by Peter Heller
“Okay,” Andy said. “Let’s stay away from those dudes.” To us, all surfers were dudes, which term we found out was about a decade out of date. He took a deep breath. “Try not to drown.”
“Got it.”
We jogged to the water on the south side of the pier. I was knee-deep in heavy wave wash before I had a plan; all I knew was that I was going surfing now. I had body-surfed all through my childhood. I understood that you positioned yourself, faced the beach, and when a wave came you paddled to get launched. Then I figured you stood up. Simple.
I waded until I was waist-deep, then pushed the board into the onrushing foam and bellied onto it. The foam spun me sideways and dumped me. Okay, no problem. I waded deeper, waited for the next surge to pass, then jumped on, spread my legs wide for stability, and paddled like a fool. Exactly like a fool. Windmilling arms, big splashes.
Phew. Somehow made it past the main break and into smooth water. Andy was already here. First triumph. I looked at the knot of younger shortboarders over near the pier and figured they must know something we didn’t.
“C’mon, Andy, that’s where the waves are!”
“Don’t go over there.”
“Why not? C’mon!”
I didn’t want to get in their way, so I paddled over to them, but not too close. They sat on their tiny boards, which were so small they barely floated. I could do that, sit in the lineup like a pro.
I wriggled up on the egg and straddled it, wobbled, and capsized. Whoops, tippy damn thing.
I came up and blinked the water out of my eyes. Nobody had seen it. The surfer dudes weren’t paying me any attention. They were looking seaward, quietly, or talking among themselves. Phew. I decided to just lie on the board and wait for a wave. It came, as waves do, in a few seconds. Humped up, rolled in.
Here was the wall. I paddled like a maniac, got picked up, bucked, yelled, stood up, sort of, a fraction of a second. Pitched forward, flew in air, then foam. The wave shoved me to the bottom. I flailed for sunlight and hit my head on the underside of the egg. When I finally cleared water and breathed, there was a long-haired kid five feet away yelling at me. Mid-twenties. He had a snake tattoo running down the side of his neck, and right then the snake was negotiating extruding corded tendons, throbbing arteries. His eyes were wild. Jeez, dude, calm down.
“You fucking Goddamn KOOK! Get the fuck out of the water!”
“What? I was way out of your way—”
“Fuck! Move the fuck down there!” He waved his arm. “Way the fuck down. See you here again I’ll fuck you up!”
He shook his head, disgusted, and paddled off. As he went I noticed how fast his board moved, how he paddled way up on the front with his back arched, his chest way off the deck and his legs pinned together. He was an asshole, but he sure looked competent.
Smarting, I paddled over to Andy, who was already way south, sitting on his board, watching.
“You see that?”
“Yeah.”
“What’d I do?”
“You cut him off. Cold, dude. Dropped in on him. I thought he was going to kill you.”
“Me, too.”
“You gotta watch. Thought that was the end of the line for my buddy.” Andy pointed to the wave breaking just this side of the pier and explained to me how good waves don’t just dump but begin breaking at a peak, and continue collapsing in a traveling line that moves sideways along the shore.
“See?” he said. “The peak, where it starts breaking, is over there by the pier. That’s why those guys are there. They hop on it just as it begins to break and then they travel kind of sideways all the way down the face.” He explained that that was why a surfer who jumped on near the pier and stayed just ahead of the white pocket could end up way down here in my lap.
I stared. “There’s a whole bunch there. How do they know who gets the wave? Or do they just yell, Get the hell out of my way?”
“The surfer just closest to the peak where the wave starts breaking has priority. See?” Andy explained that everybody had to get out of his way as he zoomed and turned across the face. He said that a “left” means a wave that is moving left from the surfer’s point of view as he’s surfing it, a “right” means he’s surfing along to his right.
“Oh,” I said.
