1. Surfing
The sea, the sea. -Iris Murdoch
Every year, for as long as I can remember thinking about surfing, I’ve also thought, “I’m going to try to surf this year.”
Until this year, that has been a lie.
I have been blessed with many natural physical talents, some of which I will not formerly record here. As an example of something I can admit to, it’s easy for me to walk for a long time. If I were asked to dig a bunch of holes or carry a bucket filled with water from one place to another for an afternoon, I could do both without complaint. My body and mind are easily accustomed to a chore of endurance. Also, I’m good at catch.
What I’ve never had a knack for is the imagination and fearlessness that makes up true athleticism. I’m horrified by injury; the slightest twist of an ankle or ache in a knee will have me back on the couch with my feet elevated. I sometimes do yoga, but I’m not notably flexible, dextrous, or steady.
You can’t really tell people any of that without them thinking you’re putting yourself down, especially instructors trying to teach you a skill to which you are genetically unsuited. For four days in a row, the uniformly gorgeous young men trying to get me to stand on a board as it ricocheted off every bubble of foam urged me to believe in myself, to understand I am a machine built to surf. There is nothing I’m built less to do, actually. But I wasn’t insulting myself by expressing that. To attempt something you are unable to do over and over is one of the few things untalented people have in their arsenal. Anyone who is good at surfing can surf, after all, so to be bad at it and not stop even when those uniformly gorgeous instructors have given up on you is the real test.
My terror of physical damage is less around water. I don’t know why, because there isn’t another element that will so rapidly and carelessly kill you. I wasn’t afraid of drowning or sharks as I dragged a brine-logged board out to the breakers each day. It’s not that I’m an elegant swimmer, and I always get out of the tide when it tugs too hard. It’s just that water transforms my body instantly, more quickly than drugs, alcohol, food, or even falling in love. My mother likes to say that we are just containers for water to walk around in, which she probably read somewhere. In the ocean, the walls of the container are gone. This isn’t scary to me; it’s a relief. I am better in the water, immediately a better person, and that goes a long way with fear.
The ocean along the west coast of Portugal is cold to the point where only children gleefully jump in it. You can always tell something is wrong when the sand is littered with towels and sunbathers and no one is scampering in the waves except the bravest, blue-lipped little soldiers in the war for fun. Did I swim without a wetsuit on my trip to Ericeria? Yes. The ocean makes me a child at heart! Wearing a full body wetsuit for the first time, though, was a revelation. At first, I was scared of the wetsuit. I know that sounds silly, but it is so constrictive, so tight around the throat. I had to ask another beginning surfer to do it up for me in the back, praying he wouldn’t say anything lascivious as he tucked the strings of my bathing suit into the zipper. At the last second, I told him to leave it a little open on top, undoing the Velcro collar and breathing to offset the panic of claustrophobia. When I stepped into the water, the wetsuit felt incredible. The cold that was just slightly too cold to be tolerable was held at bay. I could stay in the water all day in this ridiculous outfit. Then the first wave that hit me split the wetsuit back open as easily as splitting a grape under your heel. My loose collar flopped, and juice flooded the interior. I had to lean over my board and ask an instructor to do it up for me again in between sets. He firmly Velcroed the collar shut and I gulped.
I’m at an age where describing anyone under 30 in a lustful way has begun to feel distasteful. This is more about me than anyone reading, so please don’t be offended if you like being all horned up for twenty-somethings. Many young people are attractive to me, of course, but experience makes them seem further away than a 39 year old seemed to be when I was 26, for example. My boyfriend when I was 26 was 42. Now, looking back the other direction, trying to have some sort of romantic interlude with someone that age feels like interfering with a developing project, meddlesome, and a little vampiric. Part of the attractiveness of youth is just how many possibilities it contains. I’ve expended some of my possibilities, so trying to find them again in a younger person seems very unfair to them. In this case, too, these were all guys doing their jobs. Being a creepy, middle-aged woman coming on to people at their place of business (the Atlantic Ocean) is not a persona I’m ready to adopt. I hope it never will be, but who knows what extremes I’ll be driven to someday.
