Oil and Water: Stories From the Windward Shore

Oil and Water

Stories from the Windward Shore

Terry Dressler

2013 · Fithian Press, Mckinleyville, California

Copyright © 2013 by Terry Dressler

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

ISBN 978-1-56474-769-3

The interior design and the cover design of this book are intended for and limited to the publisher’s first print edition of the book and related marketing display purposes. All other use of those designs without the publisher’s permission is prohibited.

Published by Fithian Press

A division of Daniel and Daniel, Publishers, Inc.

Post Office Box 2790

McKinleyville, CA 95519

www.danielpublishing.com

Distributed by SCB Distributors (800) 729-6423

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Dressler, Terry.

Oil and water : and other stories from the windward shore / by Terry Dressler.

p. cm.

ISBN [first printed edition] 978-1-56474-537-8 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. California—Social life and customs—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3604.R474O37 2013

813’.6—dc23

2012035295

"I am not I; thou art not he or she;

they are not they."

—Evelyn Waugh

To my mother,

who taught me how to tell a story,

and my father,

who taught me which story to tell.

Contents

Prologue: The Windward Shore

Those Spirits that I Called

Envy

Fishing

Fool’s Anchorage

Horatius at the Bridge

Hubris

Lost and Found

Luck Is for the Lucky

Never Okay Again

The Golden Calf

Oil and Water

Redemption

Sin

The Lotus Eater

The Ranch

About the Author

Prologue: The Windward Shore

Every island has two sides. On the leeward or sheltered shore the weather is fine, the skies clear, the air warm and dry, the breezes calm, and the pale azure seas placid. This is where they build resorts and timeshare condominiums. It is a place where one imagines oneself lolling in a hammock and sipping a highly alcoholic drink that is flavored with tropical fruit. On the leeward shore, life is slow and easy and lazy. It is often too hot to stir. Nothing much happens on the lee side and the happy indolent denizens of this sunny paradise like it that way. There are no stories there.

On the windward or weather shore the clouds constantly scud across verdant, rain-drenched hills. The air is cooled by daily and predictable trade winds. The sea is tossed and white-capped above a dark sapphire indigo. The predictable precipitation makes the windward shore the traditional place of agriculture and, hence, commerce. This where people work, produce, and make money. Yet, the presence of turbulent weather and high, flooding seas makes the windward shore a place where nature challenges man and man labors to conquer nature. The windward shore is where things happen, where life happens, where death happens. There is no vacation there.

Those Spirits that I Called

Ach, da kommt der Meister

Herr, die Not is groß

Die ich rief, die Geister

Werd ich nun nicht los.

—Goethe. Der Zauberlehrling (The Sorcerer’s Apprentice)

Ah, there comes the master

Sir, the catastrophe is great

Those I called, those spirits

I now cannot escape.

translated by Terry Dressler

So this is what it comes to. For starting and running Kent Blanks for more than forty years, supplying an essential component to a thriving worldwide recreational industry, providing jobs and benefits to nearly a hundred employees, paying huge amounts of taxes to Orange County, the state of California, and the nation, I may be facing decades of lawsuits, millions of dollars in criminal penalties, and years in prison. I can’t even walk away from the business without paying a king’s ransom in cleanup expenses. The flood of government regulators, lawyers, official return-receipt-requested letters, panicked customers and suppliers, and scared employees crashes over me as if I were caught inside by a giant wave at Waimea Bay and trapped in the crush and swirl and tumbling foam, out of control, disoriented, drowning. Jimmy was right. I’m like the Sorcerer’s Apprentice; but no sorcerer is going to arrive in the nick of time, wave his magic wand, and save me from myself.

I first encountered the Goethe poem about the Sorcerer’s Apprentice at Jimmy Hahn’s house in the early ’90s. I had seen the Mickey Mouse version when I was a kid, and took my kids to see it thirty years later. But I’d never seen the original poem until Jimmy read it to me in German and translated it for me that afternoon at his little cottage in Santa Monica. That was when my troubles were just first beginning in earnest; and I think now that Jimmy was trying to tell me something by reading me that poem.