We wrestled with the foam for two hours. I felt less like a surfer than ammo in a human slingshot. I was so tired I couldn’t lift my arms to paddle. We’d stood up for a combined cumulative time of four seconds. I thought I’d understood what Andy had said about the peak and the surfer with priority, but when I finally got out past the break I couldn’t figure out where the peak was. I didn’t know how far away from the other surfers was safe to sit, and I must have gotten it wrong, because another dude collided with me and asked me if I was born on Planet Kook. That really hurt my feelings. Andy and I crawled out onto the sand and went for a late breakfast at the Sugar Shack, a block and a half from the pier on Main. It was always packed. Working people, tourists, surfers. We squeezed into a table against the wall, an arm’s-length from the backs of the guys at the counter, and I ordered eggs over easy with bacon and coffee. Andy asked for poached eggs on dry toast. The brisk young gal in a black Shack T-shirt snagged a pen from behind her ear, blew away a wisp of ponytail, and asked us how the waves were. How did she know? The tangled hair? My osprey eyes? I was thrilled. She had broad shoulders and strong forearms.
“Waist-high, kinda mushy,” I said, repeating something I’d heard in the parking lot.
The walls were covered in surfing photos. We sat under a framed cover from Surfer magazine: a guy standing straight up and relaxed, like he was waiting for a bus, in the middle of a barrel about as big as the Holland Tunnel. Above that was a signed blowup photo of someone riding a giant, and next to it were two local Shack-sponsored kids’ surf teams and a framed memorial to a young surfer who had died somehow. He must have been sixteen. Below his head shot, very blond and forthright, were the words:
Whenever you are riding,
We hope the waves are forever
glassy and hollow
The guy in the tube was Timmy Turner. Timmy was behind the counter punching orders into the register. Timmy was twenty-six, and he’d been surfing for twenty years. He wore a black T, and it hung loosely on his wide shoulders and he seemed thin, almost slight, for being one of the most hard-core surfers around. His mom, Michelle, had bought the Shack twenty-five years before from her own parents and was known for feeding full meals to homeless people, and for sponsoring local school-age surfers. The kids got one free meal a week, salad through milkshake. I loved the place right away. The generosity of spirit, the rock-solid values of decency and civil duty, seemed to permeate the whole restaurant. It was there in the respectful way the young waitresses talked to the broken-down beachcomber at the end of the counter, the way everyone who passed asked if we needed more coffee.
Andy burst the yolk of his egg over his single piece of butterless bread.
“I love surfing,” I confided.
Andy sipped his coffee and studied me over his cup, through his round gold wire-rims. “How do you know?” he said.
“Well …”
He smiled. “Maybe tomorrow we should try Bolsa Chica. It’ll probably be closed out, but it won’t matter. We need some time in the whitewater.”
That sounded good. I didn’t know what “closed out” meant, but I liked the idea of giving it all another go, maybe miles from any tatted-up dudes who kept saying fuck when talking to me.
Bolsa Chica State Park begins two and a half miles north of the Huntington Beach Pier. It is three miles of wide sand beach along a lightly curving southwest-facing coast. At the southern end, the Bolsa Chica estuary runs out through a cut in the beach. A rich tidal wetland, the estuary is one of the great American success stories of grassroots conservation and surfer activism. Once one of the largest oil-drilling fields in the world, the estuary and much of the beach were slated in the nineties for development as a mega
-marina. The critical habitat would have gone the way of the rest of Southern California’s 75 to 90 percent of coastal wetlands lost to development. This single lagoon was so important because the Pacific Flyway is one of the largest north-south bird migration routes on the planet, and many species are forced to skip much of Southern California because the tidal marshes where they used to stop over have been destroyed in order to build ports, marinas, and houses. The marina at Bolsa Chica would also have probably wrecked a favorite local surfing spot. A consortium of environmental groups led by the Surfrider Foundation stopped the project, and in 1997 got the state to put up $91 million to restore the marsh and to widen a cut through the beach to increase crucial tidal flow. At 880 acres, it has been one of the biggest and most successful coastal wetland restoration projects in the country, and has reestablished a stepping-stone in the flyway for migrating waterfowl. Now, every day, a few hundred yards from scores of surfers, bird-watchers can be seen walking the wood-plank trails in the marsh with their binoculars. Endangered birds such as the light-footed clapper rail are nesting there again. And outraged surfers led the charge. Go figure. The Surfrider Foundation is mostly made up of surfers, and today it has over fifty thousand members in the U.S. In ’91 they won the second largest Clean Water Act lawsuit in American history, against two pulp mills in Humboldt County. More recently, they have worked with Laguna Beach to mitigate coastal water pollution from runoff, and they stopped Orange County from dumping 240 million gallons per day of partially treated sewage into the sea. Why should it surprise me? Surfers are an intense bunch and they love their coast the way they love their mothers.
