I’ve found myself immersed in a lot of beautiful foreign terrain lately. These unfamiliar landscapes are starting to take a toll. My eyes have seen so much beauty in forms they’ve never fathomed: cliffs, vistas, mountains, lakes, glaciers, woodland creatures and forests full of the kind of trees you could chop down and make it Christmas. Beauty terra firma overload. It really is something — but there are side effects. Which you’ll see first hand if you’ve looked at our website lately: It’s been dormant. And for a blossoming indie media surf mag thing that we are, that’s not good. Here’s the upside: I think I know what the problem is. There may be a remedy.

All these beautiful vistas and mountains I’m surrounded by and blown away by are simply not beach. Like my boy Ken (yeah, I was down for Barbie), my job is beach. I need wave action and salt water and sand to properly assess my surroundings.

I’ve spent a lot of life trying to diversify my “beach” obsession — but it turns out it’s the baseline that makes me tick. I can try to distract myself from it with music, film, photography, writing, literature, art and foreign landscapes in the great plains and beyond — but the homeostasis that is me at my best is all created by the beach. The ocean. Waves. And salt.

So as my ocean sabbatical comes to a close after this weekend in Yellowstone, I feel like an animal lying in wait — which is why this Bukowski poem has felt so full of invisible wry enthusiasm — I find myself stalking, ready to make my move. What better time to make my return to the brine than the kickoff of Fall in California with John John as three-time World Champ and Caity Simmers as a first time World Champ. Both represent the deserved anti-hero and a breath of fresh air for surfing in a jersey. Time to scribble and tear up this blank slate the mountains drew me. I’m coming home with the antidote.—Travis Ferré

[Above Photo: Charles Bukowski poem from Burning in Water, Drowning in Flame.]