Midlife crises come early to the perpetual adolescent. Mine began, in a slow, simmering way during the summer of my thirty-second year. I felt pangs of mortality and decrepitude. Worse, I saw the gradual creep of grown-up responsibility leaching into my life. So I latched, quite suddenly, onto the idea of becoming a surfer. Surfing promised salvation. Surfers are hardbodied and cool. When you think of a surfer, you see a tan, lean 20-year-old with wind-blown, devil-may-care hair. Even old surfers are cool. There is a proud tradition of middle-aged rebels cruising waves on 10-foot longboards, every ride a rebuke to adulthood and the grave. I was determined to become one of these dudes. If possible, without doing any actual surfing.
So I started buying surf gear. There were the hip surfer sunglasses and the tragically expensive surf watch. (In addition to time and date, it tells the height of the tide, the moon phase, and the spring/neap cycle.) There were other purchases too embarrassing to recount here, but none provided more than passing comfort. Then last summer I had a conversion experience.
I was swimming in the waters off North Carolina’s Emerald Isle. A lone surfer sat on his board, a little way to my left; he began pointing in my direction as a good-sized wave crested in front of me. As the wave broke, a gray bottlenose dolphin jumped out from the foam. He wasn’t more than a yard or two away, almost near enough to touch: For an instant he was suspended in the air, his mouth hanging open in a grin. We locked eyes, then he splashed down and swam off.
I like to think that if I had been present at the apparition at Fatima or Guadalupe or Knock I would not have hesitated to believe. In any case, I wasn’t about to ignore a surfing dolphin. I signed up for lessons and started surfing for real.
It’s been a year now, and I’ve reached a minimal level of competence. But along the way I discovered that surf culture isn’t quite what I had hoped it would be. For instance, most surfers aren’t effortlessly cool. Actually, they put rather a lot of effort into it. And instead of viewing the world with laid-back bonhomie, they build up little communities that gossip about each other. Cruise any online surfing forum and you’ll see surfers railing against “kooks”–people learning to surf–for somehow destroying the sport.
The offputting provincialism isn’t just online. Peter Kreeft is a philosophy professor at Boston College who, at 70, has been surfing for most of his life. In his charming book I Surf, Therefore I Am, he recounts meeting another surfer on the water in California. When this fellow found out that Kreeft lived in New England, he replied, “You’re crazy. Or else you’re not really a surfer. You don’t really love to surf.”
This obsession with what makes a real, versus a fake, surfer is part of surf culture. As is the claim to have surfed really big and perilous waves. Almost every surfer I’ve met says he’s surfed the mammoth–and very dangerous–waves at Mavericks in California or the North Shore on Oahu. Maybe they all have. But it strikes me a bit like the number of Frenchmen who, after the war, said they had been active in the Resistance.
For my own part, I have no desire to conquer 25-foot monsters. I don’t aspire to anything more than surfing mediocrity. Because I’ve found that the pleasures of surfing do not lie in achievements.
Like all sports, surfing is physically enjoyable–riding a wave feels good in the same way that hitting a line-drive does. Surfing also provides an element of adventure. People tend to worry about sharks, but the biggest danger is your surfboard: You’re tethered to a large, rigid device designed to collect, focus, and redirect force. When someone dies surfing, the board is usually responsible. Mind you, surfing isn’t really dangerous–it’s not like serving in the Marines. But it’s risky enough to provide the occasional thrill and every so often to require some physical courage.
Yet most of the time, surfing is radically peaceful. I treasure sitting on my board, bobbing in the water just beyond the break. I try to stay apart from other surfers. The waves drown out manmade noises, and when I face the horizon, the only other creatures I see are low-flying pelicans and the occasional dolphin. I’ve learned to take comfort in the realization that the waves roll in, one after another, whether or not I turn to catch them. Whether or not I’m even there.
A man can measure time by the shifting of his pretensions. I used to want to be part of the surfer culture; now I just want to surf. Dude.
–JONATHAN V. LAST