We pulled up to the beach in a stiff offshore wind. Numbered lifeguard towers sat at two-hundred-yard intervals along the sand; the numbers went up as the towers marched northward. We would find out later that the towers served as landmarks for surfers—a few friends might decide to meet at Tower 21, or if it’s too crowded or the waves are dumping, they’d go south to 18.
Bolsa Chica was pretty, but it was no picnic. We trotted out to an empty part of the beach and jogged into the surf. As soon as we stepped off the sand it was like walking into a swift river. We got swept south by the strong riptide. When I did manage to get through the surf to calm water, I was beat, but happy to be way past where any waves were breaking. I looked out to sea and blinked, transfixed like a highway deer. What the hell was that? That was a set wave. Bigger than anything yet and breaking much farther out. I got squashed.
Having learned my lesson, I paddled way, way out. No set wave would catch me inside again. Out here, it was pretty but it wasn’t surfing. I clambered onto my board to sit—which in itself was a tenuous operation. I breathed, gut hollow with exhaustion, arms and back burning with lactic acid, and looked around. Relief to be out of the crashing mayhem. Just easy rolling swell. Phew. Three dolphins swam lazily by, heading north, their backs glossy and dark. Now, this was the life. But no waves broke so far out, so I edged back in. And then another wave, much larger than the others, walled up and broke on my head. It tumbled me back inshore, right into the impact zone, which is where the brunt of the waves collapse. It was also the worst part of the riptide, and I got trundled south, and the first wave’s posse clobbered me one after another.
Was this fun? Two-foot waves were turning me into Play Doh. On the fifth wave, I managed to crawl up and stand and just as fast flew through the air like a catapulted cow. I know now that with the waves dumping the way they were, and the length of our boards and our skill level, we didn’t stand a chance. Once, in sheer frustration, I rode the egg in on my belly, just to feel some speed. I got off it in ankle-deep water, and turned and lifted the heavy board. I carried it back into the white foam in front of me and across my body and got slammed by the next sweep of whitewater, and the egg leveled me like a snowplow. I unpeeled myself from the sand inch by inch the way Wile E. Coyote detaches himself from the pavement after Road Runner drives over him with a cement mixer.
I took a breather on the beach. Then, on the wet sand, carelessly attaching the Velcro of the leash to my ankle, I let the egg wallow in two inches of wash, and the next surge sent it sideways into me and nearly broke my legs. It could have snapped them like dry sticks had my feet been set.
If two inches of afterthought from a waist-high wave could do that to me, what would a real wave do? The forces a surfer deals with are beyond reckoning.
That night, covered with bruises, aching everywhere, I lay on Andy’s fold-out couch in the library. I revisited the last two days and winced. I was such a kook. In surf slang, kook doesn’t just mean beginner; it means outrageous, awkward, clueless novice who cuts people off on waves, thrashes around speaking to other surfers like it’s a cocktail party, hollers rebel yells when he does manage to stand up for a split second, has no tact, no respect for the finely tuned protocol of surf, and is dangerous to boot, because when he drops in on a wave without looking, boards and bodies collide. That was me. I had called my girlfriend Kim and she was sympathetic to a point. She was getting sick of me being away all the time. She did not demand that I change, but she pointed out that it was hard to stay close. Ouch. It dawned on me that kook also perfectly described my aptitude with women.
I was unwilling to turn out the light and let sleep claim me before I had salvaged something of the day. Andy’s old shepherd Cody lay on my legs and watched me with a concerned expression. I had known him for years. Now he seemed to sense that I was wrestling with powerful forces: vanity, pride, surf.
