The Surfer

This story comes from an old series I began back in 2015 called "The 1000 Word Project", which you can read more of here. The idea sprung from the statement "a picture is worth a thousand words." I began to have people submit photographs of their own in exchange for a story of 1000 words in length, and it was honestly one of the most enjoyable creative outlets! Thinking of starting up again...

It is strange how fascination, curiosity and passion for something often do not equate with one another. Like my curiosity for surfing. I am fascinated by the way a person decides on the car they’re going to own based on how long their board is, not how many children they have (or plan on having), nor how many friends they want to drive home after a night out, stopping in at the McDonald’s drive thru. You can hear the sound of the leg rope banging on the windows of the car, slapping salty water against the glass, the velcro making that uncomfortable scratching sound that I’ve always detested against the pane. You’ve been out on a four hour surf trip in the sweltering relentless summer sun somewhere just out of civilisation’s reach. You’ve had to park your car and drag yourself and your board for what seems like miles through an empty, desolate development estate and over a half-intact fence before reaching the bushy overgrown track that will suddenly spill out onto a deserted beach and you’ll immediately start frothing. 

You’re a surfer born of the water for the water, it makes all the sense in the world for you, and often the only sense in the world for you. It is a life force, a conjurer, a sport, a challenge, a day-starter, a network developer. The surf gives to you and you give to it like the tides that transport it back and forth each day. Without time in the water on the back of a board, you’re wondering where life went wrong, how you survived the hours passed. Well, sir, I am not a surfer born of the water for the water. I never tasted salty waves after being thrown off a board into shallow swell. I never threw a leg strap around my ankle (and it wasn’t for the fact that the sound and feel of velcro is absolutely offensive to me). I just never understood surfing, and whilst that beckoned curiosity for it and fascination of it, there was never a call for me to jump on a board and heckle the waves that heckled me first. I understood it in its capacity to be something that saves people daily from their every day lives - that lightens up someone’s day, that becomes routine and essential like breath itself. But I never understood it in its capacity for me. And as unskilled as I feel in comparison to my hometown friends, it is not enough of a curiosity or fascination to drag me off the dune and into the surf. I just sit and watch and read and muse as others head out for their fourth hour of play. 

And while I’m no puberty blues character, waiting for you on the sand with a chiko roll and a kiss, I’m watching you in this obscenely beautiful display of darting and diving between walls of water. You rise above the tip of a wave, the board balancing for a moment then tipping forward and scooting across the water as it barrels over. It’s a game of who will come crashing down first, and you hold your hand out to feel the water’s force, acknowledging its presence, its power over you, but also teasing it as you make it through without losing balance and flipping off in the other direction, your leg rope snagging and sending the board flying only to the extent that a leash around a pole lets the dog growl and threaten within a respected radius. I admire you from afar, not in a strange laundromat owner kind of way, but more so in a “wow I wish I could do that and be a magnificent being like the one that is before me. Too bad I’m too scared of waves/literally cannot be bothered learning” kind of way.

I think it is because I have never been a fan of “fast”. I am hardly impatient. I happily slow down and wave people across roads, smiling at them. I sometimes drive below the speed limit just to take in the surroundings better (“oh look, there’s a dog. And another. And another. Oh, they’re attached to owners. That’s too bad.”). I’m never in a mad rush, because we all get somewhere eventually. And so, with those examples, it is reflected also in my physical activity. I don’t walk to the kitchen, I sloth. I don’t hurry through a train station, I wander. I don’t like running for half an hour, I prefer to walk for an hour and a half. And so surfing, for me - the rush of water, the quick decisions, the fitness required - it just has never stuck in my mind as something I’d like to do. 

But look at you - you’ve now run up the beach puffed and ecstatic, your face saying “mum let’s do that again!” as you grin from ear to ear. The water beads down your chest and you throw your body around like a dog shaking water out of your hair and eyebrows. You’re frothing. You’re a frother. Your love for this life allows me and others who just don’t quite get surfing to also find love for a life of our own. And I’m so glad to see your fervent enthusiasm crushing it like Kate Bosworth in Blue Crush. Whilst we’re so different, we’re so damn alike. We take to the earth with bare feet and glide and skip through days, weeks, months, and years. We stop to take notice of dogs (plural) and in the end neither of us are rushing a thing. Neither of us are putting off our love for the simple act of living in favour of making it to a milestone without stopping to see the shiniest, most perfectly round pebble on the road there. We are wanderers, and we are surfers - of dreams, hopes, thoughts and musings. We dip and dive and paddle and soar over our fears, and we live.