long road from hollister
The Hollister logo was emblazoned across the chest of a local at the end of a dirt road that took 4 hours by 4x4 and one (in)voluntary toll to reach. The toll gate was a rock, in the middle of the track. Positioned with the quiet authority of someone who got there first with a sufficiently large rock, and two sketchy guys in attendance who eventually accepted a counter offer of a snack just to get rid of us. The transaction was 'technically' optional, but I was sad to lose my popped corn.
The road continued.
Hollister, for the record, is a scrub-oak town in the California nowhere, famous for an annual motorcycle riot and not much else. Abercrombie and Fitch built a Southern California beach identity out of the name, curiously choice considering it is an inland farm town hours from any beach. The brand inherits nothing distinct or uniquely central CA. It is now sold globally to people to whom it is a combination of letters. Three layers of dislocation before it even got to the dudes shirt by container from a Chinese factory.
The rock in the road was more straightforwardly itself.
Jarringly, what followed, was the DOT shirt. That DOT shirt, red circle, yellow lettering, the Santa Cruz Skateboards logo that anyone who grew up in our orbit could read at twenty meters without meaning to. I grew up in 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 held practice, the lineup at The Lane operated on the understanding that Valleys didn't belong and should "go home". A Valley was anyone who dared to drive 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 hoarded by the first groms with a sufficiently large rock. Metaphorically speaking. You wore the DOT for tribal identity. It was your passport asserting your right to drop into the lineup.
That logo is following me, on a road the original Locals Only crowd couldn't find on a map, TBH it wasn't really on any paper maps either but Google assured us it was traversable. I don't know how to feel about seeing these misplaced artifacts from my past. Definitely not pride. Something crouching on your chest like altitude, present yet distinctly not right and out of place. Maybe there is a name for it, cognitive-dislocation?
Or not.
O'Neill, at least, has legitimate walking papers. Jack invented the modern wetsuit in a cold-water garage and the company never left the town. Finding our logo from Peru to Chile just means surf culture moved farther than the surf. The DOT is different. The Valleys won, is what the DOT means now, three thousand miles from the nearest lineup.
The Valleys were the locals all along.
Complicating the facile globalization hot take are the abuelas. The youngsters are on their phones, in the same algorithmic glow as everyone everywhere. Hollister obv included. But a few women of advancing years still rock traditional dress. De rigueur a few decades ago. Still topped by the 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 getting hard 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 kept working ignoring its own obsolescence; this one was lovingly maintained, parked at the end of another road that stopped being a road 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 attraction 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 Vellesy, token proof they were in "SC", acquired, forgotten and eventually, by some chain of hands 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.
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