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Sitting on Choirbench I
Watched you roll the tribe
With some kind of sculptured toys
Even though you promised
Macking corduroy
Buzz went aggro in the drop
His nose kick tripped up
On a speedbump hidden in the bowl
Then Hatch tried to hang
But every digit missed the rail
And he face planted in a gnarly perl
With his stick going ballistic
On the back swing his pintail
Nearly sent him mystic.

Kalani

Photo: Diego Fernandes 2008

I can’t remember exactly where the place was, except someplace northwest of Pearl and Waianae and it was ‘locals only’. I couldn’t tell you anyway because I was laying down in the back of the station wagon on the way and I couldn’t see where the turn-offs were. If I had seen the road, I still couldn’t tell you because Kalani and his buds only let me go because I had enough money to rent three boards, and the spot was “the spot” and the break supposedly didn’t have a name. Well, it had a name to them, just not a name to the wide world, like the famous North Shore spots.

I actually ended up renting four boards for five guys, which was so typical of Kalani. He would say, “Oh no, there’s just gonna be you and me. Nobody else. I’ll have plenty of time to show you the ropes so you can get the place wired.” At first, I was naïve enough to believe him, but I got wise. If he said two, it meant at least four; if he said four, it meant ten and it didn’t matter if it was people or money or screws that fell on the floor.

I thought at first maybe he just consistently underestimated everything. I got wise to that too. Whenever I questioned his numbers he always answered, “Don’t worry ‘bout it, bud. Don’t worry ‘bout it. Too much worry’ll kill you. ‘Specially you haoles.”

That was another of his tactics. People were drawn to him because he abused them. I know that doesn’t make much sense but he would call you racist names to your face and you would take it as honesty or something. He said haoles made worry a science, whereas native Hawaiians were the soul of laidbackness. Nothing could bother a Hawaiian. Everything bothered anyone else, especially Mainlanders like myself. “You always wanna know how far, how much, how many…but you need to take it light, brah.” Kalani never talked any kind of pidgeon-surfer slang like that anywhere but near home. Everywhere else, his English was almost punctilious except for his use of ‘Bud’.

I remember talking to him once when he was home and drunk on Saporo beer and asking him about what it felt like to be a ‘real’ Hawaiian. I was reading a book about the overthrow of the last queen at the time and the whole concept had surprised me. The book had been written by, if not a Hawaiian nationalist, then at least a sympathizer and it revealed a different history than I was taught at school in California. Kalani muttering expletives under his breath about the haoles and the puka people, his word for Asians, because he said you could always find them in lines and they all looked alike, said, “fuckin’ haoles everywhere …” Then he made a slip, “even me! I got mostly haole in me, brah!” He giggled a little and then went back to swearing about pukas.

He didn’t look like a Hawaiian or a Polynesian at all. He had wavy dark chestnut colored hair and his eyes and eyebrows were the same color. He had beautiful teeth and a hesitant smile set in incredibly pale skin freckled with spots that were also the same color as his hair. It was actually kind of disturbing to look at him; the color looked dyed or fake because it was so even and there was so much of it. It wasn’t that he was bad looking or ugly or anything, cause he really wasn’t. He just looked kind of over-the-top dramatic. Intense would be the best description, really intense.

Kalani also had a thin, hairless and very short body, barely topping five feet and there was always sloppy casualness to the way he dressed. His hats always had odd bends in them and everything he wore had sat too long in a dryer with dozen of wrinkles running in odd directions. But he always wore leather shoes and they were always polished to a mirror finish. I tried to tease out the reason for those brightly polished shoes on a couple of occasions and he just shrugged me off.

Kalani claimed to be a Christian and spent a lot of time chatting up girls using religion as a line of attack. The rest of the time he spent trying to get them in the sack. He hung around regularly with one of four or five guys who he called his ‘buds’. All of those guys told excuse-like stories about why they were Kalani’s friend and they all complained about him whenever he wasn’t around, because he just seemed to absorb energy and resources. Oh yeah, he always had good ideas, but why did someone always have an accident or get in trouble?

One guy said while watching Kalani from a distance, “don’t go out with that fucker, you’ll end up in the hospital or the morgue. See this scar? That came from playing ‘follow-the-Kalani’”. I wanted to know what had happened and the guy, his name was Tyler, told me he had climbed on a highway bumper and fell off, tearing the skin off his leg.

“What? Did Kalani knock you off or something?”

