Kim and I celebrated our first night on the coast with a cup of tea. This was really something. Our own private Idaho, except it was Southern California. Our party took about five minutes. We were whipped from our desert drive. We tried to sleep while revelers on the beach yelled for us to go back home to fucking Colorado. I guess they were jealous and could read the plates. Then we got feasted on by mosquitoes. Then, sometime in the small hours, the pavement-sweeping vehicles trundled by, yellow lights flashing, the broomed wheels getting louder and louder until it seemed they would vacuum us off the planet. Then they backed around us with glad beeps. Then the garbage truck announced itself with a clashing of steel cans. Then it was daybreak. July 25. Exhausted, relieved, we climbed into the front seat and drove up to Seal Beach for the first day of our new lives. We would take lessons from Saint Michael until we were fit enough to launch out on our own.
When we rolled down the ramp into the parking lot of Seal Beach and saw the M&M Surfing van parked one row back from the sand, and saw our round teacher hobbling around the truck in a blue wetsuit, passing out boards and hugs, and heard his hoarse laugh, I felt a little like the first day of school. How often in our adult lives do we get to feel we are on the verge of a new life? Exciting, demanding, shiny. Scary. How often do we get butterflies and feel aquiver with expectation and fear? When we date. When we marry. When we have a child.
What I felt mostly was that this was not a lark. Surfing was really hard. The surfers you see cutting it up on the waves have been doing it their whole lives. The ocean is vast and capricious and dangerous. We’d come all this way and now we were committed.
BOOT CAMP
Ocean. There isn’t another word in the English language as strange and lovely and broad. Ocean. There is a trochaic swell moving through it, rising and falling, so that as I say it my spirit rises and falls, too, softly, like a boat, or board. If you look at it long enough, it is a word that opens and spreads out, makes a circle of a far horizon, a word on which rain can fall and dimple or sweep across in lashing gusts and leave unperturbed. A word that is calm enough to look at, almost lulling, but also hints at holding unreckonable power. The O, far off, where the tempest circles, the fearsome storms that beget the waves. And the N, I suppose, is the far shore, thousands of miles hence.
Ocean is, by levels of magnitude, our greatest wilderness. Her deeps, by metric measure alone, exceed the highest Himalaya. The mysteries there, in the most absolute darkness, rival those of outer space. The biodiversity puts a rain forest to shame.
As a kid, my absolute favorite television was Jacques Cousteau. The jaunty explorer took us to every corner of the sea, gray-scaled depths to reefs exploding with color, colors in combinations I had never seen before, with iridescences, phosphorescences, intensities of -escences that made my little head spin. The sharks, the eels, the whales, the jellyfish! Ze humble anemone opening like a morning flower! I loved his accent as he, like some orchestrating god himself, narrated the mysteries of our reticent world. I loved his Zodiacs and mini-subs, and the short black beards of his sons and crew, and the seriousness with which they gathered around the chart and plotted their approach. It was the grandest adventure ever. It was the reason that 90 percent of my woolly-headed generation, when asked what they wanted to be, would answer at some point, “Marine biologist.” I doubt their seriousness. A data sample by definition demands repetition. I don’t think they wanted to count thousands of microorganisms in samples of seawater or empty nets and catalog the contents along a grid of eighty characteristics, or conduct statistical analyses until their eyes blurred. Neither did Jacques. He wanted Philippe to prepare the Zodiac for departure. He wanted to immerse himself in beauty and mystery and adventure. And then pull into Monte Carlo or Nice and put on a tux and be the toast of the town. Who wouldn’t?
But beauty, it turns out, is mostly hard work. It’s hard work for a species that has to keep adapting, it’s hard work for a marine biologist, and it’s hard work for a surfer. And, it turns out, it is hard work for an ocean with human beings inhabiting the fringes. It was becoming ever more clear that the oceans may be on the verge of collapse. A study published in Nature in 2003 by an international team, studying fifty years of data, found that we have lost 90 percent of our pelagic predator species—the deepwater game fish we all love to eat: the marlin and tuna and halibut and swordfish—90 percent of these stocks since 1950. The great sharks are functionally extinct, meaning that they don’t occupy their niche in the ecosystem any longer, and the smaller predators, the littler sharks and rays, are multiplying and wreaking havoc on the benthic communities. Another, more recent study, published in Science, predicts that if current fishing trends continue, every fishery will collapse by 2048. It’s hard to even think about. But as much as the ocean is struggling, she never fails to lift my spirits when I first catch sight of her, and there was no place else I wanted to be on that July morning.
