greg, who had driven up from San Diego with his bike stowed in the back of his SUV. I hadn’t seen my old, high school friends since attending the funeral of John’s mother-in-law in December, and we hadn’t gotten together for any kind of social activity since September when I joined Greg and John in Cambria, for sightseeing and pitch & putt golf. In fact, it had been over a year since all four of us met for our last travel adventure to Hoover Dam and Primm, Nevada (see The Road We Traveled). It was Greg who first proposed this bicycling activity and John followed up by booking the rooms. This trip would only involve The Three Amigos, because Jim said he wasn’t interested in a biking along the beach. We arrived within 10 minutes of each other at the hotel at the end of Bali Way, and since we were too early to check into our rooms, we unloaded our bikes and took off.

The morning was cold and overcast, as so many spring days are in the coastal communities of Los Angeles. The three of us had grown up in this area and were familiar with the Marina and the weather, but we had never ridden along this particular bike path. With John and Greg riding side-by-side in the lead, we passed the launching dock where Greg once set out on his sailboat voyages around Santa Monica Bay, or to Catalina Island. Then we made our way along Fiji Way, past Fisherman’s Village, to the end of the street where we entered a section of the La Ballona Creek Bike Path. This is a dedicated, two-lane bike route that runs along the cemented creek bed from Culver City/West L.A. to its mouth at the Marina del Rey breakwater. We rode along this path that paralleled the Marina boat channel and then crossed over the Ballona Creek Bridge. We remembered that before 1961, this bridge physically connected Venice with Playa del Rey, and we identified the spot where a beach existed before the Army Corps of Engineers constructed the man-made harbor of the Marina and placed a breakwater at its entrance. John recalled body surfing there as a child, and I had a flashback of the time I almost floated out to sea on a plastic inner tube before learning to swim. Greg had a birds-eye view of the entire county-owned property being drained and dredged from his hillside home perched on the bluff overlooking Culver Boulevard. From there he saw the La Ballona swamps and wetlands gradually disappear and become transformed into a small boat marina.

Crossing over into Playa del Rey, we rode past the fraternity and sorority houses of Loyola Marymount University that bordered the beach and surrounded Del Rey Lagoon Park. None of us ever joined a Greek-letter organization but Greg and I benefited from the membership of a friend we had in high school and college. Wayne belonged to some LMU frat, and in his sophomore year he was placed in charge of purchasing beer for house parties. He became our underage bootlegger, and we had a steady weekend supply of Colt 45 for as long as he held the position. John always managed to procure beer through other means.

The trail now veered onto the beach, and I saw why it was called The Strand. From this point it became an exclusively, Class 1 Bike Path - a ribbon of cement on the sand, skirting the beach towns of the South Bay. Surprisingly, even though all three of us had gone to high school in Playa del Rey, and John and Greg had rented apartments in Hermosa Beach during college, we had never ridden on this particular bike path with its view of the coastal street, Vista del Mar Boulevard. As we rode along, three abreast, we vied with each other to identify the familiar landmarks of our youth. There was Gillis Beach, the popular high school hangout and make-out spot, with its faux oasis landscape, in front of the deserted lands purchased by LAX. In fact, John’s family, along with many of our high school friends, had been displaced by the eminent domain expansion of the Airport into Westchester and Playa del Rey in the late 1960’s. Then came Dockweiler (known to us as D&W) State Beach, with its popular fire pits and volleyball courts. Next we easily spotted El Segundo, betrayed by the twin towers of the Hyperion Treatment Plant and the mammoth Standard Oil Refinery at the edge of the sand. The refinery marked the boundary between these sparsely populated beaches and the crowded, oceanfront homes and apartments of the South Bay cities of Manhattan and Hermosa Beaches.

At this point in our journey we became aware of a sudden influx of traffic, with large numbers of skateboarders, inline skaters, and pedestrians sharing The Strand with us. This wouldn’t have been a problem except for the fact that we were all sometimes distracted by the palatial gaudiness of some of the homes on the road, and there was a tendency for pedestrians to halt in their tracks and gawk. Honestly, from the beach, it was hard to tell where one city ended and the other started. As I said, Greg and John lived in Hermosa as college students, and I spent a lot of time with them there. In those days, we remembered Manhattan as very affluent, with more single-family residences, and expensive shopping boutiques. In contrast, Hermosa was more laid-back, with lots of apartments, lower rents, young singles, and more bars. We passed the Manhattan Beach Pier without stopping, remarking that it hadn’t changed much, and halted at the Hermosa Pier, a favorite haunt of John and Greg. As we walked our bikes up Pier Avenue, I was shocked to see that a part of the street had been closed to traffic and converted into an open-air mall, surrounded by stores, cafes, bars, and restaurants. We pedaled away from this over-developed, yuppie, commercial center, and decided to end our trip with lunch somewhere on Redondo Beach pier.

The Strand section of the trail came to an end at Herondo Street, the boundary between Hermosa and Redondo Beach, and we merged onto a street (designated Class 2) bike path. We pedaled along Harbor Drive, and passed the entrance to the King Harbor Marina, until we came to the Redondo Beach Pier. There we parked, locked our bikes and went looking for Tony’s on the Pier for lunch.

That evening, with the rigors of the day behind us (and the sore butts to prove it) we talked about our families and grown children. The last time we had gotten our kids together on an adventure was the Rosarito-Ensenada Bike Ride in April 2007 (see Rosarito – Ensenada Bike Ride). Our updates mentioned that John’s son Mikey was finishing up his first year of teaching English in Korea. Greg’s son Josh was graduating with a PhD from the University of Colorado in May, and my daughter Teresa’s baby, Sarah Kathleen, was being baptized soon. We talked and laughed late into the night and awoke to have breakfast at The Terrace Café, a restaurant near Venice Pier. After the repast we returned to the hotel and went our separate ways, promising to reunite soon.