I rubbed his forehead with my fist and slid a notebook off the side table. I glanced up at the bookcase that occupied the entire wall opposite. A thousand spines, a thousand reverberating names, the best efforts of the truest minds. I scanned across the modern canon and their antecedents. Eliot, Coleridge, Proust, Stein, Dickinson, Brecht, W. C. Williams, Plato, Faulkner, Homer, Rilke, Cervantes. Waves of their own, waves that broke over reefs of readers and worked their own geologic power. I felt small. What the hell was I doing here? I had hoped to write some fiction and I was setting that aside for the moment to take up a new sport that everybody said was consuming. Why do that to myself at forty-five? Why take the risk? If I was going to get any good writing done, I needed every minute I could get. I knew myself—the king of distraction.
The last title that popped out made me laugh. When I did, Cody lifted and cocked his head.
“It’s nothing,” I said. “Don Quixote. I’d read it to you, but it would drive a dog like you nuts.”
I opened the notebook and wrote at the top of a page: SURFING, then What I Learned Today.
Set waves break farther out than you think and then you’re screwed.
Do not get the surfboard between you and the wave. Keep it beside or down-wave from you.
Set waves are not alone. They come in … sets. D’oh!
Now we were getting somewhere. I closed the notebook and went to sleep.
We woke up just at first light on the third day. I eased my feet out from under the weight of Cody and found my shorts. The air coming through the open windows was brisk. I put on a thick sweatshirt. People think of Southern California as hot, but it’s not, at least not by the water. Everything on my body hurt. My shins were bruised; my head was tender from the knock the first morning; my shoulders and back were stiff and sore. We made instant coffee in the kitchen while Andy’s family slept. We each ate a bowl of cornflakes. We took the bottle of Advil out of the cabinet with the coffee mugs and each ate four. As the salty gray air lightened, we gathered our heavy wetsuits from their pegs without much enthusiasm.
We were sluggish, and I know my body was tired through and through. It’s exhausting getting battered. Demoralizing getting yelled at. I think now that if we’d had another day of surfing like the first two, we might just have hung it up.
Then again, I doubt it. Most sports, at first entry, balance the initial strangeness and difficulty with some immediate rewards. In kayaking, you launch down your first riffling whitewater, take the
first little waves over your bow, feel the speed like a revelation as the current tongues into a smooth V between rocks. You may dump and swim but you’ve had that rush. Skiing is the same; the bunny slope gives you that first alien and wonderful sense of slide and acceleration, though you may not know how to stop or turn.
Everything works this way except surfing.
Surfing is one of the only pursuits on earth that can drub you into numb exhaustion and blunt trauma time and again and give you nothing in return; nothing but sand in your crotch, salt-stung eyes, banged temple, chipped tooth, screaming back, and sunburned ears—gives you all of this and not a single stand-up ride. Time and again. Day after day. Gives you nothing back but tumbles, wipeouts, thumpings, scares. And you return. You are glad to do it. In fact, you can think of nothing you’d rather do.
WHAT WE THINK ABOUT WHEN WE THINK ABOUT SURF
Have you seen Beach Blanket Bingo?
The Endless Summer? Step into Liquid? Riding Giants? Point Break? Baywatch?
When we imagine surfing we probably see images from these classics. Maybe in another dream there are old woody station wagons pulled up to the beach and some guys playing ukuleles. Maybe there’s a leaned-over surf shack covered in bougainvillea and an empty curve of Mexican beach with perfect combers breaking white along the bay. A bucket of sweating Corona. Maybe there are three happy-go-lucky Endless Summer kids trading waves and you can hear their whoops on the wind. Maybe there are lifeguard towers every quarter mile and Pamela Anderson is driving a pickup, and maybe the beach is Malibu and there are five surfers hanging ten all together on one wave. Or maybe we are the rare dreamer and we see one giant mountain of water, some Jaws rogue wave, and there’s a lone figure, small as a swallow, arcing down its face.
Either way, scientists and anthropologists agree that for 95 percent of us our fantasy will involve eight standard components: