In the later forties the dredges came, and all that had been sand dollars, crabs, seagulls, mud, and grass was moved, removed, built up, or otherwise altered into what we now call Gleason Point, Ventura Point. I loved watching the dark gray spume burst out of the end of the pipe a mile or so from the dredge, and the sound of billions of shells rattling through the pipes, sometimes all night long, was pleasant and romantic.

The mudflats sometimes stank at low tide; it wasn’t really a bad smell, but a grassy, muddy smell that could be pleasant if you associated it with the kinds of things you did on the mudflats. When tourists or even people who lived in other parts of San Diego saw them , they usually called them sand bars, but nobody in South Mission Beach ever said anything but mudflats. They were very black mud, except for a few areas which never were covered by high tide; these, indeed, were made of sand, but they were still called mudflats, not out of ignorance but because one of the relationships we had with the mudflats was the clubby right to call them that.

Author Keith Robinson: When I put on my red trunks with the blue San Diego Lifeguard Service patch and went on my first day’s duty as a real lifeguard it was thrilling, but the kinds of joys the Beasels knew in the sand and sun that year were gone forever.

There were several things one did on the mudflats, so that a mention of them was a way of reminding ourselves that we were cool and everybody outside of South Mission was a hick. We called them all hicks and hickville was everything except the other parts of San Diego, which we called downtown; a person from the government project called Frontier Housing where the Sports Arena is now, was a hick from downtown, and so was a person from East San Diego, Mission Hills, Kensington, Loma Portal, or wherever. If there had been a Clairemont then, somebody from Clairemont who showed up in our section of Mission Bay would have been the archetypal hick from downtown. I suppose our naïve and smug use of these appellations was a cousin to our habit of saying that anybody from Chicago, Omaha, Cleveland, or the like was from back east.

But as I was saying, the mudflats in the southernmost part of Mission Bay in the forties were many things to us. There was a sort of rite, for instance, which occurred at about the age of first communion when one rode for the first time in the stern thwart of a skiff rowed by an older pal all the way over to the mudflats, if there is anyone from those days who can’t remember his first giddy step on the oozy, sand-dollar littered edge of the mudflats, trying not to get too excited while looking across the entire three hundred yards of water to his house on Bayside Walk or Dover Court or San Gabriel Place, he must have had a constant surfeit of thrills since that moment, for I can imagine almost nothing that might displace my own memory of the pivotal moment. And then of course one day you got to do the rowing, and Eddie or Wayne, or whoever the older guy was didn’t even have to tell you he was doing you a favor. You didn’t get alarmed when the tide carried you many yards north or south of the point you were aiming for on the mudflats, but you would have, if Wayne or Eddie hadn’t been there, coolly disregarding your navigational ineptitude; many trips later, you finally asked how he always got where he was going, and with casual sagacity he taught you to line yourself up with houses or trees and aim above or below your destination, depending on the action of the tide. Ludicrously simple, but absolutely cosmic to an eight year old.

Once there, we trapped smelt and other small fish so that they could be used for bait; we put bread, trying not to handle it too much, in a wire trap which was always handmade, and then we went to another area to wait for the fish to swim into the trap. They were already trapped by the receding tide and it was the resulting concentration of them in shallow depressions that made them so easy to catch. Sometimes we would spend an hour or so blasting each other with handfuls of mud, which was fun to throw at each other because a good hit always riddled the victim with six or eight splats, perhaps starting at the belly and moving up the face, like a machine gun burst in a gangster movie. Often after a mud fight we would go exploring. We used that term, even though we knew ever inch by heart, because it made us feel adventurous and because there was always the chance that something had changed.

There was, for instance, a huge packing crate in the higher dry sand with pop bottles and empty Camel and Lucky Strike packages in it. We called it the fort, and we frequently checked it to see if anybody had used it since our last visit, and sometimes there were new wrappers or other evidence. Once we spent half an hour sneaking up on the fort, bellies in the sand in the best commando style, because we thought we had seen movement in it through the one-inch peephole. We assumed it was a boy and a girl necking, because that was the most exciting thing we could imagine. The last ten minutes or so was spent behind a dune only twenty yards from the fort, wondering if the guy would beat us up if we caught him making love; it was delicious agony, hoping and wanting to move the last twenty yards, to see what? Maybe a girl with her bathing suit straps undone?—but afraid of the actual confrontation. We finally got up the nerve to dash by the open part of the fort, and of course there was nothing in it but I remember we were not terribly disappointed; it was the process of getting there that had been the challenge.

Another challenge was swimming all the way across to the mudflats, and I have never looked at other rituals such as killing a lion alone with a spear without thinking that they didn’t have any idea what a real feeling of accomplishment was. I think I was about eleven years old the first time I did it, and the only parallel I can think of is getting a car five years later; both events brought a totally unexpected feeling of freedom, of a world suddenly many times larger and many times more accessible. We are allowed only a few moments like that, and for this and other gifts. I loved the bay and mudflats.

