Surf Station
by William Etling

Amtrak picked up a $1.3 billion dollar check from the stimulus package last week. It's time to check out the closest tracks.

Surf Beach may not be your own private train station, but it feels like it. The train stopped by the cold, blustery beach with a concrete kiosk and automated ticket dispenser to let off just one lonely passenger on a recent Monday around three pm. Where else can you beachcomb in the shadow of a Space Launch Complex while you wait to ride the rails?

For mariners this is a tempestuous, treacherous, white-capped corner. Great white sharks haunt the water. Surfers who brave the towering, icy-blue walls of glass down the way at Jalama Beach, and the windsurfers who revel in the blasts of ripping wind, play in a watery valley of the shadow of death.

Just south of Jalama is Point Conception, a mysterious, fog-shrouded, surf-torn promontory jutting into the Pacific, marking the northern entry to the Santa Barbara Channel. Atop the lonely, jagged black rocks that disappear into the wild roiling foam, framed by water and sky, haunted by the eerie cry of seagulls and the moan of the foghorn, shines the Point Conception Light, a bright beacon to mariners since 1856.

Offshore, the whales move in slow motion through the water, spouting white plumes high in the air. Dolphins pass in ethereal pods evidenced by sudden, shiny fins, slicing the water in graceful arcs.

This is a haunted land, marked by pieces of the past. Chinese laborers lived in makeshift camps here when they built the railroad up the coast, leaving coins, buttons, bits of opium pipes. Unknown fossils spill out of the crumbling sandstone that rings the pounded Pacific shore. Seals cavort on desolate beaches, alongside the bleached bones of their friends.

The gaunt tower of Space Launch Complex Six stands like a specter in the fog, built to launch the space shuttle into orbit. The viewing area for the TV cameras, housing for the astronauts, and podium for President Reagan had all been mapped out when the Challenger exploded. A stone's throw away from the space-age skyscraper are cave paintings.

Fierce roiling winds blew Juan Cabrillo back toward home when he sailed here in 1542. Sebastian Vizcaino officially put Punta de la Limpia Concepcion (Point of the Immaculate Conception) on the map in 1602.

At nearby Honda Point, rusting iron sometimes appears from the waves at low tide. On September 8, 1923, in one of the worst peacetime naval disasters of all time, nine destroyers misjudged their turn into the Channel and ran onto the rocks, killing 23 sailors. Two ships were able to pull free, but hundreds of their shipmates on the rocks contemplated death in the dark, freezing water. Five other destroyers in the convoy stopped in time.

From the Southern Pacific Bulletin: "The destroyers were wrecked at a point about a quarter of a mile from the Southern Pacific line and opposite the Honda section house. At 8:46 pm the evening of September 8, John Giorvas, section foreman at Honda, heard a crash, and two minutes later heard another. He ran to the second story of his home and looking out of the window saw a light near shore. Taking his sixteen men he went to the beach and there saw a destroyer, later found to be the Chauncey, on the rocks. The shouts of the crew could be heard but no one could be seen. Giorvas ran back to the section house and telephoned to the operator at Surf, reporting the wreck. Returning to the beach he found that two more vessels were on the rocks and a little later discovered two more. It was not until towards morning that it was found that seven ships, all told, had been wrecked...

"...Mrs. C.L. Atkins, wife of the third trick operator at Surf, will be remembered for many years by the Navy men for her fine work in caring for the survivors, making them comfortable, giving them coffee, and doing other acts of kindness. Mrs. Atkins mothered the boys for nearly twenty-four hours without a rest."

Click Here to see more pictures of Surf Beach and the train.

William Etling is a 41 year resident of Santa Ynez, and the author of Sideways in Neverland: Life in the Santa Ynez Valley.