I’d also gotten better. I’d been surfing consistently and had traded in my banana boat for an eight-foot Roberts funboard, a good board for someone clawing their way from kook to semi-competent. I had $40 bucks in my wallet and I gave it to her. “Take your guy out to dinner,” I suggested. You could do that on $40 back then. She smiled and said she would.
She must be nearly 40 now. I wonder how her life turned out. I hope well. Aside from the panoptic travesties of the current American situation, I have to say that mine has been pretty good. I’m not rich and my house is small, my car is old, and my wages are modest, but my cup is full of blessings.
Which is what I’m thinking on this day when I turn my back on the ocean for a minute (betraying my former saviour’s warnings to be careful) to take stock. The beach, glimmering in the high sun, is 150 yards away. Past that is Highway 1, the iconic Pacific Coastal Highway that can deliver me to Seal Beach in 10 minutes or to Eureka in 10 hours. Either one would be fine—both ribboned, as I am now, by mountain and sea.
I catch some waves. Get a few decent rides, handling the rights a little better than the lefts, but not too bad. I’m not really a surfer. I don’t go enough and I’m not good enough. But here, too, I’ve been lucky. I’ve surfed Miramar in Santa Barbara on the rare days when it’s firing; a wave of euphoric memory. I even caught one at hallowed Hollister Ranch in the generous and slightly inebriated company of “Wingnut” Weaver and Dana Brown. Further up the coast, I dodged a great white shark in Cayucos and broke break with the Malloys. I had three glorious weeks alone in Costa Rica. Surfing has given me a lot.
It’s also taken some—pieces of my body sliced away by the dermatologist, infections that pinned me to the bed in fever sweats while I shat myself, concussions, stingray barbs. I don’t think it helped my first marriage. Over the years, though, even now when the waves have become harder and harder to get to, surfing remains what my body and soul long for; what I really want to do. My surfing dreams are modest—to not be the worst one in the lineup. Today, on this blue-sky, offshore, three-to-four-foot day, I wasn’t. Not even close. It’s been a long journey to get here, one that began years ago and miles away in colder, darker places. But that’s another story. For this one, let’s just say I know my end is much closer than my beginning and, as I approach it, I keep this thought in mind. Malibu in 1964, the year I entered this dimension, surely still exists in some other. Maybe in my next life I’ll be recycled there and get to be a real Californian, not just a Johnny-come-lately. Consider this my early application. Until then, it’s enough to not be the worst surfer in the lineup, waiting for a wave, looking at Mount Baldy, absorbing the sun and the salt.
The ocean, pregnant with possibilities, swells beneath me. It says, “Welcome home”.