Report from Santa Barbara post-COVID lockdown: “Determined tourists sit on the beach under a heavy, cold marine layer just because it’s Memorial Day Weekend!”

Calories don’t count on vacation, they say. Maybe the weather doesn’t either.

And then suddenly the doors swung open.

One day we couldn’t go inside a store or sit down at a restaurant.

The next day, just like that, we could.

A girl could get whiplash trying to keep up with things around here.

Memorial Day weekend showed up out of nowhere like a car swinging around a blind corner. A three-day weekend. What does that even mean?

For quite a few people it meant a weekend away in Santa Barbara. The hotels are still supposedly closed to tourists and “leisure travelers,” but there they were, leisuring all around us. The county added two-hour parking restrictions to some of the beaches, but it didn’t seem to matter.

The determination of tourists to sit on the beach under a heavy, cold marine layer, just because it’s Memorial Day weekend, will never fail to amaze me. Calories don’t count on vacation, they say. Maybe the weather doesn’t either.

A solid round of upwelling meant the water temperatures were far from tropical. Good luck, bikini-wearing tourist! Good luck with your Wavestorm! Good luck with that.

Every car has a board strapped to the roof, it seems, never mind the mostly flat surf and uninviting temperatures.

I slip down to the beach early ahead of the crowds, all totally socially distanced, of course, and ride some sloppy little runners. Summer soft top times, not worthy of an actual surfboard, not really. But I stand up and slide along, so I’ll call it surfing.

Certainly, the tourists with their bright boardshorts and fresh bikinis and the Wavestorms they bought on the way to the beach will call it surfing when they brag later about how they rode one all the way to the beach.

They stare at my 4’6” like I’m crazy. They’re probably right.

A pale grey ray, bright against the dark green seagrass, passes under my feet, fluttering in the currents. It looks nice down there, beneath the surface turbulence, just swimming.

They close one of the main streets of town to cars and I ride my rusted out town bike down the middle, giddy with the weird freedom of it. For weeks, we’ve sat around home, without much to do. Now, suddenly, we can ride down the middle of the street like there’s no rules at all.

I stop by the surf shop and slide under the caution tape intended to ensure against too many people entering at once. It’s a large warehouse-sized building with roll-up doors open at both ends. It’s as safe as anywhere else. To me, it feels safer than small-wave surfing with stingrays underfoot, but I don’t claim to be good at figuring out things like risk and probability.

“I’m looking for beach chairs,” a woman says loudly. A thing you learn living in a tourist town is that vacations are stressful. If I don’t find a beach chair, this whole thing is going to be a failure, the woman seems to be saying. I don’t linger to see if she finds one.

An old-school kind of place, the shop has beach toys for both tourists and surfers. Buy a towel, a pail and shovel, a beach chair, or a Hypto, and do it all under one roof. Bikinis cover an entire wall, boardshorts another.

The last of the winter clothing still hangs on the racks like a time capsule from two months ago. Sale: 30% off. I spy a Vissla x BeachGrit backwards fin shirt, laugh, and text Chas a photo.

Vintage boards hang from the ceiling, a treasure trove hidden in plain sight. Behind the wetsuit rack stands a 1950s-era Simmons. Several wetsuit racks stand empty, a reminder of how not that long ago, time stopped. There are few, if any 3/2mm men’s suits in stock. Maybe next week, maybe next month. No one really knows.

I wander the board racks, imagining. The tourists, busy with their beach chairs and their flip flops, haven’t made it here. The room’s quiet, boards lined up in the racks, so much fresh fiberglass. It would take a lifetime to ride them all.

A half-dozen Andreini’s showed up a few days ago fresh from the glasser, and already, two are marked sold. I look longingly at a Ghost, thinking less about the board itself than about the dream of waves good enough to make a board like that sing. There’s a bright pile of Trimcraft midlengths. High-shine, Gloss-coat Yater longboards march down the wall, almost too beautiful to ride.

There’s three bars of green wax left. Toilet paper, whatever. Green wax is precious stuff. I buy all three. Unlike the toilet paper, there’s more where those came from. Sex Wax is just down the road.

I walk out into the bright sunlight and pedal up the street.

The cars turn off the main street and I keep going. People sit outside the restaurants, drinking and laughing. A band set up outside one of the bars that’s still closed plays a Van Morrison cover. A couple slow-dances in the road, as though there’s nothing to worry about, not now, not ever again.

Maybe they’re right.

It’s a lovely fantasy, here under the trees, in this moment out of time.

The sun slides lower, and a flurry of swallows dart across the sky, flashing in the light.

I think I’ll stay a while here in our happy bubble.

All the real world’s worries will still be there when we wake up tomorrow.

But for now, they can wait, just like we did.