long road from hollister
The Hollister logo was emblazoned across the chest of a guy sitting on a rock in the middle of the end of a dirt road. It took us 4 hours by 4x4 to find the one (in)voluntary toll road. The toll gate was really his rock, in the middle of a deer path/road? The stone was positioned with quiet authority of a local who got there first carrying a sufficiently large rock. There were two other verrry sketchy guys who eventually accepted a counter offer of "snack" just to get rid of us. The transaction was supposedly optional, but I was sad to lose my popped corn.
The road continued.
Hollister, for the record, is a scrub-oak town in California nowhere, famous for an annual motorcycle riot and not much else. Abercrombie and Fitch built a Southern California beach identity from the name, curious choice considering the place is an inland farm town hours from any beach. The brand inherits nothing distinctive or god forbid uniquely central CA. The name is sold globally to people for whom it is less than a combination of letters. Three layers of dislocation before the shirt even got to the dude in a container from a Chinese factory.
The rock in the road was more straightforwardly itself.
Jarring what followed, the DOT shirt. That DOT shirt, red circle, yellow lettering, the Santa Cruz Skateboards logo that everyone who grew up downtown could scan from 2 blocks away. I grew up down there. I know what the DOT meant, which is a problem.
Santa Cruz surf culture ran on Locals Only, and the credo was not academic. It was long practice, the lineup at "The Lane"" operated on the understanding that "Valleys"" didn't belong and should "go home". A Valley , so you know, was anyone who dared to drive treacherous Highway 17 over the mountain from San Jose. To poach a wave that clearly didn't belong to them. The xenophobia was real and it was practical. Finite waves, (imaginary) infinite demand, the commons tragically hoarded by the first groms with a sufficiently large rock. Metaphorically speaking. You wore the DOT for tribal identity. That was your passport asserting your right to drop into the lineup.
The DOT logo is following me, on a road the original 'Locals Only' crowd couldn't find on a map, TBH it wasn't really on paper maps anyway but Google assured us it was traversable. I don't know how I feel about seeing misplaced artifacts from my past. For sure not pride. Something crouching on your chest like altitude, present yet distinctly not right, out of place. Maybe there is a name for it, cognitive-dislocatedness?
Or not.
O'Neill, at least, had legitimate walking papers. Jack invented the modern wetsuit in a cold-water garage and the company never abandoned our town. Finding his logo from Peru to Chile just means surf culture moved farther than the surf. The DOT is different. The Valleys won, that's what the DOT means, three thousand miles from the Lighthouse and Steamers Lane.
Valleys were the locals all along.
Complicating the facile globalization hot take are the abuelas. The youngsters are on their phones, bathed in algorithmic glow like everyone everywhere. Hollister obv included.
But a few women of advancing years still rock traditional dress. De rigueur a few decades ago. Here they are topped by cool felt hats that I guess protect from the sun? colorfully embroidered dresses, neither performative nor protest, just what they are wearing today. Probably not consciously holding any line, meanwhile global turned local, and local is harder to find.
The last thing I ever expected was a Mystery Spot bumper sticker on a Willys (Willix?) in Colombia, a proto-SUV that just keeps working, ignoring its own obsolescence; this one was lovingly maintained, parked at the end of another road that stopped being a road at least a few km back.
The one and the same Mystery Spot is a local huckster tourist trap at the end of its own improbably winding road, the attractions are all gravity illusions and whole-cloth lore.
Their primary marketing trick is a bumper sticker about disorientation. Few self-respecting locals would put one on their own car. That is for Valleys, token proof they were in "SC", acquired, forgotten and eventually, by some chain of hand offs the length of a highland dirt road, to nowhere, Colombia.
The DOT traveled as identity. O'Neill traveled as provenance. The Mystery Spot sticker traveled as something nobody claimed.
🔴