The Tilt of the Board

I think an amazing and simple concept has escaped our culture. We have complicated most processes to such an extent that it is difficult to find serenity. I wonder if this is one of those thoughts that people have been having for centuries and either can do, or will do nothing about it. So many other activities and daily events are so like this in character. Habitual living. I was recalling earlier today how I first became attracted to surfing.

I was visiting my Aunt Mary who lived at the time in Campbell, a suburb of San Jose, California. It was during the school Easter break and during the week my aunt planned lots of activities to keep myself and her four sons busy; she was, by trade, a teacher and I am not sure she did anything without planning but everything seemed completely spontaneous. One morning she packed her four sons and myself along with, I think, one of her friends and maybe the friend’s sons, altogether into a bright yellow-orange Volkswagen Van and drove us over the mountains to one of the beaches near Santa Cruz. I remember one of my cousins asking her if we were going to the “cement ship”.

The idea of a cement ship intrigued me. How could a ship be made of cement? Was it a real ship? How did it float? All questions a teacher was well equipped to handle. These questions occupied at least part of the drive over treacherous Highway 17, and when she wasn’t concentrating so much on driving, answers came easily forth. But Highway 17 takes a lot of concentration and I have always had a need to watch the road with the driver, so I don’t really recall what her answers were, but we did arrive in Santa Cruz and found our way to the correct beach.

After finding our spot on the sand and laying out towels, arranging picnic equipment and setting up a small beach umbrella, my cousins took me to see the cement ship. It had been a real ship and apparently then fell on hard times and became permanently moored, or rather, grounded. It had been deteriorating for many years but certainly still looked like a ship and for boys our ages had a certain romantic excitement about it.

As the morning wore on, we swam a little then walked back to our “spot” on the beach and ate our lunch. That meal was memorable because my cousins ate differently than my family even at picnics. They came from the anglo side of the family and ate hotdogs and burgers with mustard and catsup, american cheese and maybe a slice of pickle. They drank lemonade, coca-cola or rootbeer. My family had vast quantities of sour-dough bread, canned sardines or oysters as an appetizer, oven-roasted chicken cooked in or with wine and herbs, or fire cooked sausages, or firey choriço cooked with pinto beans. Dessert might be ice cream made by my grandfather or figs or apricots off my grandmother's trees. To drink there was usually red wine for the adults and ginger beer for the children. On this occasion the food was what my cousins would call “normal” picnic food, consisting of sandwiches, potato chips, lemonade and apples.

As I finished my lunch I remember eating the last of a small bag of potato chips, not unheard of fare in my family but certainly rare, and then biting into an apple. The taste sensation was of seawater! So much so that I thought somehow that seawater had gotten on the apple. Not so. I found more potato chips and ran an experiment. I drank whatever was nearby and crunched my purloined chips then bit into the apple again. Seawater! Not particularly pleasant but worth the experiment.

My Aunt told us all mildly to wait an hour before we went back in the water after we had eaten. I remember wondering if we would still be there an hour later or if everyone would have gotten tired of waiting and gone home. But we spent an hour or so running in and out of the surf, playing wave tag and chasing each other up and down the beach. It was during this post-lunch waiting period that I spent watching some people surf, an activity of which, up to that point, I hadn’t paid any attention at all.

Some older boys, related I think, to my Aunt’s friend, had driven themselves down and had brought their surfboards. When they seemed to be more interested in talking to some girls in two-piece bathing suits than surfing, I asked, or maybe begged to borrow a board from one of the boys. The boy that owned the board told me I could use it if I could lift it and if I was careful. Assuring him that I would be very careful, I pushed and pulled it, and even managed to balance it precariously on my head for a short while but eventually got it down to the water and out beyond the crowded shore break to where there were far fewer people and hardly any wave action at all. “Outside” surfers would say. I was laying prone on the board and enjoying a relative isolation from all the people noise and the heat of the sand.

I knew nothing of the sea except my enjoyment of it. I really wasn’t much of a swimmer although I had taken a YMCA swimming course. I was probably eleven. I didn’t know how to surf. I didn’t even think of trying. I was floating on a big blue and white surfboard and using it kind of like a pool chair. I was enjoying the gentle rocking motion and the warmth of the Santa Cruz’s spring sun. I was also floating on that blue and white board further and further out into the wide blue Pacific.

I remember thinking at the time there was really nothing to keep me from floating outward into the coastal current and all the way down to Mexico. I had, at the time, recently read a story of a Chumash boy in a dugout or bark or some kind of canoe, paddling between, or out to, or from, the Channel Islands and fearing being caught in the California Current. I thought it might rather be fun to be able to move along in the ocean and not need to paddle.

