I haven't blogged in a while, but I have been working on a short-story slash extended journal entry about my fictional surfing trip. It's pretty boring, but seeing that I've become my own readership of one, why the hell not.
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The best-kept secret about surfing is that it’s a pathetic activity.
Let me rephrase. Perhaps it’s not so secret that surfers generally are pathetic; but would that mean that surfing is a pathetic activity? I would imagine not. I’ve always felt envy and fascination for surfers. Jobless and high all the time, somehow rich enough to stay jobless and high in California’s priciest real estate; and leisurely enough to chase the tides around the clock, always ready to drop everything for a good swell. !! Schmucks like me were toiling behind a desk and a computer day in and day out—and tragically, we would be the lucky ones (white collar vs. blue collar, yada yada). We scramble together all the scraps of our lives just to keep our heads above water, and yet we’re never much better off than the slackers who spend their lives in the water. Why is that? It’s tempting to think that surfing itself is what solves all your problems (a ridiculous supposition, obviously).
But the best-kept secret about surfing is that it’s a pathetic activity. You can see traces of it even in the heat of July, if you go to a popular break like San Clemente. Imagistically, San Clemente is a colorful beach ball; descriptively, it’s a zoo. It is also one of the most consistent breaks on the west coast; so even though it becomes a Club Med in the summertime—choking with kids and tanning lardies—and it goes without saying, beginners, including myself—San Clemente will always be a surf community with a surf-community vibe: meaning, hostility. Isn’t it proverbial by now how hostile surfers are? (It should be.) I believe that is what prevents more people from learning how to surf, because they all have heard if you drop in on the wrong guy’s wave, you’ll come back to the beach to find your car keyed and your tires slashed, plus you’ll get your ass beat personally by said wrong-guy. As breaks go, San Clemente is very friendly, and its locals practice patience like they were candidates for sainthood; for real. But in spite of or because of this friendliness, some beginner is liable to piss off some local (or more likely, some upstart; for the locals are chill, as I’ve argued), and the tension comes to surface, and there is aggression or passive-aggression, as the case may be.
Because the thing is, every single person out there in the water is looking for something, waiting for something, trying for something. But unlike everyone else, outside the water, they know that they are searching.
The frustration is more palpable when you come back to San Clemente to surf in October. The beach was out of season. Some breaks, like Santa Cruz, have their surf season in the winter because the waves are stronger then; but San Clemente is not one of these breaks. Club Med in the summer, in the winter it is evocative of pathos and loss. October is the time of year when the most unemployed of surfers all over the world begin to pack up their bags and go to New Zealand or Australia, trailing the summer in a patent exhibition of Denial…much as Homer Simpson trailed the Krustyburger Ribwich on its extinction tour. But children of blessedness, the surfers can dwell in their fantasy, conceivably, forever: they have no “last Ribwich.” Summer returns every year, and with the cyclic alternation of seasons and today’s globalization, that dream of summer can truly be endless and seamless, to the mobile and inexplicably wealthy.
As for the rest of us, we engage in a more modest form of Denial. I returned to San Clemente, where all the kiddies and lardies of the summer had deserted, and only the (less unemployed) locals were left, sad at heart. The locals did not know that they were sad at heart, so much were they rejoicing that the beach was theirs again. But the desertion of the tourists, however hateful they were in the summer, must have felt like it was signaling the twilight of an era. Again, a place like Santa Cruz never witnesses a like twilight, nor with such vividness, because it’s mostly locals all year round. Meaning, the air holds a persistent nihilism. Nihilism is the natural state of the surfing community, and while it remains uninterrupted, there is no sadness in contrast…
Why is nihilism the natural state? Nihilism should be the property of embittered white collar slaves, radical intellectuals, criminals, and Germans. If a surfer who has never had a steady job did nothing but thrive under the Establishment, why would he want to burn it down?
The ocean has a way of doing its own thing always. When you’re out there surfing yourself, you don’t notice that; it feels like you and the ocean are working together symbiotically to make one perfect ride for your special self. On the other hand, when you’re watching other people surf, watching them from the beach while you warm up and stretch, it becomes clear how little that one dude matters, him and all his timing and skill and energy, and even his instinct for the ocean. That dude—even the most intimate of surfers—remains ever the yearner, the groupie; while the waves will continue to follow their indifferent course. To think that the wave works with a man symbiotically is like imagining a man cooperating with an ant to build, like, a house. No doubt every surfer, at some point, felt humbled when he first observed this; and he probably gasped about how the ocean was vast.
