This article ran in the New York Times Sunday Magazine, on November 15, 1998.

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About a million California surfers don't own land on the private and utterly sublime Hollister Ranch, located on Point Conception, just up from Santa Barbara, Calif. A hundred do. That ratio helps explain why Ranch surfers are so often described in impolite terms—as self-indulgent trust-fund brats, bloodsucking beachwear industrialists or even retired drug dealers. They're floating on a hydrosphere of empty, sparkling surf, near pastoral green hills and oak-filled canyons, while the lumpen surfetariat is stacked five to a wave at Rincon, Trestles and Huntington Beach, shouting over the traffic noise and condo construction and stewing in have-not hostility.

The Ranch has always been defined in terms of beauty, privacy, expense and discipline. For more than a century, the Hollister family farmed their 39,000 acres, but in the late 1960's, they sold the 14,000-acre main ranch—including nine miles of exquisitely preserved coastline—and it wasn't long before 100-acre parcels were on the market. (One is currently listed at $4.75 million.) While at Malibu hordes of Valley cowboys paddle around in four-foot crumblers from the point to the pier, here you can enjoy faultless eight-foot cylinders at Big Drakes or Razorblades, near the south end of the Ranch, in near solitude. Not surprisingly, Ranch surfers have earned a reputation for being among the most unfriendly and undemocratic on the planet.

Although surfers can walk into the Ranch, it's four arduous miles to the nearest good break. Boating in is an option, but the equipment is expensive and hassles are manifest. And Hollister landowners, who try to keep their waves a secret, are usually standing by to greet visitors with yells, threats, even fists.

Such exclusivity cuts against the history and esthetic of surfing, which has always been a natural for the cash-strapped or overdrawn. Waves are free and not much equipment is required: nude bodysurfing is at the irreducibly low end of the gear range. When ex-world champion Tom Curren dropped off a rented car and left $7,500 worth of prize checks on the floorboards, the story became an instant legend.

Still, there has always been a strange acquiescence from surfers about the Ranch's elitism. We don't trust ourselves. Free access would bring crowds, noise, trash and ruin—which makes it hard to tell if the privileged Ranch surfers are small-bore autocrats or simply preservationists. So while Curren, a surfing deity, is at the moment living in Orange County in a tract house and is probably stuck in traffic right now on the way to the beach, the Ranch surfer—anonymous at best, and almost certainly reviled—is cruising past the gate, headed for open spaces, open ocean and quietude.

It's not hard to figure out who's having the better time.

"STATUS IS . . . FOR SURFERS: A KEY TO CALIFORNIA'S BEST PRIVATE BEACH," BY MATT WARSHAW (1998)

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