I do not remember if someone called me or another person on a surfboard came by, or I just got the notion to go back in, but in I started, thinking I’d have to paddle myself all the way back to the beach. The waves moving toward the beach were quite small and slow moving and as far out as I was, it was going to prove to be, and more importantly, looked, like a long, long paddle. My naïveté was a lucky thing for me, as I had no clear realization of the depth of water I was in, or that the momentary calm of Monterey Bay was an asset to an ignorant pre-teen without much ability as a swimmer.

The surfboard, one of the old balsa-wood construction types, was like a diving platform for someone my size. It was quite stable. It also paddled like a diving platform for someone my size. I think I even stood up on it to look around. My lack of knowledge, regarding how to place oneself on a surfboard, made standing up a perilous adventure. So I paddled and I paddled and I paddled; my skinny arms flailing along the rails like a three-horsepower outboard pushing the Queen Mary. Then I would rest for a while and again start paddling. Rest and then paddle. Rest and paddle. It became a horrid exercise in repetition and perhaps because of the distance, seeming futility.

At some juncture during my paddling it dawned on me that I had indeed paddled way too far out and maybe I really had caught the sea current and was on my way to learning Spanish. I could not see my Aunt or her friend, or my cousins or their friends or anyone I knew or recognized, and the people on the beach looked like ants and, well, I started to panic a little.

But my panic stricken arms were tired so I took another rest and then I spotted, far far down the beach my Aunt waving her arms at me, or at least I thought she was waving at me, and my calm returned and I refocused my attention on getting to the beach. I tried all kinds of techniques; both arms at once, one arm after another, hands only, pushing myself back on the board and using feet only, holding onto the tail-kick, full legs, knees down only; I discovered that one arm after another mid-board was best, despite the size of the board and my skeletal arms.

I don’t precisely remember when it happened but I do know it was somewhere out where full-grown men were standing on the sandy bottom with just their head out of water and occasionally a toddler sitting on their shoulders, but somehow the speed of my paddling and the speed of the waves rolling by, found an equilibrium and I was being pushed by a wave with no help at all from my weary arms. I was enthralled and delighted that I had discovered a principle of grand locomotion that was better than a carnival ride, and neither I nor anyone else had to pay for a ticket and neither had I anyone telling me I wasn’t big enough or old enough.

I felt lifted and energized. And the board began picking up speed a little. Now this was living! Then abruptly and directly in the path of the board a swimmer emerged from underwater with the back of his head to me and in my fear I leaned my body to the right which I honestly thought would roll my body off the board leaving the board to continue along its path to provide the unsuspecting swimmer with new blue and white stripes. Much to my amazement on a flattening, though still steep learning curve, the board tilted with me as I clutched the rails, even though I didn’t know they were called rails, and, to my stunned amazement, turned like a roller coaster car avoiding the completely unaware swimmer and picking up even more speed!

Keeping my death grip on the rails and fearing that the board would flip, I pulled hard on the right and pushed on the left and to my relief the board slowed and in response to my pressure straightened perpendicular to the wave and began to turn slowly to the left. Making this discovery, I pushed slightly more weight to the left and sure enough, the board turned more left and began to pick up speed again. I was zooming along nicely mow. I gave some pressure to the right side and again the board slowed a little and I was heading straight into the beach.

Twenty yards, ten yards, just a few more feet and then another head popped up, this time a toddler playing in the water a few feet from the sandy beach, but this time with wisdom aforehand, I pushed on the left side of the board and yielding to my pressure, the board turned, picked up a final burst of speed, missing the child and avoiding what might have been the first beheading at sea of a two-year old by an eleven year old with a longboard. With another slight lift the board and I were pushed onto the beach where I lay for a while feeling the relief that comes from a stay of execution.

Another small wave rolling in again lifted myself and the board, us, I was thinking by this time, and pushed us a few inches further onto the sand with a hissing crunch I’ve come to know well and my first surfing adventure was over. The simplicity of sliding along on a wave made by the forces of nature, out of control and in control simultaneously, changed something about the way my mind worked. At the very least, it changed the way I perceive the world, and I knew it at the time. Then I got a confirmation.

As I lay there still on the board, feeling my panic abate and a kind of relaxed energy returning, I rested my head on my arm and stared at grains of sand here and there sparkling in Santa Cruz’s afternoon sun, a pair of bare feet walking by, flipped a small amount of sand into my face and a voice from far above said, “nice ride.”