I had gone to visit Jimmy because we had been friends a long time, since I was a grom at Santa Monica and Malibu in the late ’40s and early ’50s; and I’d heard that he was sick with skin cancer. Jimmy Hahn was an iconic surfing legend, one of the first California surfers and an innovator of both design and style. He was also a decorated lifeguard, the skipper of a rescue boat, and a true waterman. He was one of the designers of the first Malibu surfboard back in the summer of 1947. He won a bunch of long haul (over thirty miles) surfboard paddling races between Catalina Island and Manhattan Beach. I had met Jimmy when I was just a kid and he gave me the nickname Stinky, even though my name is Steve. We all had nicknames back then. I have been Stinky Kent ever since. I helped with the fiberglass job on the racing hull that Jimmy used to win the 1954 Diamond Head paddleboard race in Hawaii. Despite being a lifelong dedicated surfer and waterman he was somewhat of an autodidact philosopher and classical music snob, which is probably why he had a copy of Goethe’s poems, in German.

But this is not Jimmy’s story, it’s mine. Jimmy died not long after my visit that summer and never lived to see my life come unraveled. When I told him about the trouble I was having with the business, he just read me the poem. I guess that was all he had the energy for. I should have listened more carefully. Instead, I just had the optimism and faith in my own skills and abilities to solve all the problems.

Rather than looking for a real job after I got my degree in chemical engineering from Harvey Mudd College in Claremont in 1959, I went back to the beach where I had grown up surfing and working in the surf shops up in down the coast between Laguna Beach and Malibu. I got a job at a shop in Dana Point fiberglassing balsawood surfboards that were shaped by one of the pioneers of surfboard design.

I was very lucky to come out of college and start glassing surfboards during a time of rapid materials innovation in surfboard manufacturing and a huge increase in the popularity of the sport (the first Gidget movie had just come out). The big materials innovation had started at about the time I began surfing right after World War II. The development of fiberglass, resins, and foam for the war effort was soon applied in all kinds of experimental ways by the surfboard makers.

The original boards used in California in the 1930s were varnished redwood planks and were very heavy and difficult to transport. Then the use of fiberglass and resin to strengthen and seal the boards made the use of other, lighter, core materials possible. The most popular became balsawood, because it was light and easy to shape and the fiberglass and resin made the soft and porous wood core stronger and waterproof. By the time I got out of college there was a lot of experimentation going on with polyurethane foam. The guy I was glassing boards for at the Dana Point shop was working on a method to mold foam blanks of consistent quality and sufficient quantity to keep up with the growing demand for surfboards in the post-Gidget mania. This was where my chemical engineering background came in handy.

The whole foam-making process relied on the rapid expansion of gases within a closed mold. This was an unstable process that was difficult to control. My boss kept blowing up his molds and even blew the wall out of a shack that he was renting. So I asked him if he would let me tinker with the process and see if I could get some consistency and quality out it, and he said okay. So the apprentice was left with the magic chemicals and that was the start of all this mess. There were other guys working on this problem and a lot of competition and secrecy. I remember when Nick Gregory, the guy who would later be the first to prove that you could surf a thirty-foot wave, came over to my house one day with a case of beer and his dad, who was a defense industry chemist in Culver City. Ostensibly, they came over to share ideas about polyurethane foam chemistry; but after I drank five or six beers, I did most of the sharing. The next thing I knew, Nick had started his own blank manufacturing business. But he was a shaper at heart and ended up using my foam blanks to make his boards.

