Ghost Wave - Chris Dixon [119]
Steve planted his kids on the nose of a longboard at San Onofre before they could walk and was hauling them down to Baja to camp by toddlerhood. Rusty and Greg were soon bombing the hills above Calafia Beach aboard skateboards and BMX bikes and ducking into the strand’s thumping beach break atop boogie boards. The boys made good grades and became talented soccer players and a seemingly psychic little league pitcher/catcher duo. Heather became a stunning, fearless waterwoman.
By middle school, the kids were experienced free divers who knew more about the local hiding spots for lobster and corvina than the crustiest old longboarders at San Onofre Point. They also came to know, and see, the consequences of Dad’s work firsthand. The ocean can kill you. Plan accordingly.
The Longs learned to surf all of the waves that peel from San Onofre through Trestles: Church’s, Middles, Uppers, Barbwires, and Cottons Point, but the high-performance right and left peaks at Lower Trestles became the brothers’ specialty. Even on days when it seemed you could walk atop the heads of surfers to the lineup, the lean, swarthy young duo learned to slay their share at Lowers. Rusty was a quiet young Zen warrior. Greg was precocious beyond his years, regularly butting heads with guys—and girls—three times his age. “God, he had such a mouth,” Rusty laughs.
By the mid-1990s, San Clemente was shedding its image as a somewhat sleepy surf town. In 1992, Esquire magazine ran a cover story on the life aquatic of Herbie, Dibi, Christian, and Nathan Fletcher, and other locals ascended to national recognition: Shane Beschen, Chris Ward, and the big wave–charging brothers McNulty. What’s Really Goin’ On—released by a small homegrown surf company aptly named…lost—captured a hilariously and disturbingly dysfunctional surf town, portraying San Clemente as a barrio capital for hard partying new school surf punks. It was a world of drug-and-booze-fueled Jackass pranks, with kids pushing each other down a deadly hill in a barrel or lighting a buddy’s hair on fire with an aerosol can for laughs. But the Longs were not among the donkeys. “We couldn’t get away with anything,” says Rusty. “We had Dad and all the lifeguards around.”
Sounding like his boyhood idol Mike Parsons, Greg says, “Our parents were very open about partying, drugs, alcohol, and using recreationally, and how for some, it’s part of their everyday lifestyle. That was never a point for me. I wanted to be a professional surfer. I didn’t want anything to slow me down.’”
Rusty probably took his first puff of weed at around fifteen. “I’ve used it for yoga,” he says, “stretching deeper. It slows the thought process a bit—helps with my flow. But I’m like my brother in that I never had the urge to get into anything else that was going to get in the way of my goals.”
Also like Parsons, Rusty and Greg both gravitated toward the biggest waves they could find. Why they were so attracted to big waves, becoming classic high-sensation seekers themselves, is impossible for them to say; when they grew up, San Clemente was rife with surfers, yet few chose the path they did. Perhaps acquiring a taste for the thrill of surfing in infancy had something to do with it. Perhaps having a lifeguard father whose profession involved an adrenaline- and wave-filled life did, too. In any case, both can pinpoint the moments that set the trajectory of their adult lives.
When Rusty was fifteen, he pulled an airdrop on a Sunset Beach macker. “That one wave set the hook,” he says. During the stormy El Niño winter of 1997–98, Greg began soloing out at San Clemente’s West Reef, a lonely bombora that breaks nearly a mile out. “That Big Wednesday swell—the one where [Ken] Bradshaw caught