Coastalsurvey

To live in New York and to call yourself a surfer is to be an optimist. The waves, with a few glorious exceptions, are consistently bad. The water is cold and rarely clean. Work, geography, traffic and weather all conspire against the hopeful surfer. And, in a city where people value their time so highly that they keep accounts of the hours in little black books, surfing swallows entire days in one gulp. Surfing in New York has nothing to do with those pretty pictures in the magazines, and by no stretch of the imagination can Fire Island be compared with, say, Fiji. So why pretend?

That’s what I keep asking myself: Why bother? I can’t count all the days I’ve wasted looking for waves that weren’t there, although I clearly remember a handful of perfect rides. Those moments can’t justify the time and expense, yet I keep going back.

Some of this can be blamed on a stubborn refusal to grow up. I began surfing when I was 17 and living on Australia’s Sunshine Coast. (The indigenous New York surfer is a rare fish indeed.) I suppose I associate the sport with youth. Certainly, at the competitive level, it is a young man’s sport. There are no 40-year-old professional surf champions, and that is a key aspect in this most Peter Pan of sports: It is a rebellion against time itself.

After a ten-year hiatus, I found myself working for a large publishing house here in the city. I was desperately unhappy and considering a move to the West Coast. Instead of moving, I bought a surfboard.

I’m not a particularly accomplished surfer. In fact, I’m pretty terrible–what surfers used to call a hodad or kook and what is now referred to as a barney. I should feel foolish paddling around in the brown Atlantic, in the kind of surf that hardly deserves the name, yet I always come out of the water renewed in some fundamental way.

There’s a picture on my desk of my girlfriend standing on a subway platform next to my surfboard, which is wrapped in a blanket. It was taken in early April a few years ago after an exceptional session at Rockaway Beach. The sky was overcast that day and the air was cool. The water, however, had warmed up to 50 degrees — tolerable with a good wetsuit — and a small but steady groundswell was rolling in from a storm center far to the east. I spent that day trading waves with a young woman who was riding a longboard. We were the only two people in the water. I rode clean shoulder-high waves — rights and lefts — until my arms were too tired to paddle.

At this point it has ceased to be about waves. If I were serious about surf, I would have moved to Australia, Hawaii or Peru by now. I just surf to get clean. It’s the best way I’ve found to wash the city off my back. Even a bad day bestows an overriding sense of calm, relaxed well being.

Last November, down on the Jersey Shore, was a bad day. A series of storms had shifted the sandbars away from the remnants of an old pier to a point about 200 yards offshore. That morning had been gray and rainy, but two hours before sunset the wind swung around, blowing the clouds out to sea and lining up near perfect waves. A crew of a half-dozen wetsuited surfers were out at the bar, riding waves that were well overhead.

Approached from the side, the waves walling up over the sandbar looked like a deep pit. Every few minutes a surfer would paddle toward shore and disappear over the edge of the pit. Then, 50 yards down the line, he would reappear rising on the face of the wave to turn safely off the shoulder as the swell slid into deeper water.

I sat in the lineup and waited my turn. When I saw a swell rising behind me, I began to paddle. The pitch and speed of the drop surprised me. Rising from the bottom turn, I embedded myself in the lip of the wave and fell with it to the flat water below. I brought my arms up to cover my head before I was driven down and roiled in a dark, cold place. I heard the roar of the wave pass over and surfaced in time to see another wall bearing down on me. I took a breath and dove for the bottom. When that wave passed, I struggled to the surface and began reeling in my board as another wall began to break. I was caught in the impact zone, a not unfamiliar position for a surfer of my abilities. I pushed the board away and dove again, but not deep enough — the wave dragged me over the sandbar.

I didn’t see the fifth wave; I was on the board paddling weakly for shore. When I heard it break, I wrapped my arms around the board and waited for the whitewater to overtake me. It did, and then I was out in front of a wedge of tumbling foam, skimming like a kid on a sled before an avalanche.

I walked a few unsteady steps up the beach and sat down. It was dark. I couldn’t see the surfers out on the bar, but I could hear them whooping it up. They were still catching waves.
This year, I’m sure, it will be better.