It’s the second week of June and summer has finally arrived in Northern California. At the Novato Art Wine and Music festival yesterday, I passed someone in the sweltering crowd who smelled strongly of cocoanut oil. Back in the day, that odor wafting off sweaty bodies around our family pool meant summer was in full swing.
Of course, sun block hadn’t been invented back in the sixties. You covered up when mom was looking and, when she wasn’t, you just went ahead and got a healthy burn anyway. It only took a couple of episodes of “don’t you dare touch my back” and engrossing hours peeling your skin off in long strips before you had laid down your summer tan, which was impervious until school started again in September.
Suntan oil was for the girls, who wanted to keep their skin soft and supple as they browned nicely on their multi-colored beach towels with their bikini tops enticingly untied. Cocoanut oil was the choice for the tanning pros in the neighborhood, such as Jan Baroni, who already had a head start with her natural Italian coloring. On rare occasions, we pre-pubescent boys would even be put to work anointing those unreachable areas on the girls’ backs. I suppose they assumed we were too young and innocent to get turned on. Our main thoughts were how to extend the suntan oil slathering closer to the infinitely more desirable and mysterious regions of the female anatomy. Of course, that never happened.
We spent a lot of time outdoors in the summer. Actually, nearly all of our daylight hours. It was important to become as sun-resistant as possible in preparation for the ne plus ultra of summer outings when we would all go inner-tubing on the Russian River. I am sure that the older teenagers would have preferred to go off by themselves, but we “little kids” were probably part of the negotiations that involved the borrowing of family cars and gas company credit cards for the day.
Now, I had no idea where one acquired the enormous inner tubes that we used, but Chris O’Connor and Gary Montgomery did. They would inflate the huge black rubber doughnuts down at the Flying A gas station that used to stand at the entrance to South Knoll Road and tie them down to the tops of cars and in the backs of pick-ups.
The drive north took only an hour or so, and half the cars would be left at end of the planned trip, where we would eventually pull out. Then we would cram ourselves into the remaining vehicles like sardines and go another ten miles or so upstream. A quick lunch and we would plunge into the river.
Life jackets? You must be kidding. Thanks to our weekly block parties at the pool, we were all fairly strong swimmers. Besides, the few rapids we encountered were relatively tame. There were even some so shallow as to require getting out and portaging.
Mostly, we just floated along with the lazy current, baking in the hot sun and cooling each other down with frequent splash fights. Along the way, we would drift past fruit farms and occasionally, if the coast was clear, sneak onto shore and snatch fresh peaches off the nearest trees.
The only part of the trip that I didn’t care for was the ritual stop at one section of the river that had a row of high cliffs overhanging the water below.
However, for the others, this was where the testosterone-estrogen contract was sealed. The bravest teenage boys would challenge each other to higher and higher feats of diving, soaring off the slippery rocks while the prettiest girls would stretch out languidly in their string bikinis on the rocks opposite, like so many county fair prizes to be won. I was terrified of heights and the thought of jumping off even the lowest ledge gave me the willies, so I always made an excuse to go explore the meandering rapids nearby with Lynny Montgomery or Mike Baroni, who was even younger than I. Not that any of the cliff divers cared, I’m sure.
Finally, the day would end and we would carpool back up to the start of our floating adventure and drive home. The inner tubes were deflated and we fought to ride in the beds of the pickups or the open back of Johnny Baroni’s Scout.
Looking back, I can’t believe we got away with that. If I ever found out my daughter did something so reckless, she would be grounded for life. But, back then, it all seemed perfectly safe. The river rapids were gentle and Highway 101 was a harmless open-air thrill ride as it passed by the roadside gas station in Petaluma that advertised cigarettes on an enormous billboard that remains to this day. As we rode south, the trailing scent of cocoanut oil combined with our innocence to get us through summer unscathed.
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