The waves were nothing like the thumping beachbreaks that I had been bodysurfing for years.

I paddled out alone, bowing my head and hanging on through gentle, silvery lines of whitewater. There were other people out, but San Onofre is a roomy spot. I don’t recall anyone giving me instructions. I rode my first waves standing up there, on a borrowed green board, one summer day when I was ten. And it remained an excellent place to learn to surf. Many of the surfers who went on to modernize board design after World War II cut their teeth at San Onofre-it was the Waikiki of the West Coast, minus the hotels and hoopla. The rides were long and smooth, with enough rock-reef variety to keep them interesting. In surfing’s early modern era, however, when boards were huge, very heavy, and generally did not have fins, riding straight toward shore with a minimum of turning was the preferred (indeed, the only possible) technique, and San Onofre offered perhaps the best wave in California for that style of surfing. San Onofre’s waves were passé by the ’60s, when I came along-too slow, too mushy. Bridge tournaments and volleyball gave way, after sundown, to bonfires and hootenannies, and martinis were legal tender. Panel vans with faded awnings and tiki huts built from driftwood provided patches of shade.

Surfboards, fishing rods, snorkel gear, old sea kayaks, inflatables-everything pointed toward the water. Many of them seemed to have PhDs in having fun. The beach was nothing special-narrow and treeless, rocky beyond the water’s edge-but the families who camped there shared the place with a palpable, low-key pleasure. There was a dirt road to the coast blocked by a guardhouse, but members of the San Onofre Surfing Club were allowed through. San Onofre had been one of the early outposts of California surfing, and the dedicated beach bums who camped there to surf and fish and hunt abalone had somehow convinced the military to let them keep going in after the base was built. The Beckets stuffed their Volkswagen bus full of kids and gear and headed down there on weekends. It was forty miles farther south, a little patch of undeveloped shore surrounded by a big Marine base. I loved Newport, but I loved San Onofre more. He has twice been a National Magazine Award finalist and has won numerous journalism awards, including two Overseas Press Club awards. He is the author of Cold New World, A Complicated War, Dateline Soweto, and Crossing the Line. Finnegan has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1987. The following is from William Finnegan's memoir Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life.

Barbarian days a surfing life