I couldn’t wait to try my new boards. Just before we got to Seal Beach, Bruno Troadec—a French surfboard shaper and a neighbor of Saint Michael—had begun to shape six custom boards for our trip. “Shaping” means he was sculpting the foam cores of what, once they were skinned with fiberglass, would become unique surfboards. I still had the 8–6 (eight-and-a-half-foot) funboard that Scotty had sold me three years before. (Surfers just say the numbers and omit the “feet” and “inches.”) But the first few days, the Saint wouldn’t even let me use that. He had helped me patch it my first week. He had lifted the tail in his palm and run his expert eye down the rails, or edges, and proclaimed it an almost unadulterated blank. In other words, Skip had ordered inexpensive foam blanks, had someone shape them for maybe ten minutes, and then had them glassed—voilà, one cheap “custom” surfboard.
“Whose board are you waxing?” Michael asked me that first morning, eyes atwinkle.
He knew very well what board it was. He was messing with me.
“You know what board this is! This is Son of Egg.”
“Why don’t you put him back?” Michael winked. “I want you to use one of mine today.”
“You mean a shortboard?”
“I mean that ten-foot foam board over there, mister. Go on.”
The first few days, Michael, Jr., was trying to nudge me into actually learning to surf. This meant not heading straight for the sand on a carpet of whitewater. Straight-off Adolph. It meant taking off at an angle—at Seal most of the waves break left—and gliding in one direction down the face of the wave as it forms ahead, staying just ahead of the gnashing break. The first time I did it was a revelation. M, Jr., can get so excited he sputters. He’s a former Navy medic who worked with Marine units. A torn-open torso will leave him cool, professional, efficient. But the sight of me thrashing around on my funboard, for some reason, excited him to hysteria.
“Okay, okay, okay, Pete, here comes your wave, get ready, get— Not that way! Left! Dummy! Chest up! No, I promise I won’t push you, all yours—left! That’s it, that’s it, now paddle easy, paddle, wait for it, okay, go, go, go! You’re up! Yeah!”
What had just happened was that a shoulder-high swell built up behind me and I angled left and paddled hard and it surged under me. Somehow, with M, Jr.’s urging, my trim was right, chest up, so I didn’t dig the nose and flip—but not too far back on the board so that it stalled—and the wave picked me up. I was paddling like a madman, watching ahead of the board down the green berm of a building wave, and the board tipped and accelerated and there was that blissful moment when the speed released us, me and the board. When I knew that I had it. I was looking ahead at a world of sloping green. This wasn’t the spew of whitewater I’d been riding all week, this was something entirely different. This was smooth and fast. It had real angle, like the pitch of a steep ski slope. I was rocketing along it. I popped up. Instinctively I edged. I guess that meant flexing ankles, weighting my heels a little. The board held its line and I coursed like a kid on a zipline straight along the little face. Then the break, which
had been chasing, caught up and crashed around my knees and turned the board straight to the beach and I managed to hang on and ride the whitewater into the shallows and wipe out.
I stood up in the foam and pulled the board in by the leash and took in the pier, the packed sand, the dazzling froth, the yells, the sift and muffled crash of the next wave. I breathed in the salt, wet sand, drying seaweed. I looked for Kim and saw her lining up for a shove from M, Jr. I felt the board come under my hand and steady like a just-galloped horse. I felt somehow self-contained and open to the whole universe at once, as if everything within the circle of the senses and I were of a piece. It was euphoria, pure, sweet, unmediated, immediate.
Meanwhile, down at the Huntington Beach Pier, the pros were battling it out at the U.S. Open. After surfing we’d go down and watch them, and then go to the surf movie festival at night. The pros were incredible. The horn would blow and four of them in a heat would run into the water, hit their boards, and paddle out through the surf without ever losing momentum. That in itself awed me. They duck-dived under breaking waves and came up like their boards were powered by twin Mercs. This was not a clean, regular wave—peaks cropped up and broke in sections—so the competitors fanned out and hunted the peaks. And then when they latched on to a good wave it was nothing like the wing-and-a-prayer rides of most other surfers. Even the best I’d seen, it was always a little touch-and-go: Will she make the drop? Can she pull off that cutback? Will she make it around the collapsing section of white in front of her? With the pros, there was never a question. If the wave sectioned out and collapsed in front of them, they floated the whitewater until they found the blue wall again. Or they jumped it. Or, if there really was no place to go, they performed acrobatic moves in the foam. The wave was a canvas and they painted it with whatever was in their imaginations and bodies to paint. They jumped the lip, caught air, and came down on one rail. They made fast, fluid figure eights in and out of the crashing pocket. We didn’t even know the names for what they were doing, but we stood on the high pier, leaning over the railing, and cheered.
In the finals we watched C. J. Hobgood, a top pro from Florida, go head to head with Jeremy Flores from France. In competition, the horn blew and surfers had twenty minutes to charge into the surf, get out to the waves, and catch as many great rides and throw in as many great maneuvers as they could. The idea, basically, was to wow the judges. The Association of Surfing Professionals, which puts on these events, changed their scoring system in 2005 to foster ever more exciting moves. The new scoring criteria sound like a field manual for a superhero: “A surfer must perform radical controlled manoeuvres in the critical section of a wave with Speed, Power, and Flow to maximize scoring potential. Innovative/Progressive surfing as well as Variety of Repertoire (manoeuvres) will be taken into consideration when rewarding points for waves ridden. The surfer who executes this criteria with the maximum Degree of Difficulty and Commitment on the waves shall be rewarded with the higher scores.”
Hobgood had no problem with any of that, especially the radical and commitment parts—the man was like a wildcat, if a wildcat could surf. He would take off on a peak, make a fast smooth bottom turn, and charge back up the face for what everybody expected to be a classic “off the lip”—an aerial cutback. Instead he’d throw in a big reverse—a backward spinning 360—and land perfectly again in the pocket. He was agile and quick like a puma, and a total thrill. He just seemed unexpected and radical and he won the contest. But we loved watching the women the most. The two who got to the finals were top U.S. surfer Karina Petroni and top Australian surfer Stephanie Gilmore. Karina had spent so much time surfing in Australia since she was a kid, the two girls had been best friends since they were nine. They were both very tall for women surfers, about five-foot-eleven, and they both had fast, fluid, graceful styles that contrasted with the men’s power and to me won hands-down for sheer beauty. Karina’s board was a little 6–0 that seemed almost like a skateboard under her tall, willowy frame. She moved across the wave in big sweeping, carving turns and roundhouse cutbacks that were so smooth and swift she seemed like a dolphin. Stephanie won (would go on, we found out later, to become world champion), but to me they were equally stunning. When they paddled back in at the end of the heat they were mobbed at the pier by local surfer girls who wanted autographs.
Back at Seal, I had been eyeing our own pier for days. Facing the beach, it was off to our right. The unspoken agreement of the M&M Surfing School with the rest of the Seal Beach surfers was that the school would congregate and shoal a hundred or two hundred yards north of the pier. That gave room for real surfers to catch a decent long left off the pilings before running into students.
There is this moment in every beginning surfer’s career. I was a little shy after the scene at Huntington Beach Pier. I was singed. I took a deep breath. It was time for me to paddle over there and sit in the lineup with the big kids.
