In 1976 America Was Just Coming Out Of A Protracted Depression called the Vietnam War, but back then I was still deep in the middle of mine. I was twelve years old, and boy was I pissed.

It was early in May on that particular spring morning and I was huddled with some other children on Seal Beach around 9th Street. We were staring out through a predawn mist at the gray Pacific Ocean while consulting Walter Dixs old surf watch to time the AWP-which is what Walt called the Average Wave Period between the incoming swells. Walt called swells the steeps.

The beach we were on was about fifteen miles from the Huntington House Group Home, which was in a run-down neighborhood in Harbor City, a few minutes southeast of Carson. There were four of us gathered around Walt, all wearing beavertail wet suits with the sixties-style long flap that wrapped around under your crotch and left your legs uncovered. We were his lifers. The yo-yos. The kids who kept getting thrown back. All of us knew we would probably never get another chance at a foster family or adoption because we were too ugly or too flawed or we had lousy county packages, having already been placed too many times and then returned with bad write-ups.

But there were other reasons we didn't make it. We were an angry group. I held the Huntington House catch-and-release record, having just been sent back for the fifth time. My last foster family had called me incorrigible, unmanageable, and a liar. Probably all pretty accurate classifications.

The four of us had been specifically chosen for different reasons by Walter "Pop" Dix for that mornings sunrise surf patrol. Of course we had all desperately wanted to be picked, but it wasn't lost on any of us that we'd earned the privilege because of a variety of recent setbacks. Pop understood that, even though we'd failed, it didn't mean we were failures. He also understood our anger, even if nobody else did. Pop was the executive director of Huntington House and was the closest thing to a father I'd ever known.