That being said, I do want to elaborate a little further about how incredibly vital, handsome, and endearing all these young surfers were. The ocean is one of the most beautiful things in the world, and each one of them was a part of it. Their physiques were built by their profession, one they couldn’t have entered without a natural grace and intuitiveness, without being mostly water themselves, much more than the ordinary container person. Even just wading out to their posts, they moved so perfectly and unselfconsciously, like dancers stretching at the mirror who are not even putting on a show and yet draw every eye as the room goes silent to watch. Their hair, their skin were drenched with sun. It imbued them with a golden glow almost too bright to look at directly if I didn’t want to blush, which I consider to be a sunburn of the emotions.
Over the course of a few days, I learned a bit about them, partly because the other students whispered gossip to each other when we spun into shore together, out of their range of hearing. Everyone was enthralled, like you would be about the high school football team in a small town during playoff season. I learned they did these lessons 2 or 3 times a day, pushing in tourist beginners for two hours straight who were unequipped to paddle out at the right time without careful guidance. Most of them worked all summer with the various surf hostels up and down the coast. Then in winter, when the waves got really serious, they surfed and competed and traveled and forgot all about us.
I also learned a lot about them because I’m pretty good at getting people to talk to me. I’d hold up the line chatting, propped up in a cobra position on my board as one of them clung to the side to keep me in place and told me about their favourite Nolan movie or the small surf town in another country they came from or the girl they moved here for or what their sponsorship ambitions were. Waves would smash into us and I’d grip the board so I could ask a follow up question, pushing my soaking bangs out of my face again and again to hear more.
“I like gossiping with you, Aimée,” one said, when I ended up in another instructor’s line. He waved me back over.
But this friendliness only lasted until the end of the lesson. Once we were all back on shore, their sea glass gazes shuttered, and they hurried to get our boards and us back on the rig and into the van. They rushed through their ablutions, stripping off their suits and running into the showers. We barrelled through traffic and back to our accommodations and then they sped off to wherever they went when on dry land. Probably to some hot food and a nap before the next round.
I brought this up with another instructor named John on my last day there, asking, “Is it tiring, dealing with people all day and having to talk to us? Are people nice to you?”
Actually, I was curious if they got hit on all the time, but couldn’t think of how to ask that without sounding like I was hitting on him. I really wasn’t. I was just fascinated the way you are when you have a little crush on seven people at once.
“Mostly, yes. When I used to work at a five star hotel, then people were…,” he shook his head to indicate how bad. Another wave rolled us. Over his shoulder, my gossip companion, Tommy, ducked under the surface then rose up like a Disney mermaid, flicking back his dripping curls. He was by far the most beautiful, also the youngest, and it was sweet to hear how young he was when he loudly announced, “It’s cloudy today! On my birthday!”
His colleagues ignored him, but I wished him a happy birthday and he looked almost shy for a moment.
I tried to explain to John how I’d observed the surfers shut off when the lesson was over and it made me think it must be socially draining. He laughed and agreed, then turned my board around and shoved me away.
So, I’m not afraid of the ocean and I was having a delightful time, but here is the problem with surfing: most of what you’re actually asking your body to do is outside of the water. All of the things I’m worst at come immediately into play. I had no balance and a very legitimate fear of falling and hitting my head. Something people who have never tried to surf may not realise is that you’re mostly not that deep to begin with. This particular beach was very rocky, and where we stood chatting and awaiting waves, the water only came up to my waist. By the time I pushed out of a cobra into an upward dog, it was knee-high, and if I managed to get my feet under me, I was practically skimming the sheet of stone just below the surface. All around me, other students were standing and technically surfing. They then slid down and off their boards to return back to the line, seemingly without incident. This, I just knew, was not possible for me. I was going to simply fall and die in front of everyone and it would be very embarrassing, which is how I’m pretty sure I will die one day. Embarrassingly. Which is better than sadly, I guess, if I have to choose.
