Kook

by Peter Heller

  1. A beautiful setting, invigorated by the wild nature of the sea.

  2. Beautiful chicks, bikinis, the promise of sex in the air like the smell of hibiscus—hibiscuses—hibisci—

  3. Aloha spirit—a generous, blissed-out bonhomie, on the waves and off.

  4. Hair-raising prowess on the wave—muscled and graceful.

  5. Machismo: the only possible result when combining numbers 2 and 4.

  6. A party, lots of booze and pot.

  7. Happy, danceable music in the background.

  8. The wave itself. The lead character. However you conceive it. Like God.

  What we have just concocted without realizing it is the Garden before the Fall. Maybe surfing was like this once. Maybe, after the red heifer and the Antichrist and a Great Fire, it will be so again.

  But for now, let’s review and correct.

  1. The raw power of the sea is beautiful. Even at Orange County river mouths where you are sitting on your board and look down and see what can only be strands of feces and undissolved toilet paper floating by your vulnerable toes. Even in Mexican bays where they have yanked out the last significant stands of bird-flocked, fish-breeding mangroves and replaced them with box hotels built by greed-sick developers from Denver. (This is true, in Baja—I know the guy—and in thousands of other places, too.) Even off of beaches where there used to be mackerel and tuna runs and now there are none, because they have all been fished out. Even then—and sometimes all these things are happening at once—the ocean heaves her inexorable breath and you feel humbled and renewed.

  2. Sometimes there are foxy chicks. They sit on a towel with a camera with a huge honking lens and take pictures of their semipro man who has been snaking your waves all morning; because he can. Lucky if they even nod as you walk by.

  3. Which brings us to Aloha Spirit, the greatest draw and the greatest misconception about surfing.

  Surfing is one of the fastest-growing sports in the world. Thousands of neophytes join the ranks of new American surfers every year. Worldwide, including surfwear and fashion, surfing is a billion-dollar industry. The cachet, the attraction, seems to be all about youth, strength, and that generous aloha spirit. The idea is that surfers have an easygoing, hang-loose relationship with violent hydraulic power and other people. Nothing much ruffles the laid-back surfer.

  The problem is that the aloha spirit is generally a myth—surfers have always been aggressive, driven, and territorial. You have to be, temperamentally, to deal with waves of any size and to jostle for position with others. All the eager new surfers crowding the waves are exacerbating tensions and shortening fuses. Some California counties have actually enacted anti-surf-rage ordinances that ban aggressors from their local waves as part of the punishment for surf-related assaults.

  4. The prowess and grace are real. I wanted some of that.

  5. The machismo is real, too. As you shall see.

  6. Party—well, yeah. Not like beach blankets and campfires and volleyball, though that happens in rare fits of collective nostalgia, especially at big competitions. Especially in Mexico. Usually, though, it’s a quick joint in the front seat of the car before bailing out into the dawn chill.

  7. Happy music: of course. Sometimes it’s just in your head. One of the things I love most about surfing is all the time you have to yourself—long paddle-outs with the schooling fish and birds and breaking sets; sitting on your board away from the others with the whole ocean in front of you, looking for your own peak; catching that one long ride, when the music is acceleration, speed, thunder, and glide.

  8. The wave itself. It is the one thing that no one can exaggerate. As poetic as you wax, as thick as you lay it on, as much as you magnify, you can never, ever encompass or describe the greatness of the wave. The wave that can be named is not the real Wave.

  Nobody can be blamed for having all these wrong ideas about surfing. You read about how surfing started way back in the Polynesian kingdom of Hawaii, the first account recorded by British Lieutenant James King in 1779, who tacked into Kealakekua Bay on the Kona Coast of the North Island and witnessed the oddest thing: dozens of men riding wooden planks down the waves. You can see an artist’s rendition in an engraving from the period: four Hawaiians dropping in on the same wave on what look like chunks of six-by lumber. Others show island women perched on boards, breasts bared, hair flowing behind them as they shred. One sailor reported that when a good swell came in, whole villages would abandon whatever they were doing and run down to the shore and surf. That was another version of Surf Eden. All myth is based on a rock foundation of truth. It is true that surfing began in the Pacific, probably in Hawaii or Tahiti, and that it sprang from a culture who lived in a place of such beauty and bounty that its people had generous bumpers of leisure time and an inclination toward laughter and play.

  And maybe then there really was aloha spirit. Maybe the crowds of Hawaiians didn’t get in each other’s way on the wave, maybe they did not collide and crack each other’s wiliwili-wood planks. Just maybe they didn’t come up yelling, bruised, or lose control of their leaden, loglike boards, which then maybe didn’t accelerate toward a whole clutch of little kids and mow them over like tenpins. Maybe they just stood on the front of their plank with the wave curlicuing behind and over them, feet together, hair flowing behind, perfectly balanced, perfectly spaced apart on the waves as in the engraving, Adonises and Aphrodites of Kealakekua, and the only thing you would hear from the beach aside from the sift and crash of surf was laughter and cries of innocent joy.

  P.S.—WHY WE NEED STUFF LIKE SURFING

  We are not a graceful species. We spend all day falling forward from one precarious step to the next; we bump, bumble, and teeter. Think of John and Jane Everyhuman walking down the street, chatting, sipping their Starbucks on the way to work. Think of them swiveling their bulbous heads on the stalks of their necks to look at something that catches an eye, their raw, hairless faces like blunt semaphores in the sunlight. Think of them stepping off a curb, wading to the other side, lifting their knees with some effort to gain the sidewalk, jostling Jocelyn Everyhuman, whose head is craned into her cell phone as she passes. Now think of a single minnow. Minnie. She turns like a bead of mercury. She is as at home in her firmament as an element. Water gains definition by her fluidity. Lightning can teach her nothing about moving from one place to another. When she idles, holding herself steady with a minute wavering of her tail, an invisible flutter of a fin, she is incomparable in her stillness, as poised with the potential for explosive movement as any loaded gun. She looks like she is thinking.

  That’s just one minnow. Look into the water off any seaside dock, and if the water is green and clear, you see a hundred minnows, a thousand, moving in liquid concert like a single thought, flashing back sunlight in a sudden turn as precise and effortless as a single swallow, as synchronized as a wave of wind moving through tall grass. That’s minnows. We haven’t even mentioned a big cat flowing down through rocks. Don’t get me started.

  We need surf—or dance or yoga—because it reconnects us with our animal bodies. For a little while we practice moving through the world with rhythm, with an intention of efficiency and power. Without it, we become just a bunch of walking heads.

  THE SAINT

  On that third day, our first stop was Huntington Surf and Sport, the large surf shop on the corner of Main Street and the PCH, just across the road from the pier. They served good coffee and blueberry muffins before anyone else in town. I loved coming in there when the cavernous store was empty and the few other cars on the street had boards on the roof. All surf shops smell the same—a fragrance of epoxy resin offgassing from the racks of surfboards, new neoprene, perfumed surf wax.

  The dense overcast of the marine layer was burning off and the day was turning fine and warm. We got in the Chrysler van and rolled to the T of the Pacific Coast Highway. Across it I could see fast waves breaking either side of the pier. I winced. I turned to Andy.

  “Ma
ybe we could go someplace that’s a little more gentle.”

  “We could try Seal Beach. It’s only like fifteen minutes north.”

  We rolled up past the Cliffs, where there were already clusters of surfers floating off the bluff. From the hill we could see the low waves breaking all along the length of Bolsa Chica. We passed the big empty parking lots and drove through the strip of Sunset Beach, a tawdry jumble of fish restaurants and tattoo shops. Then the wasteland of the Navy ammo dump, miles of bunkers on flats of dead grass, ending at water’s edge where a windowless destroyer was tied up to the dock waiting to be fed her load of torpedoes and shells.

  Then quaint little Seal Beach. Palm trees and bungalows. Another tall pier, a curve of white beach. Away off to the northwest was the port of Long Beach, derricks and buildings. We pulled into the parking lot with a shirr of tires over sand, cut the engine, and while the engine ticked and the offshore breeze rattled the palms behind us, we drank our coffee, looked through the windshield at the beach, and tried to get stoked.

