Learning to Surf

The entire universe is powered by waves. Energy waves. Light waves. Sound waves. Radio waves. All are present; and all are undetectable to the human eye. But a breaking ocean wave is one of the only instances in which that power that runs everything around us actually becomes visible.

There is a moment, shortly after you accept that your demise is imminent, when it occurs to you that you could be elsewhere; that had you lingered a few minutes longer over breakfast, or stopped to get a newspaper, or been delayed ever so briefly in any number of possible ways, you would not be here right now, confronting your own mortality.

This thought occurred to me just as I encountered a very large wave…a rare wave…a surprising wave…a wave that really had no business being where it was…pitching and howling…and leaving me with a fraction of a second to make a decision. The options were not good.

Ahead, I could see Rikpun paddling his surfboard furiously up the face of another wave…a much kinder wave. Rikpun has been living on, or near, beaches his entire life. And he is not what you would call a ‘normal’ Thai male. But it was Rikpun who introduced me, just one week before my 40th birthday, to the world of surfing.

In the late afternoon, I would often see him riding the waves in front of my seaside hotel. He worked at a restaurant a few blocks down the beach and he must have negotiated with his boss to have his afternoons off because every day around this time, I saw him out there. One day, as he was preparing to exit the beach, I asked him if he would teach me how to surf. He agreed and now, a day later, here we were.

A few minutes earlier I had yelled out to him, “What should I do now?”, once I’d finally managed to bring both myself and my rented surfboard through the break zone. This had taken me at least a half an hour to accomplish, of which, a good twenty-five minutes were spent underwater in various states of distress.

Over the deafening roar of the crashing waves behind us, he yelled back, “Look for wave, shape like ‘A’!” I thought it was sort of odd that this Thai surfer, who spoke broken English at best, albeit decent enough English for a Thai, would have any idea of just what exactly an ‘A’ looked like.

A wave shaped like an ‘A’. Hmmm. I looked around. I saw Z’s and W’s and V’s. I saw the Cyrillic alphabet. I saw Arabic script. I saw no A’s. Finally I gave up and chose the next wave that would have me, which turned out to be a poor decision. The demon wave picked me up and after that, I have only a vague recollection of spinning limbs, a weaponized surfboard, and chaotic whitewater, all kind of churning together over a reef. Oh yeah—and the taste of salt water—LOTS of salt water—salt water which I tasted through both my mouth and my nose, and which I swear, I somehow even tasted through my ears as well.

This wave was nothing like those pictured in glossy surf magazines, the ones with perfect barrels heading inexorably toward sandy beaches populated exclusively by gorgeous, buxom girls in string bikinis. No. This wave was mean. It raised me up…as in twelve feet high…above a rapidly dwindling layer of water covering a very sharp reef shelf and then, just as I thought I was going to race diagonally down and across its face, it suddenly disintegrated and I felt myself free-falling. Somehow, I barely missed the reef, but still, the impact of the drop (imagine jumping off the roof of your house and landing flat on your back in your yard) left me winded, which was highly unfortunate because the wave, or rather the remains of the wave, still had plenty of forward momentum and I found myself in the previously described condition of hurtling through a foamy froth that was both lifting me and pounding me.

A novice surfer needs to possess a certain persistence. It’s like this—you are tethered to your surfboard by a leash wrapped around your ankle, and in one sense this is a good thing because it will always float…and you will not. This is important because you can hardly breathe until the wave finally decides to spit you out. But on the other hand, as together you and your board collide and pitch, you feel as if your foot might be ripped from your leg. Finally, after traveling the length of a football field, you realize that you’re not dead and miraculously, you can actually feel the sand beneath your feet. You spend a few moments checking for injuries and putting yourself back together, certain that you have acquired just a little more knowledge, just enough wisdom to ensure that next time, you are going to let waves like that one just roll on by.

Well, I decided that this was not for me. Somehow, I had escaped physical injury, although mentally, I feared that I might need therapy in order to ever again approach even a bathtub filled with water. “That sucked,” I declared.

“You pick wrong wave,” Rikpun said, after surfing the same distance that I had tumbled, and in a state of such languid repose, that he seemed to be mocking my tumble through the maelstrom. “Maybe you try body-board first.”

And so it was that my days as a surfer abruptly ended after less than an hour, and I became a body-boarder once again. I’d body-boarded plenty in my life, and I recognize that in the world of water sports, body-boarding does not rank very high, being regarded about as manly as synchronized swimming, but I don’t care. I willingly and enthusiastically decided right then and there to give up surfing forever.

Body-boarding offers one the same opportunity as surfing—to become extremely intimate with a reef-breaking wave. You are in the wave’s bosom, sharing its fate, and when the wave is large and glassy and smooth, and you are riding it just where you should be riding it—just ahead of the break…not too high up it…and not too far down it—and the wave doesn’t do anything really nasty like suddenly collapse on top of you, crushing you against a boulder encrusted with sea urchins, well it is then that you really feel as if life is incredibly good.

And yet, there is something about being on top of a wave, just at that moment when it catches you and you prepare to fly down its face, that brief moment when you are now committed, and even though you are now perched very high, and from this perch you can see with remarkable clarity the jagged coral reef below, with its body-sucking crevices and toxic spines, you are at this moment—pumped!

Even when I didn’t necessarily want to body-board the waves, I sometimes went out just to float in the late afternoon, when the island was flushed with color. And later on that week, that week during which I both discovered and forsaked the sport of surfing, I happened to be traversing an inlet on my body-board, just minding my own business, when I saw four fins slicing through the water, approaching me with intent, and my first thought of course, was that I was about to meet my end, and that it would be a gruesome, horrific end, the kind that becomes island lore—“Hey, did you hear about that guy? That American? Four tiger sharks! Nothing left but a scrap of bodyboard.”

My heart rate quickened. But then, the creatures began to leap around me and I saw that they were not man-eating sharks, but playful, curious dolphins, and I suddenly felt very happy to be alive, floating in the ocean in the company of dolphins. For a long while, they stayed with me, darting underneath my board, swimming alongside, and then they went on their way.

On other days, I saw flying fish that vaulted at least twenty yards through the air, and silky rays that glided below me like shadows, and long sea pikes that launched themselves urgently above the waves, and schools of shimmering silver fish capering off the bow of my board. Sailing canoes and long-tailed boats drifted by, and I’d wave the wave of lazy contentment, a flick of the hand reciprocated.

I don’t want to get all sentimental about it, but being on the water just off the shore of a tropical island on the equator is about as sublime an experience as one can find on this planet.