“No,” he stated flatly, still staring at Kalani’s antics in the distance, “no, I climbed up and then I fell off.”

“Okay, I’m confused. How did Kalani have anything to do with it?” The guy was staring at Kalani with what looked like near hatred.

“He didn’t have to do anything. He was just there. It’s like he’s bad juju, or something. Stuff like that happens whenever he’s around. People will be having fun, that asshole shows up and suddenly someone’s being eaten by a shark.”

“Uh…like…um…bad luck or something?”

“Or something, alright.”

I didn’t pursue it with Tyler, but I got really interested for some reason and later asked one of the real ‘buds’ if he had had something like that happen. His name was Joey.

“Oh yeah! It happens to everybody that hangs around with him. Just bad shit, ya know?” he was nodding his head emphatically.

“You?”

“Shit, yeah! That little fuck and Pat and me went down to the International Market Place to score some pot and there was a bust goin’ down when we got there. We just thought it was funny, ya know? We were watchin’ an’ shit, laughin’ and suddenly this big Samoan cop is wrestling with one of the guys they're trying to arrest. The guy takes off at a run and the cop throws … THROWS his gun at the guy and hits Pat in the side of his head! He needed…fuck…he needed like twenty stitches or something.”

“Well, where was Kalani?”

“He was standing next to Pat.”

“Yeah, okay, but nothing happened to you, right?”

“Not that time.’

“So what happened to you? I mean, you know, when Kalani was around?”

He suddenly looked a little glassy and got kind of pale, “It’s kinda hard to talk about.”

I made a laughing sound that wasn’t really laughing and waited.

There was a long silence while Joey just stared off toward the Pali highway.

“So, are you going to tell me? Or what?”

“I’m not … it’s kind of embarrassing, ya know.”

“Did Kalani do something?”

“Oh no. No, it wasn’t anything like that. He never does anything. He’s just there when shit happens and a lot of shit happens when he’s around. A lotta shit!”

“So tell me!” I tried to keep my voice neutral like I wanted to know but didn’t care if he told me.

“Remember that girl, Angela?”

“Angela? The one … you met at Kaneohe?”

“No, that was … what the fuck was her name? Anyway … no … Angela came from the mainland. Was over here on vacation. Long brown hair. Funny. Was looking for a job at one of the hotels.”

“Oh yeah! Now I remember! About five-seven, brown hair, blue eyes?”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah. Anyway, me, Angela, Tyler and that slut he was hanging out with and Kalani and some rental he’d found were all supposed to go up to the Pali and then over to North shore. Well, first Tyler and co. decided they were going to party with some tourists on a boat over at Ala Wai and Kalani asked if he could use Tyler’s car because they weren’t going to need it if they were going to be on a boat and Tyler, you know this was after he fucked up his leg falling off that highway rail, said who’s going to drive, and Kalani said it didn’t matter, he could or I could, whatever Tyler wanted. Well, I wasn’t there and Tyler was scared Kalani would fuck up his car so he said, okay, but Joey drives and has to meet us over by the harbor. And Kalani says sure, sure and then he asks, can I ride with you over there ‘cuz it’d be closer to where he was going to pick up his date. Well, Tyler says okay and he and that slut and Kalani all get in the car to go over to Ala Wai, only they never get there because some asshole runs a red and smashes in the side of Tyler’s car and breaks the sluts leg. So now Tyler has to go to the hospital with her and, you know, Kalani, once he decides he’s goin’ someplace, he’s goin’, but he’s late to his date so she won’t go. So he calls me and tells me Tyler and the slut are in the hospital but he still wants to go and do I know anyone with a car?”

“Oh fuck! Angela?”

“Yep.” “She was driving a rental,” and here Joey started talking in a girly voice. “Oh that’s okay Joey, I’ll drive, I don’t mind, I hope Tyler and the slut will be okay and get better soon and blah, blah, blah. And I’m like, shut up, you idiot, don’t say anything.” Joey was kind of laughing and waving his hands remembering everything.

“So then Angela and I get in her rental and head over to pick up Kalani and drive up Pali Highway. Big mistake. Everything is okay driving to get Kalani but as soon as he gets in the car shit starts happening. Angela sideswipes a cement bumper in the parking lot scratching the hell out of the fender, then we have to stop to put up the roof because it’s started to rain and the fucking thing gets stuck half-way up! Well, we finally get the goddam roof up but only after we’re all soaked and I’m like, shit, ya know, and Angela is pissed off because something else got fucked up. I don’t remember what, and then Kalani tries to calm things down and Angela says,” and Joey breaks into his girly voice again, “Oh Kalani, that’s so sweet! You are such a sweet heart. That’s so sweet! You are so wonderful and blah, blah, blah. And it really pissed me off, but then she starts asking him if he thought she and I should get married!! And I thought, FUCK! I just met you lady, I like you and all but Jesus fucking Christ, what the fuck! And asking Kalani, that was what really sucked! Like he would know about shit. Anyway, I got madder and madder and when we got up to the Lookout, I kept getting madder and made a stupid joke about jumping off or something and that dumb bitch said, go ahead Mighty Mouse, let’s see how well you fly.”

Joey turned really red just then and stopped talking. He just sat shaking his head and then grabbed his neck like it hurt. “This always bugs me when I think about this.” He just held his neck and sat quietly for a while and then said, “Fuck it.”

“I don’t know why I did it, okay? I just was so mad, I guess. Anyway, she said that Mighty Mouse shit and I popped. I turned around and ran to the edge and jumped over.”

“Fuck,” I said quietly.

“Yeah…man…I just ran and jumped. I heard her scream and Kalani yelled something and then, no shit, the wind, the fuckin’ wind, blew me ass over melon back up and right on top of fuckin’ Angela. Well, my legs hit her in the head or something and I went down hard on my shoulders and neck and smacked my head against the ground. Knocked myself colder than snot. It was fucked up. Angela caught something, maybe my foot or something on her lip and split it; had to have stitches. Got a huge fucking black eye. I got a dislocated shoulder and the doctor said I was lucky I didn’t break my fuckin’ neck. Well, he didn’t say ‘fuckin,’” Joey laughed a little, “and her elbow or her head or something, caught me in the balls as I went over her head and all I can say is I’m glad I was knocked out when it happened because when I came to all I could think of was that somebody had played a round of golf using my balls with the worst fucking handicap in the world.” Joey was a caddy part time at one of the golf courses.

“Youch!” I cringed in sympathetic pain, “Fuuuuck!”

“Dude. I was in the hospital for two days or some shit.”

I was still cringing and holding my crotch. “Jesus.”

“That little shit, Kalani, just stood there and watched me fly by too. His fucking stupid-ass, bent melon cover didn’t even come off. And ya wanna know what? He was fucking pissed that he couldn’t go to North Shore! That little scrap merchant asshole was fucking mad cause he couldn’t do what he wanted to do! I don’t know why the fuck I even still talk to that little fucker.”

Trying to be humorous, I said, “good ideas?”

“Fuck his ideas.”

That was months before the surfing trip and I had a lot of time to worry about what might happen to someone. But I worried more about Kalani’s numbers. Just you and me, he said. I figured that would mean four people. There were five. Negotiating on surfboard rentals, he said one because we would share. Kalani was always saying ‘Buds’ share. You weren’t a ‘Bud’ if you didn’t share. Pat asked him one day if that meant underwear too, because Kalani’s would be really tight on anybody else.

That was the only time I ever saw Kalani lose his temper and he expressed himself clearly but exactly like the boy who owns the ball. Kind of like, you have to be nice to me or I’ll take my ball and go home. The oddest thing was, it worked somehow. Pat listened and even though Kalani never drove, never helped carry stuff, never organized anything, and very, very rarely ever paid for anything, and his company was, well, dangerous, he came up with idea after idea after idea. I’m pretty sure no one exactly liked him, but Kalani’s ideas seemed to be gold, even if they mostly benefited Kalani.

There seemed to be only a couple of things Kalani really liked to do and one was surf. He wasn’t that great but he really liked it. He had had the idea of this trip for a long time and he got Pat to organize it, Joey to drive and me to pay. When I asked Pat why I had to rent surfboards when everyone had at least one board, I got the distinct impression a scam was involved when he told me to ask Kalani. Kalani would never have cheated his friends by selling their boards but he wasn’t above “losing” a board store’s sticks, especially if his name wasn’t on the rental slip. I made it really clear to Kalani that if I had to pay for rentals, I was going to pick the store. He tried to insist on some whack job place where there was a great deal because it was low season and I told him he could pay for a board or bring his own. He just gave me that dark red stare and shrugged.

When Joey and Pat showed up in the station wagon, Kalani started grinning because Tyler was with them. “The more the merrier!” He always liked it when unexpected people showed up.

“There’s only four boards, numb nuts! You told me four, dumbass!”

“Whatever.” That was Kalani’s answer. Whatever. I hate that shit.

“Whatever means you, dickweed, are staying on the beach, till someone decides to come in!”

“Fuck you, haole, you can stay in.”

“Let’s get something straight, butt munch, I fucking rented the boards and I’m fucking going out. I could give a shit what you do.” So I grabbed one of the boards and my leash and went straight into the water, which was fucking stupid but I’d gone crazy and wasn’t thinking.

None of those guys were unfriendly toward me but likewise they also weren’t real buds to me. They were Kalani’s buds. Joey and Pat were the best surfers with Tyler aggressively ready to try anything but without their skill. Kalani was okay, I guess, but he always seemed to wait for a certain kind of wave, letting plenty of good ones go.

They knew this break and I didn’t. It was a reef break but it was only a short paddle out and that day the waves weren’t really very good. They headed straight for the reef then jacked up fast and broke more on top of the reef than across it. The tide was somewhere midway between high and low but working toward low, which made the situation worse. I didn’t know the break; good-sized waves breaking on reef, upset, not good.

Of course, I had to be the dumbass. There was a couple of ways to get past the reef and I took the worst. I was sure of it when Pat got out ahead of me even though I’d started first. Naturally, he had to rub it in when he told me I should have gone the other way. Like I knew there was another way. Then Joey arrived and said the same thing, which pissed me off even more.

I could see Kalani and Tyler having a conversation, I guessed about who was going out first and Kalani must have won the argument because Tyler just went over and sat on the tailgate of the car.

Joey had already caught a wave and rode it right through the opening in the reef and Pat hooted for him. Pat asked me if I wanted to go ahead of him and I said no because I wanted to watch him go through that break in the reef to get a feel for where to start and in a couple of minutes Pat caught one and without any tricks sailed right through.

By that time Kalani was through the opening and outside. He didn’t say anything to me but he was looking at me with an expression I’d never seen before. It’s hard to describe but once you’d seen it you’d never forget. He was just looking at me like he was reading a book or something, maybe like he’d just seen what he wanted for lunch. His face was totally calm, empty, really, of everything. His dark red eyes were just looking at me. I was a little spooked.

It changed when I asked him if he wanted to go first. He just shook his head and said, “Go, bud.”

I think I was more spooked than I realized because I caught the first wave, the good one, too late and missed it as it passed under me so I just kept paddling like a barney and caught the next, which had me way out of position but I caught it anyway and did a really good pop up. But my desire to get away from Kalani had me on a collision course for the reef and sure enough I could see it coming. I don’t know why I didn’t just kick out or dive off the board but I didn’t. I just didn’t.

I felt the wave jack under me; saw the reef ahead and an area that was completely exposed by the ebbing tide. I knew I was going to wipe out. My balance was good, my trim was good, but I was going to wipe out on a reef on my first and last ride of the day. Then the road got really smooth, too smooth. The wave just dropped out, vanished, from underneath me. I still had my balance and forward momentum. I just had no wave. I was flying.

I even had momentary feeling that maybe I could fly completely over the reef and land in the lagoon on the other side but I didn’t. I was in a sort of crouched Silver Surfer position when I hit the coral. There was a grinding noise and I heard a kind of cruuunnch, then a loud popping snap. My momentum carried me in a run right off the nose of the board and onto the coral. There was an immediate stinging sensation just before another breaking wave caught me from behind and pushed me further on the coral and sent the board whizzing by my head. At that point I could feel the coral digging into my hands as well as my feet and then just as suddenly, I was swimming in the lagoon with the board floating upside down next to me.

With the salt water stinging my hands and feet, I reached out to grab the board and realized the leash was still caught on some coral so I painfully tugged it loose and in doing so, I guess the board was being pushed or something because when the leash came loose the tail hit me in the back of the head. Not hard, but enough to give me a bump. When I turned my body to right the board and slide onto its deck I noticed the skeg had snapped off.

I was about halfway back to the beach when I turned my head and saw Kalani come flying through the opening in the reef.


I had to pay for the broken longboard, and I only got a slight infection from the coral cuts. Joey and Pat stopped hanging with Kalani and I don’t know what happened to Tyler.

The last time I saw Kalani he tried to get me to give him a hotel room I had rented because he had a ‘girl friend’ and his new buds were playing poker in a room they rented together. I just told him to rent his own room and he told me I wasn’t a bud.

Duh.

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.”