RIDING KELLY'S WAVE

Or How I Checked My Ego At The Gate And Learned To Love The Surf Ranch

Lemoore stinks. Literally, I mean. Not necessarily in a bad way, depending on one’s affinity for the myriad barnyard smells—fecund agricultural fields, freshly tilled soil, closely stalled sheep and goats—and the acrid, urine-and-dung funk from nearby industrial cattle feedlots that permeates every breath drawn in this Kings County, California farming town.  It’s just that…well, if you’ve grown up with the salty tang of the sea on your lips and a fragrant offshore wind ruffling your hair, you tend not to associate these decidedly pastoral odors, along with that of the stale cigarette smoke emanating from the cabs of a half-dozen or so Ford F-150 diesel pickups, with being on a surf trip. But this is exactly the olfactory assault that greeted us, Kamme and me, as we stepped out of our ground-floor room at the Travel Lodge in Lemoore and into the parking lot on a warm, Central Valley early morning. Though ‘stepped’ might not be entirely accurate. For some reason we found ourselves quietly slinking to the car, piled high with surfboards, as if not wanting to be discovered doing something silly. Surfing, so many miles from the Pacific?  read the full story here