In the later forties the dredges came, and all that had been sand dollars, crabs, seagulls, mud, and grass was moved, removed, built up, or otherwise altered into what we now call Gleason Point, Ventura Point, and so on. I cannot honestly say that, at the time, I wished the Army Engineers and the City of San Diego and whoever else was messing around with the mudflats would go away; I loved watching the dark gray spume burst out of the end of the pipe a mile or so from the dredge, and the sound of billions of shells rattling through the pipes, sometimes all night long, was somehow very pleasant and romantic. But I did indeed known that something good was leaving, and my friends and I felt vaguely cheated, in spite of our enthusiasm over the new things created. It had been a great place to grow up in, to be twelve or thirteen, but it was over so we moved our rituals two blocks west to the ocean.

When I was fourteen two of my friends and I were named the Beasels by the lifeguards at Mission Beach Lifeguard Headquarters. They had been using the word “weasel” to mean somebody who was good at conning, or somebody that was good at getting what he asked for, and who was considered, affectionately, as mildly annoying. So when we hung around the station and finally got our own lockers by volunteering to work as junior lifeguards, they called us beach weasels, or beasels. That summer, the summer of 1949, was a very fine one for the Beasels; we had our friendships with each other and we had the ocean, but most of all we enjoyed the constant closeness of our models, the lifeguards. We rode in the jeeps and trucks, placed warning signs, and used the showers and lockers inside the headquarters. The lifeguards were wonderful heroes not because of their easy relationship with the ocean, we, in fact could body board better than some of them, but because of their style, the way they laughed and joked in a manner no outsider could understand. They were, or at least seemed to be very quick and witty, and they had code words for just about everything, and they were above all else cool, in control, chuckling without guffawing; they had what Elizabethan intellectuals called sprezzatura, the ability to do things well while making the doing look easy, and it was pleasant to daydream about being one of them.

We emulated the guards to such a degree we must have appeared ridiculous from time to time, as when we would lean on the seawall in front of headquarters. A six-foot guard could bend over and rest his forearms on the wall, and shift his weight periodically from leg to leg so that his shins were always slanted one way or the other, but we had to stay virtually vertical in order to put our arms on the wall. And we tried to use the language properly, as in the correct pronunciations of bitchen, a word whose obvious etymology has nothing to do with its meaning, and whose use in those days immediately identified the user as a person from the beaches of Southern California. In fact, when I went to college in another state, I didn’t understand at first how some people knew I was from San Diego, if they had never talked to other beach people. They recognized bitchen, but some people looked at me as thought I were swearing. And the reciprocal of that story is the newcomers to our neighborhood would try to pick up their linguistic membership cards, and in so trying would commit pathetic blunders like “Man, the surf at Windansea was really bitching today.” And we loved those blunders because we could give each other our ultra-cool looks which, though they lasted only a second, meant, “No need to say anything, he isn’t going to make it anyway.” The Beasels seemed to sense that if somebody had to be told things like that, it wasn’t authentic knowledge.

We would laugh at the tourists. Our favorites were men that wore street shoes and argyle socks with the kind of bathing suit we called a marble sack, and talk in our secret language, perfect our really rather remarkable bodysurfing skills, perform a pleasant chore now and then, and, once in awhile, for a change, we would go through headquarters to the Mission Beach Plunge, an immense indoor saltwater pool, to which, or course, we had free access. We knew the man who ran the plunge and the man who rented surf mats; we knew the Orange Julius man, the salt water taffy man, and the marvelously eccentric old lady who owned the hamburger joint to one side of the headquarters, and they all knew The Beasels.

Once in the restaurant on the other side of the headquarters the Captain, a perpetual growler called Captain by everybody except two or three lieutenants who called him Chuck, bought the Beasels cinnamon rolls and milk early one beautiful morning before anybody was on the beach, and that moment had everything we loved all compressed into one almost unbearably delicious burst of consciousness; that small unremembered act of kindness by the Captain was surely one of his most influential decisions.

Four years later when I put on my red trunks with the blue San Diego Lifeguard Service patch and went on my first day’s duty as a real lifeguard it was as thrilling as I had always known it would be, but there was a point during that day when I realized, not sadly but perhaps with a kind of not totally welcome maturity, that the kinds of joys The Beasels knew in the sand and sun that year were gone forever; one cannot forever go on walking slowly, barefoot, on the blazing hot sidewalk in front of a tourist who, yowling, can’t even make it to the shade without stopping and putting down their towel or something else to stand on. We go on to other joys, equally intense, perhaps, but. . . different.