  I was forty-five. Andy was a year younger, but he had been a responsible corporate breadwinner and family man for many years and he was almost bald, so naturally I thought of him as a big brother. Also he had those little wire-rimmed glasses that made him seem at least twice as smart.

  “Are we having a midlife crisis?” I said.

  “Definitely.”

  “Is this what we are supposed to do?”

  “That’s not clear to me.”

  “It’s cheaper than a Ferrari or a divorce, right?”

  “You’re not married.”

  “I’m just saying.”

  “Well, a lot of guys just build a shack in the backyard and then write a book about it. It’s a genre of its own. I don’t know exactly how much that would cost.”

  “Hmm.”

  We watched a pair of lanky teen boys head for the water with shortboards tucked under their arms. Heading for a before-school session. They were loose-jointed and carried the boards with the ease of Masai with their spears. I felt a twinge of envy. What if I had begun surfing when I was just a boy? Instead of the poker games and stoopball of my childhood in Brooklyn. I certainly wouldn’t have had to wait until my seventeenth birthday to get laid.

  Never too late, right? Wrong. You can’t redo your first anything. Was this surfing thing about going backward or forward? Forward = brave, backward = pathetic. No, this surfing project would need to be about growth, about connecting with the earth and growing older with grace. I was thinking all this as I was trying to get my foot through the leg of the wetsuit and hopping along the side of the car and feeling every sore muscle. Just as I was teetering, a beat-up white van pulled in beside us.

  A man of indeterminate age, with sun-bleached blond hair past his shoulders and a big round belly, got out of the driver’s side. He saw us and smiled. He beamed beneficence, like some holy man. He stretched the wetsuit way up over his pink gut and reached back and pulled the zipper ribbon with a practiced grunt. Then he hobbled to the back—kind of shuffled over the pavement—and yanked open the rusty doors. He reminded me of someone. Santa Claus! Belly like a bowl full of jelly. He was pulling surfboards out of the back when a pretty surfer walked from her car and gave him a hug. Then a hulking blond guy with a handlebar mustache did the same thing. Santa couldn’t get any work done; surfers kept angling over to give him a hug. Or rather receive one. There was something about the interaction that suggested bestowal. “Love you, too,” I heard the man say in a hoarse, emphatic mumble.

  I blinked. This was not the surf culture I’d witnessed so far. I don’t think I’d heard a single surfer at Huntington Beach tell another he loved him. “Fuck you, too” was about as warm as it got.

  The man’s smile was beatific, broad. But there was something bullish and tough about him, too.

  “Hey,” I said to a freshly hugged mother in a wetsuit. “Who is that guy?”

  “Don’t you know? That’s the Saint. The Saint of Seal Beach. Bless his heart.”

  Was I dreaming?

  As if this weren’t all strange enough, the driver’s door popped open and out stepped a woman with bleached blond hair down over her shoulders and a round belly over which she, too, stretched a wetsuit. She was short, and looked something like a scale model of the man. A not-so-mini-me. She began to pull piles of wetsuits out of the side, while he hauled the big blue foam surfboards out of the back. I noticed that the dashboard of the van was covered—no, smothered—with plastic surf kitsch. Spring-loaded surfing Santas, hula girls, tiny woody station wagons. When the man had unloaded about fifteen soft boards, he unstrapped the high stack on the roof rack and slid them off and passed them out, too, to a gathering crowd of what appeared to be young mothers, teenage boys, pretty nurses, retired baseball players, and grandmothers. The whole gamut. The side of the van was painted with a Joe Cool pelican in shades holding a surfboard and the words M&M SURFING SCHOOL.

  We watched all of this with growing interest. Then, at the same time, a lightning bolt of apprehension. We looked at each other with a wild surmise:

  Surf school!

  D’oh!

  Why hadn’t we thought of it?

  We signed up on the spot. Saint Michael Pless said, “Sure, come on! Glad to have you!” He thought he would have a couple of extra boards.

  “I’ve got my egg,” I said proudly. He glanced at it with what I thought was less than an enthusiastic endorsement.