The rock was my enemy. It contained hidden ledges that cruelly banged my ankles no matter how carefully I stepped and was slippery with algae on the shore for about thirty feet until it connected with sand, making it a perilous trip with the board back and forth from the van. In fact, the entire walk was brutal and too long. I’m not a good judge of how much things weigh, so I’ll just say my board also weighed too much, far too much for me, and I started to beg one of the other tourists to double up, each of us taking one end of each other’s board, which distributed the weight into a more manageable load. Or, I’d hoist it to my head, balancing it as well as I could and working another set of muscles until they screamed, then shifting it down by my side again, all while wobbling over this slippery, hateful rock. It was worse going back, of course, because I was tired and some part of the ocean was in the board now, so I was dragging myself and the board and the exhaustion and the pull of the undertow all the way back home.
Optimistically, when I returned from another failed push, John claimed that my issue was not the brain-smashing rock under a teaspoon of water, it was that I didn’t believe in myself. Watching another instructor help stand a girl up on her board by leaning on the broadness of his shoulders, we decided to try that together. The problem was she was probably a foot shorter and John’s shoulders didn’t seem up the task once I was crouching on the seizing blue surface. Sometimes, I think I am just too much person to be like other people, this dense giantess. And really, I like it. I like being this undeniable object who just moves steadily and slowly forward through the mud of existence, a steam engine next to a field of wild horses. They go more beautifully, but I’ll go farther… Still, I really wanted to stand, because John was being so kind and because all my shrieking was drawing attention. Eventually, I gave up and slipped over the side again to bob in the welcoming current. It felt great to be back there.
“I’m sorry,” I told him, because he looked disappointed.
“It’s mental, it’s mental,” he insisted. “I’m sure once you get rid of the fear, you will be like—”
He gestured to say I might ride a wave if my mind would let me.
“I promise you,” I said, touching his shoulders more gently this time. “It’s okay that I’m bad at this. I will stick with it. Persistence is how I get most things. It will take me longer than you can believe, but I’ll do it. Persistence!”
“I like that,” he said. “Persistence. Persistence!”
If I was a wild horse kind of person, this story would culminate with finally standing and riding my first wave, but I actually did that on the second day. I did it twice for about five seconds and then never again in subsequent lessons. And I did fall off the board onto the rock. On my ass, not my head. At night, I pulled down my pjs in the bathroom mirror to observe the massive bruise along my upper glute that hurt when I rolled over in bed or walked or did anything for almost a week. I didn’t die and it was only a little embarrassing.
On the last day, after the final push and failed attempt to stand, I lay down on my stomach and just let the waves take me in as far as they could. My arms were noodling over the side of the board, my hands drifting back and forth like seaweed. I closed my eyes and listened to the air coming in and out of my throat past the constrictive wetsuit collar. Salt water spilled into my mouth and I spit it out like a whale shooting streams through a blow hole. A concerned German tourist shocked me out of my reverie, asking if I was all right. Gelatinously, I pushed myself up one more time and clawed at the board, preparing for the grueling trip back across the rock and sand. There was no one to share the load with, I was behind everybody. By the time the slippery stone turned to fine grains, I had to switch my grip, lifting the board onto my head again and taking a deep breath. Use your core, I thought fiercely.
Just then, John passed me by and said, “The transition begins.”
I had no idea what he meant and huffed a laugh through my struggling lungs in response. Only after he had scampered lightly ahead of me did I remember what we’d talked about in the ocean, how coming back to land altered him and the other guys and everything. By the time I reached the group he was changing furtively by the showers, clearly thinking about something a million miles away and it felt awkward to even say goodbye. It wouldn’t have been easy to express how much it meant to me to spend four days trying and failing at something I have always wanted to do, because even trying was more than I’d ever done. And it would have been weird and unwelcome to say how much I’d like to be like all of them, to embody the water even when I’m standing up in the air above it. I’m only a container, but maybe one day I will be the sea.
Some other stuff about 1. Surfing:
I went to the Portuguese Surf Film Festival and one of the more beautiful short films was about longboard champion “El Gordo,” which you can watch here:
A longer film was Corners of the Earth which featured some very extreme surfers in Kamchatka, Russia, where they landed basically the same day as that country invaded Ukraine. This is largely unaddressed in the film itself, but the style of surfing and the extremes of climate and waves served as a pretty interesting contrast.
Since coming home, I have been trying to figure out how to surf in NYC and learning more about the culture of surfing in Rockaway, Montauk, and other New York beaches. Many people probably know the Black Surfing Association, but here’s a cool interview from them anyway:
Until the next thing!