THE CATS OF ENCINITAS The cats of Encinitas have a little game trail they have worn into the bluff beneath the State Beach Headquarters of Elija. The old man standing on the bluff was checking out the surf between Swamis to the north and Salt Creek to the south when he saw a little flash of fluff in the ice plants below. There, staring out of the darkness beneath the plants was a little brown and white kitten. It little face wrinkled, its little mouth stretched open and its little voice went Meow.. Then it vanished. He knew about the cats. Had seen them for years and had even sat apart from them watching the surfers even as they watched the surfers. He would see a good cut-back and say to the cats, Good cut-back. They, in return, would turn their heads in unison and give him the ‘cold local stare’. He had been coming to this part of the coast ever since he was a teenager. Before surfing was acceptable. Before the heel of the jackboot had made its first prints in the sand of the California beaches. Back then his kind were looked down upon, despised, even ridiculed. They were the favorite subjects, next to the black man, of the police. When he was a teen the lineups were empty in the winter. The waves un-encumbered. Now the breaks were crowded and rude all year-long. A cold winter storm out of the northwest charged down the northern California coast bringing with it days of wind-blown rain and dark low clouds that boiled overhead. When the storm began to abate, the solitary old man drove his old pick-up with his heavy long board down to the bluff to check out the surf. It was big. The swell was running at ten to twelve feet and after hundreds of miles were about as clean as they could get with eighteen second intervals between waves. The waves were forbidding. Dark gray ranks that marched in from the ocean in perfect symmetry appeared out of the rainy mist. The nearer they came to shore the more they grew in their armor of chop on their faces and the gray beards on their crests. As they scathed the outside reefs and marched into the shoals they peeled with a ground-shaking rumble that sent the Adrenalin coursing through his veins. The core of surfing was out. The names in the magazines were in the line-up with hundreds of others all up and down the coast. Seventy-five percent were just sitting on their boards floating on the shoulders of giant waves, comfortable and secure with wet suits and leashes while others were paddling into fantastic waves that were made of dreams and happen only once or twice a year. He was not going out. The surf was too big, too far out and he was in no shape to wrestle the ocean and the milling crowd. His struggling emotion was squeezed into a painful knot in his stomach that had become the story of his elderly life. While checking out an unusual six-foot shore-break tube in front of him he saw out and away from the exposed rocks in a foamy surging rip a soaked ball of fluff. High tide had inundated the rock barrier and the lower half of the steps near the bluff, where the cats live, and had captured one of the kittens. Then he saw the mother in the water and assumed she had been captured also. But, no, she was swimming away from shore. She was swimming towards her little kitten. The rip swept mother and cat swiftly out into the trough of a wave thirty feet from where he stood with the tide lapping at his feet. In the face of the pitching wave the little kitten was stuck motionless looking more like a smudge than a fluff. Behind him two surfers stood higher on the bluff. He hears one of them say, look at that stupid cat, man. It ain’t got a fucking chance. Not a snowballs chance in hell, said the other. Then together they said, Cool man. Wave and kitten were thrown out into a dirty brown tube while the mother cat disappeared behind a curtain of sea. The wave exploded off the large chunks of concrete and rock that lay hidden three feet beneath the surface. The old man flinched as the grinder wound down the shoreline. Behind him he heard, “Cool.†The soup foamed in toward shore while he searched the checkered white pattern left on the surface by the wave for any sign of the cats. His eyes traveled from one foam patch to another; around the swirls and small temporary currents he searched and while he searched his mind wandered into a senior’s moment. He saw clearly in his mind a young man with long blond hair plastered to his head streaking along a six-foot wall of the same checkered white and dark swirls of foam and sea in a squat, his left leg extended into a cheaters five off the nose of his long board. The memory was strong enough that the man’s heart beat faster. He almost smiled but then remembered the cats and focused his eyes and mind. The old man hunched up from a cold flash that traveled through his spinal column while rain water dripped out from under his ball cap and off his long gray hair. His eyes swept the coastline. He could see the swells firing off all the reefs. The two surfers behind him opted for an easier paddle out and head to Swamis. It’d take them an hour to get a parking spot and when they did make it into the line-up they would be numbers fifty-two and fifty-three. At the top of the bluff they yelled down to him. “They’re done for, dude!†Another shore-break tube came in. The wave pitched out over itself into a perfect barrel and axed into the shallow blocks and rebounded back out and into the air.  The explosion hung and formed a mist that the wind snatched and swept away. The dirty white surge swirled around his feet and he realized that the tide was still on the rise. As another shore break wave formed he studied the stretched and smooth water in front of it for the cats. For some unknown reason he felt desperate. Desperate like the cat trying to rescue its young. Did it have emotions like love and worry? The wave pitched out and thundered into the shallows like a pile driver and he backed up the bluff a little farther. He had given up hope but could not bring himself to leave. He was getting colder from his soaked trousers and shoes yet he still searched. Then he saw her. Twenty feet behind the forming shore-break. He had been looking in front of the shore-break while the whole time she had been swept out. As she fought the fading rip he silently cheered and rooted her on. As each successive wave traveled beneath her she slowly came closer to shore. He followed along