  “Egg,” he said, as if calling her by name. “Very nice. But I want you to use one of mine today. Here, take the one with the duct tape over there. You kids lay the nose of your boards on the wall there. Michael, Jr., has wax.” Michael, Jr., waved. A handsome, broad-shouldered, curly-haired kid in his twenties. The Saint’s wife, Helena, signed us up. She was as warm as her husband.

  My board had a lot of tape on the nose. The front two feet of the foam board seemed to be held on by silver duct tape. And wax. There was a quarter-inch-thick smear of dirty gray, sand-embedded wax coating the entire deck. When I picked it up I realized I was dealing with a whole other animal than the fiberglass egg, as ungainly as she was. This thing was a barge. Must have weighed forty pounds.

  Pless heaved two boards up onto his head—the man was a bear—and hitched and shuffled down to the water, following his stomach. I was now dubious about the whole enterprise. It always seemed to me that if you wanted to learn something athletic, learn it from an athlete. French from a Frenchman, carpentry from a carpenter. Surfing, it seemed, one would learn from a surfer. This guy did not look like a surfer. He could barely balance on the beach. He looked nothing like the lean guys who had been yelling at me for the past two days.

  Pless had us lie down on the sand on our stomachs and practice popping up. He had us all do it in a line, grandma down to little boy. Chest up, eyes ahead, hands in push-up position, then Bang! Up to your feet. The most common mistake was to come up with feet together, or feet facing forward, or legs straight and body bent over at the waist like you were looking for a nickel. Those who couldn’t manage the move from prone to standing in a single pop he had come up to their knees first. “Great!” he yelled. “You guys are naturals. Almost as good as Canadians! For some reason, Canadians, Asians, and doctors are the most natural surfers. Who knows why? Okay, again!” We drilled and drilled until we could go from chest in the sand to standing without thinking about it.

  “That’s all you have to do,” Pless said. “And listen to my seven commands. How many? That’s right, seven. Let’s practice. Okay, lie back down on your pretend boards.” Already this was much more fun than Andy and I had had surfing in days, and we weren’t even in the water. Pless was giving us challenges, little benchmarks that we could practice and attain. With each came a sense of accomplishment. His encouragement flowed in a constant, good-humored stream. Everybody was smiling. The seven commands were: paddle forward, paddle back, slide forward, slide back, chest up, chest down, and stop. Then an eighth: you’re up! We practiced th
em in a line, lying in the sand, paddling air like beached turtles.

  “Okay, everybody in the water! Don’t forget to watch out for people surfing in on your way out, and what did I say about your board? That’s right, never let your board get between you and the wave. You don’t want it getting shoved over you.”

  I looked at the break. The pier was a hundred yards to our left and there were a couple of real surfers there, catching lefts just off the pilings. The waves were about waist-high and seemed gentle. Pless waded in to where he was chest-deep and motioned a clutch of students over.

  “Okay, Mr. Peter, hop on your board. Here comes your wave.” I was on the board facing shore. He was standing, one hand on the waxed nose, facing the open ocean, studying the waves.

  “Okay, scootch back, good, chest up, now—paddle!” I did. Then I felt a thrust of acceleration as Pless gave me a shove. I was matching the speed of the incoming wave. The swell came from behind and lifted me, I felt the nose tip forward, but I didn’t wipe out as I had for the past two days. Because Pless had positioned me back a bit on the board and my chest was up, the front didn’t dive and purl. I felt instead a rush of acceleration. The wave launched the board down the little face. Oh, man!

  “You’re up!” Pless’s resonant shout cut through my reverie. I popped up. Instead of the weird crawl-and-stand I had been doing between near-fistfights, now I popped up as we had just practiced. The board sped forward and, miracle! I was standing.

  Standing up on a rocketing surfboard.

  My feet were apart, sideways to the board. Check. I was in a crouch, hands low. Check. I was speeding toward shore. Che— I was surfing! I saw green water at my feet. Then the wave broke around my knees and I rode the rough whitewater. I was frozen with amazement. I was yelling. I rode until the nose ground sand and the fins dug into the beach. A surge came behind and I toppled off into three inches of foamy water. I came up yelling, hands in the air. Did anybody see that? Oh, my God! That was so cool! The sense of speed! I am officially a surfer! Yay!