Once we figured out our method, we moved the operation from the shop at Dana Point up to an isolated shack in Laguna Canyon for secrecy and I began designing and building molds and turning out blanks. My partner told me that after balsa, working with foam was like shaping a stick of butter. Soon the foam core boards became so popular that we could not make them fast enough to keep up with demand, so my partner decided to sell his half of the blank-making operation to me so that I could concentrate on just making the foam blanks while he and the other shapers focused on making surfboards. Within a couple of years I had formed my company, Kent Blanks, and moved from the Laguna Canyon location over to Laguna Niguel.

It all started out great. Orange County had always been very Republican and pro-business. Companies like mine were welcomed with open arms and touted as being part of the California dream, leading the nation in modern technological innovation. They loved that I was bringing a new innovative manufacturing business and jobs to what was then mostly just open ranch land that was undergoing something called a Master Planned Community Process. Business was good. The more blanks we made the better control of the process we achieved, and the more we experimented with technique the more we gave our customers design aspects they requested. While, in the beginning, there were other foam blank makers, my system turned out to be the best and my company just took off. At our peak we had nearly ninety percent of the world market in surfboard blanks, churning out about 400,000 blanks a year. I had built a 20-million-dollar-per-year business. It was like the medieval dream of alchemy. I was taking cheap chemicals and turning them into a product that was the primary element for almost every surfboard made in the world. It was like turning lead into gold; it was like magic.

The problems began when they (whoever they are) determined that the main ingredient in polyurethane foam, a chemical called toluene diisocyanate, is toxic to humans. The styrene in the resins we used were considered air pollutants as well. Suddenly, all kinds of government agencies were concerned about my operations. At first it was just a matter of getting permits, reporting how much chemicals I used, and not making a mess with wastes around my factory. Starting in the 1970s, we got permits from the air pollution control agency; then in the 1980s the occupational health and safety folks started worrying about how much my workers were being exposed, which meant that I had to modify my exhaust systems, which in turn meant that I had to get permit approval from the air pollution police. In the 1990s new laws were passed to control the chemicals I was using and the Orange County Fire Department began to regulate the use of isocyanates and started a slow, but inexorable, process of bring-me-a-rock. You know the old trick played on fraternity pledges, new Boy Scouts, and naïve devotees of shyster gurus. You tell the poor ignorant but loyal fool to bring you a rock and when he does, you say, Not that rock, giving no more direction or guidance, sending him off on a hopeless and endless quest to bring you the rock of your imagination with no idea of its size, color, or shape. That is what the fire department started to do to me. A couple of accidental spills didn’t help my reputation with them either. I once spent a half a million dollars on permits and engineering studies to make modifications to my process required by the fire department, only to have them deny approval and cite me for failure to make the modifications.

Then the worker injury lawsuits began. Most of them claimed that the chemicals in the process made them sick or gave them cancer. I got sued by a guy’s widow. In a couple of cases the attorney’s fees were forty times higher than the settlement amount for the supposedly injured employee. I paid out over a million dollars to settle these cases and they kept coming at me relentlessly, like a slow-motion avalanche in a nightmare that you can’t escape, your feet frozen, unable to move, while the wall of snow or lava or mud or a great crashing wave of water cascades and tumbles, threatening to bury you.

As annoying and expensive as it got, when all I was dealing with were the local air pollution control agency, the county fire department, and the city planners, and my lawyers were handling the worker injury lawsuits, I still felt I had some semblance of control over the situation. When I received a twenty-page citation from the federal Environmental Protection Agency and was told that it would be handled in federal court, I knew that any perception that I was in control was an illusion, an illusion of my own special design and fabrication. Panic set in and I began to think of an escape route. I was coming to the end of the ride on a very big and powerful wave on which I had been in skillful and thrilling control but was now about to rear up, curl over, close out, and crash on my head; and I was desperately looking for a way out.

That was when I realized that all the innovative pioneer development that resulted in original unique designs, processes, equipment, molds, and chemical formulations made the whole operation impossible to sell or give away. Because I had created this magic, no matter how far I ran away from it, the liability of its operation would follow me to the ends of the earth for as long as I lived. To make matters worse, every square inch of my factory, every piece