The Dog Days of Winter

In his poem No Possum, No Soup, No Taters, Wallace Stevens writes, “it is deep January. The sky is hard. The stalks are firmly rooted in ice.”

The poem title leads one to believe it probably doesn't get much better from there.

Sorry, bro!

Excepting the worst drought California has ever experienced—and it’s seen some doozies—this year so far has seen lots of metaphorical possum, soup, and taters.

The first of January saw Mario’s new 6'4 looking like this:

 While I was in Southern Baja doing this:

Then back home to Sonoma County where the shit got fifty shades of shreddy and looked like this for a solid week:

Then Mario’s board suddenly looked like this: 

And this:

And this! And, again, our pots were full o' possum.

Clearly, we need rain. Shakespeare's no Punxsatawny Phil, but it would be great if February goes something like  act five, scene four of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, when Don Pedro greets Benedick with, “what’s the matter, That you have such a February face, So full of frost, of storm and cloudiness?”

We'll take some of that.

A Clear Sense of Things

American poet Wallace Stevens penned the following lines about fall:
After the leaves have fallen we return
To a plain sense of things. It is as if
We had come to an end of imagination,
Inanimate in an inert savoir.
Sorry, bro!
(by the way, I looked up savoir so you don't have to: a personification of death)
Fall means many things to many different people up here in Northern California, but 'inert' isn't one of them. Winemakers and grape growers boost their heart rates to 'high alert', poised on the edge of a gargantuan push to kickstart one of the most wonderful processes in all the world.
Steelhead, feeling increasingly more funny in their netherparts, burst from their upstream feeding grounds in pursuit of saltwater and sweet, sweet love. Fishermen, feeling a similar tingle,  spool backing onto fly lines and fantasize about #8 egg-sucking leaches and depth-charge nymphs.
Young 'uns lay out new clothes and feel awkward and try out for sports and theater productions and wonder if their fresh haircut will grow out by picture day.

And surfers. Eager to transcend the thigh-high windchop and socked-in, wool-sweater fog of summer, surfers begin mindsurfing the inevitable pulses of North Pacific energy.
Know who's ready for Fall?
Lucas, as evidenced by his new Sparkplug.
This thing has fall in Northern California written all over it--clean lines, no-nonsense shape, no frills glass job by Pico and the good folks at Northern Light Surf Shop in Bodega.

To be fair, Wallace Stevens was living in Central Pennsylvania when he wrote A Plain Sense of Things.
And, in a sense, we, too, return to a Plain Sense of Things in fall--attentions shift wherever they had been for the spring and summer, and come into a sharper focus. The Pacific Ocean stirs, and things start happening. Surf. Weather. High pressure. Low pressure. Pulled pork in the crockpot. Red wine and Islay single malts. Socks. Unmanageable surf. Highly manageable surf.

Lucas is a man who thinks ahead. He'll have his Sparkplug quad dialed by the time the first overhead wave spins toward our rocky shoreline this fall, bringing with it the hopes and joys of Pacific Coast surfers, and a beginning, rather than an end, of imagination.