It is about a 30-minute walk from Michelle Donez’s home to the end of the Oceanside Municipal Pier, a trip she made most mornings for decades.
But that familiar morning trek stopped on April 25 when a fire ignited in the vacant restaurant on the structure’s westernmost reaches.
“I haven’t been able to come back down here since the fire, I just couldn’t do it,” she said. “It was just too painful, but getting it back today is like the return of an old friend.”
She and many others returned at 7 a.m. Friday, forming an impromptu throng of pier peers determined to reclaim what had been closed for 15 days.
They found that their morning walks were a bit shorter than they used to be, ending at a black chain link fence blocking access to the wide “hammerhead” platform now holding up the charred remains of what once was a Ruby’s Diner, but now looks like it suffered the brunt of a Santa Anna-driven wildfire on some isolated back country road. Such a spectacular ruin just doesn’t seem likely a quarter-mile out over the Pacific Ocean.
Losing a little distance on her morning walk did not bother Donez in the slightest. Better, she said, to have most of the path open again, even if the final few hundred feet will remain a demolition site for some time to come.
What is it about the pier that keeps so many coming back day after day? Sure, Donez said, a pier takes a person into a slice of nature that would otherwise be inaccessible. But a pier this long is really a way to access a particular perspective. Here, without getting wet, anybody can sidle alongside the surf lineup, watching men and women still in winter wetsuits drop in on every set that comes rolling through.
And one can go walking right on past the break and then turn around to see just how the shore stretches out.
“It’s the view going both directions,” Donez said. “We don’t often see our coastline this way, looking back toward land in both directions.
“Looking south, looking north, from out here you can see so far, and it’s just a beautiful way to start the day.”
The Oceanside pier’s long lower rails, essentially stiles designed to keep visitors from accidentally slipping under its main wooden rails, are covered with engraved names, many of them are memorials to family members no longer among the living.
When news of the fire spread, many whose loved ones’ names were engraved on the rails around the restaurant worried that they could never be recreated once they were burnt to ash. But that turns out to not be as much of a concern as many initially thought. There is no need, announced Oceanside City Clerk Zeb Navarro, for anyone to remember exactly which rail section each name was carved into.
Assistant City Clerk Thomas Schmiderer and Deputy City Clerk Kayla Valdovinos discovered detailed records of the names engraved on the pier as of March 15, 1989, “including the location, side, and rail number,” Navarro said in a Facebook post.
“Fun fact: Enice Beaver (1890-1990) was the first to get her name engraved on the pier,” Navarro said.
Many of those who were first to return Friday morning brought fishing poles and bait. It was not long until the first rod bent and Sean Foster of Oceanside hauled up a nice-sized blackspotted croaker hooked on baby mussels he pried from a riprap boulder just down the coast.
Two weeks without fishermen plying these particular waters seemed to make the bite that much more vigorous.
“They been missing us the way we been missing them,” Foster said, drawing a ripple of laughter from his fellow fishermen.
Chen Liu of Vista explained that many in Friday’s crowd are on a first-name basis, gradually getting to know each other over decades spent leaning on the rail, chatting days away even when the only thing biting is the pelican roosting on the rail down by the bait shop.
After retiring from a cooking job at Harrah’s Resort in Valley Center, Liu said he increased his pier visits from once to five times per week.
“You can get sunshine, you can get exercise, your friends talking, it’s good,” Liu said. “Here you see so many people, Chinese, Filipino, American.”
Working at the bait shop, which sits about half-way along the pier’s 1,954-foot length, for the past 15 years, Jeff Port said part of the pier’s allure is simply the fact that it’s the farthest a person can go on their own two feet.
“It’s the end of the world,” he said. “You can go to the end and just stare out into the void if that’s what you want to do.”
