This is the first of three posts that follows the small revelations that can happen on a morning walk through Ocean Beach. At the center is the LivingVoltaire: a neighborhood observer, successful businessman, quiet philanthropist, dog-treat distributor, and unlikely philosopher whose daily post turns passing moments into civic lessons.
Voltaire Street gives him the name. Ocean Beach gives him the material.
It was an early Monday morning in Ocean Beach, that hour when the town is waking up in layers.
People sleeping on the sand were beginning to stir. Cardboard was being folded, blankets were being shaken out, dogs were already claiming the beach as their kingdom, and the whole shoreline had that strange OB mixture of salt air, tenderness, chaos, and theater.
I was walking near the stretch before the pier, where the beach begins and the old memories always seem to gather. That area has long been famous to me for its characters. Real characters. The kind every neighborhood used to have before everything got polished and permitted and overexplained.
There was Spaceman, who would give you a number so that when the spaceship came down, you would have your place in line. There was Marius, who collected television antennas and had them all over his house, supposedly to stay properly beamed in with the right spirit. And there were so many others, half legend and half neighbor, all part of the living folklore of Ocean Beach.
So I was already in that reflective state, remembering decades of coming down here as a kid, surfing, bodysurfing, walking, watching, absorbing OB in all its unvarnished glory.
Ahead of me was a man who did not look like Ocean Beach. He was dressed more like he was heading to a business meeting than a morning walk by the pier. Nothing wrong with that, of course, but he had that polished, outside-the-bubble look.
Nearby was a young woman with two dogs playing in the sand.
The man said something to her as he passed. I didn’t hear exactly what it was, and I wasn’t paying close attention until she answered.
Then I heard her loud and clear.
“Hey, this is Ocean Beach. You know it’s weird. Why did you come down here?” The man just kept walking. He didn’t turn around.
I passed the woman and gave her a thumbs-up.
I’m not even sure she knew why. I’m not entirely sure I knew why. But something about it hit me. It felt refreshing. It felt honest. It felt like someone had just defended the invisible constitution of Ocean Beach.
For the next thirty or forty minutes, I kept thinking about it.
Why did that little moment move me so much? Why did her sentence feel larger than the exchange itself? Why did it feel like she had not just answered a man, but spoken for a whole neighborhood?
Eventually, I made my way toward the place where the Living Voltaire sits every day.
He was there, as he usually is, holding court without looking like he is holding court. Watching dogs, greeting certain people, noticing everything.
I said, “I had something profound happen, and I don’t know why it moved me so much.”
He looked at me with that familiar patience, as if the world is always handing us little riddles and he has all day to help solve them.
“What happened?” he asked.
So I told him. I told him about the well-dressed man, the young woman with the two dogs, the comment I didn’t quite hear, and her reply.
“Hey, this is Ocean Beach. You know it’s weird. Why did you come down here?”
I told him it just felt good to hear her say it. Like she had stood up for something. He nodded.
“There’s a reason for that,” he said.
Then he paused, in that way he does before dropping something simple and devastating. “It’s plain and simple,” he said. “It’s the one thing Americans have always agreed on.” “What do you mean?” I asked.
He said, “When the founders were forming this country, they were trying to get ideals down. Virtues. Values. All the things people argue about. But the one thing they could agree on was the First Amendment. Freedom of speech.”
And there it was again.
The Living Voltaire of Ocean Beach blowing my mind from his usual seat.
Because suddenly the whole moment made sense. That woman was not just snapping back atsomeoutsider.Shewasspeakingfromthedeepestinstinctoftheplace.Don’tcomedown here and tell us how to be. Don’t walk into Ocean Beach and act surprised that it is Ocean Beach. Don’t try to sand down the weirdness.
This is OB.
And OB, for all its changes around the edges, has remained remarkably itself for as long as I have known it. Fifty, sixty years of characters, surfers, dogs, drifters, philosophers, musicians, eccentrics, old-timers, young rebels, and people who simply do not fit neatly anywhere else.
That is why I love it.
I love that it has resisted becoming too clean, too curated, too obedient. I love that a woman with two dogs can still speak up on the sand at seven in the morning and remind a stranger where he is. I love that the neighborhood still has enough spirit to answer back.
And I love that later, when I took this little moment to the Living Voltaire, he turned it into a meditation on the First Amendment.
Only in Ocean Beach can a beachside encounter become a civics lesson.
Only in Ocean Beach can a woman with two dogs, a man in business clothes, and a street philosopher on Voltaire combine into one perfect little American opera.
So thank you to the woman on the sand. Thank you to the Living Voltaire.
Thank you to the founders for free speech.
And thank you, Ocean Beach, for still being weird.