the rubbled shoreline as she drifted sideways with the new current during slack tide. The ocean had quieted except for the swells and the mother cat began to make noticeable headway. Headway into the hard tubing overhead shore-break that was doing its level best to destroy the large chunks of concrete and rock at the base of the bluff. The cat was just a barely distinguishable form when a fast-moving wave, larger than the others, grew up behind her, preparing to break farther out than all the other shore break waves. He put his hands to his head and clutched his hat. His mouth opened and closed without uttering a sound. Suddenly he had to pee and began to dance from one foot to another. The wave continued to rise up behind the mother cat. It was huge, at least fifteen feet from trough to crest. It was now that the old man saw a small bundle like a mouse, held hanging from her mouth. The mother cat had her offspring. She had actually found and recovered the kitten. But it was too late. There was no way that she was going to survive the wave that was now sweeping her and her kitten upwards into the mottled sky onto its gray-black face. The pee ran down the man’s leg. It would have been humiliating had he not been soaked to begin with and on the brink of launching himself, clothes and all, into the cold swift ocean. As the mother cat and kitten became vertical on the face of the wave and underneath the lip that was already in the process of leaping outward, she arched her back, dug her left rear leg into the face and made the drop, head-first on the soft fur of her belly. The wave fought to suck the cats back up its face but the mother cat barely skimmed the surface and controlled her position with her left leg and hip. She disappeared into the tube. And she surfed the wave down the shoreline. It was a fantastic stand up tube of monochrome gray and black shadows and the man yearned to join with it, like that fantastic, bold surfing cat who, he thought, was now being smashed into the jagged edges and corners of concrete and rock. He stumbled along the bank, threading and climbing blocks that were inundated with surf. The surge swept up around his knees and fell into the wash. He stopped and watched the wave section against the hard concrete bank. The soaked old man, his thinning hair plastered like dark gray thread across the top of his head, stood with his hat in hand waiting for the wave to end. Whatever had happened it was now over. He could see no movement, no objects in the wash of ocean and shore. He climbed out of the water and up the bank for a better view. Although he still hustled he was not hopeful. But, there she was. Her and her dangling kitten still alive not looking much different than a drowned floating rat. She was once again swimming against a weak current and amongst piles of sea-foam. He was elated, and he moved as quickly as he could down to the waters edge to stumble among the wash and rock. He stopped and watched as a chalk-streaked wave grew behind her. But the new current was moving her back out once more and the barreling wave smashed into the shallows and peeled off, thundering in front of her. She was moving very slow and struggling to keep her hind legs up, like a sinking ship going down by the stern. She was exhausted and on her last reserves. The whole universe knew that this was her last attempt to reach land. He was tired of trying to run back and forth along the concrete rubble. It seemed like he had been doing this forever. But now he realized he and the cats had arrived at the climax. This was it: the last chance. He waded out carefully through and over the blocks, waist deep, where he hoped he could get his hands on the cats when the time came. He wedged his feet between blocks of concrete and stood with the water around his waist. Suddenly realizing what he was about to do he stripped off his jacket and threw it onto shore where the tide immediately claimed and carried it away. In front of him, fifty feet away, the mother cat with her kitten clenched in her mouth struggled with her last effort to stay up, barely making way against a soft ebb. Behind her another grinding tube began to peel off onto the blocks. He waded farther out until the water was just under his armpits. He would watch and see what happened and at the last second he would duck down beneath the surface, find a block and hold on while the tube axed him. After that he would surface and find the cats. It was all he had. The lite rain that had been swept along with the wind, died. The brisk on-shore stiffened. The low scudding clouds thinned and broke up, revealing, thousands of feet up, flat lenticular wind-swept saucers. Beyond, thousands of more feet, wispy mares tails swept gracefully across a bright blue sky. The ocean turned blue and the foam a brilliant white while a flight of albatross sailed along the face of an outside wave. Again, a wave lifted the cats, its lip pitched out and they made the drop. The old man, now in front of the approaching tube looked down the barrel at the cats surfing toward him. The mother cat looked at the old man from within the barrel and their eyes locked. The surge swept out, pulling his legs out from under him and the old man as he went under looked into the vortex of the wave, seeing the cats travel over him. The wave sucked him up and he went over the falls losing his shoes and hat. He was driven into the blocks and amidst a million bubbles and flashes of sea and sky he tumbled until out of nowhere a hand grabbed him by the belt of his trousers. The two surfers had returned and while one rescued the would-be rescuer, the other rescued the cats. He lay on the blocks above the wash of the waves with his head pounding and his ears ringing. On his chest lay the two cats, the mother with her kitten still in her mouth. He watched their chests rising and falling while the mother cat looked deep into his eyes and then licked her kitten, perfectly content lying on his body. Dude what were you trying to do? The old man looked up into the face of the surfer standing over him dripping water and blood. His buddy standing next to him dripping oceans of sea answered for him. Body surfing. Man, that was some wave you and the cats had. Totally awesome dude. As the two surfers walked back up the bluff the old man heard one say to the other. Unbelievable, bro. Cats in the tube. and they started laughing.