THE SEAL BEACH LINEUP
This is how they were strung out from the pier:
Jack Hill. He ran the lineup when he was out there. Something like six-foot-two, one-ninety, square-jawed, curly hair almost to his shoulders. Ex-con, but the kind with a golden heart—jailed for something like beating the pulp out of a guy who offended his girlfriend. Looked like he stacked weights while he stacked time. Shaped beautiful epoxy boards in a garage. Competed and just missed going pro. Nice to me, for some reason, when I paddled up. Borrowed my longboard, said, “Just a sec,” caught the next wave, and rode it in on his head.
Circus Man. Looked exactly like the strong man in a freak show. Little sinewy legs, brick-shithouse torso, handlebar mustache. Wore a Speedo. All tatted up, naked ladies and mermaids. Whizzed down a long wave with a cryptic half smile, Mona Lisa meets Ajax. Never said a word.
Eva. Supermodel. Swedish. So thin even her size-zero wetsuit hung off her butt. Had no butt. Huge eyes the green of the water when the sun is at its zenith. Surfed between photo shoots in Italy and Brazil. Painfully shy. Learned to surf from Michael and adored him because he treated her like a normal person. Whenever we chatted, I couldn’t help but wonder what it would be like to make love to her—like hugging a fragile sculpture of sticks and leaves. Surprisingly strong, though—paddling out, she left me in the dust.
The Seal Beach Sistas. Actually a young mothers’ club, very upscale, lot of pearl earrings and perfect coifs, even when wet. They surfed after dropping the kids off at school. In summer months they met when they could get away. This was not family-at-the-beach time, this was sitting out on their longboards, rising and falling easily on the swell, away from every tentacle of obligation—and talking trash. Desperate Housewives stuff. And laughing. And peeling off midsentence to catch a wave.
Bill Cartwright. Former CEO. Ran three multibillion-dollar health care companies. Made the mistake of taking a week-long surf class from Michael so he could be closer to his son who surfs. Became, like me, dazzled by the sea. Quit his job, found God, surfed every day. “I realized there are things that are a lot more important than making money.” Really? Like what? Like he bought a house in Costa Rica so he and his son could go down and surf together. Became inarticulate when trying to describe the sensation of being out in the ocean on his board, with his friends, feeling close to God. A transfigured character.
Jill. A zaftig blonde, very sexy, mother of two, with a strong nose and stronger shoulders. No-nonsense. Got respect on the wave by being courteous and catching what she paddled for. A marine biologist by training, ran an innovative science program for home-schooled kids that included combo littoral biology and surfing clinics. That first day I headed toward the lineup, Jill was already there and she took me under her tan wing and surfed with me.
Willy. Another kind surfer. He was the only black man I have seen out on the waves. About twenty-two years old. Kind of shy, self-deprecating, but tenacious. Had to be. And brave as hell. Listen, surfers are rednecks with fins, generally. Lot of rough, lower-class, white toughsters out there, lot of
tattoos and attitude. Some of it is racist. I couldn’t admire Willy more for coming out to Seal every day off he could, driving the hour from the Valley where he lived and worked as an electrician’s assistant. He had an eight-foot foam-top board, which was an inexpensive beginner’s board, but he was not a beginner. He wanted to get a hard board when he could afford it. Very nice to me when I paddled up.
Rogue’s Gallery. Assorted young hotheads on shortboards, who should really have been over at Huntington Pier and not terrorizing me. Why didn’t they answer when I said, “Hi! How’s it going?” One of them was French. He had a heavy accent like Bruno, and long, vain, curly locks. He hogged the waves. What was he doing here anyway? Go back to France.
Tykester. Tiny eight-year-old on the smallest shortboard on earth. Looked like a frigging skateboard. But the kid could rip. He was all freckles and confidence. On my second day in the lineup he was sitting inside of me by about ten feet. I was just on the spot, at the peak, and as the swell came in he turned to me and said earnestly, confiding, as if I’d be crazy to doubt him: “I got it.” And then he took off. On my wave. I blinked at his diminutive retreating figure. “Okay,” I said to the back of the wave.
It was a typical California crowd. Every segment of society now surfed. The culture used to be edgy and rebellious, and still thrived on that myth. Plenty of surfers still lived for almost nothing else, and they tended to be a breed apart. But most had families and a boss and drew a paycheck.