Surfing days

Virginia Beach, Virginia 1960

The beach, an early summer morning.  The three of us walked toward the ocean, surfboards under arms.  The boards were heavy.  These were the days of 9’6”-long boards. So long, they had to be balanced to carry.  

The air was sweet with salt and morning. The sand was still damp from the night.  Our feet pressed through it like it was cake icing.  We—my friend, Dudley, his brother, Hartwell, and I—left lunar-like footprints as we walked. Sand crabs scurried semi-sideways, racing by on delicate points. 

The sun was edging up, fiery, from the horizon before us. 

We were fourteen years old, fifteen, sixteen.  We’d found exactly what it was we wanted. 

We walked to the edge of the water.  We gazed. Were there waves? We put the boards down on the beach beside us, careful not to let any sand get on the surface we’d waxed. That would grate on our stomachs later when we paddled.  

If we saw other surfers in the water, that was good. We watched them sit, in their small clutches, bobbing on their boards, or, if there were no undulations, still. Sometimes dead still. Not a good sign. 

Am I lucky today?

Then Hartwell saw what he thought were waves deep in the distance  He pointed, and we all became attentive, like wary animals. Hands raised above our eyes in protective shields against the sun’s light, we looked.  If Hartwell was right, and there were waves, we acted.

We hoisted our boards and walked to the ocean and kept walking until we were in water, mottled and cool, first feet, then calves, then thighs, until we were deep enough that we could lay the boards down and flatten our bodies against them. 

We began to paddle out.  Or if we had the practice and skill, alight the boards on our knees.  Then the paddling was a leaning forward and a pulling with our finger-tightened hands through the water.  There might be shore break that met us, unruly. It raised the boards’ fronts upward and against our chest or knees.  We paddled hard through it.  We had the strength and energy.

We paddled until we were out far enough, free and clear of shore break. We situated ourselves in a little group, sitting on our boards. 

Heading out

We might say a few words to each other, or, more likely, sit silent, legs dangling in the ocean on each side of our board, breathing the briny air.  The three of us waited. A set of too-small waves might pass under us, raising us up and down, a pleasant feeling, like riding a swing. The salt water dried on our shoulders in the early morning and crinkled.

An opportunity.  A set of three waves was approaching, moving slowly toward us. They were always in sets of three. “Wave, wave, wave!” Hartwell called out, like he’d spotted a whale from a crow’s nest. 

Dudley, Hartwell and I watched as the waves gradually rolled their way toward us.  Now, it was about timing and choice.  Would we try to catch the first wave of the three?  The second?  The third? 

The waves closed in, grown larger.  Our surfing instincts, honed with practice and failure, said to us that these waves were rideable. 

Then the wheeling of our boards around toward the shore, poised.  When the time came—and that was the issue, when was that time?—we began paddling furiously to get up enough speed to catch the wave.  We wanted our momentum to match the wave’s momentum.  Then, at a certain point, if we became united with the wave’s forward motion, we stood up. 

Then we were riding the wave.   We were surfing.

The waves always seemed bigger than they really were.

We rode forward but on a slant.  If the wave’s surface was sleek—glassy was the word everyone used—we felt like the first person who had ever done this, moving along the wave’s surface, going left or right depending on the wave’s direction. 

If the wave was large enough—and they hardly ever got larger than three feet in Virginia Beach—then, as we rode, we might glide our fingers against its pristine surface, feeling its strong watery-ness.  

All of this was happening with the sun glinting off the water’s surface and the only sound the board moving across the wave’s face and the beating of our young hearts.  No adults, just Dudley, Hartwell and I catching waves in the early summer morning.

Sometimes our ride was ended by the wave’s duration and sometimes by our own mistakes.  Then we fell off our board.  We found ourselves submerged, the world turned upside down.  

We surfaced, looked around, and located our board, floating, hopefully, nearby.  We swam to it and pulled ourselves back on. We were going back out to catch another wave until there were no more waves to catch or we had to head back home to get ready for our summer jobs.

One last wave. We rode it all the way into shore, lying flat on the board, until the moment when the bottom struck the beach.  We got up, picked up our board and walked with it up the beach, water dripping off the board, then over the dunes, done for the day.

All we wanted was for the day to be done and for another new morning to arrive, and we had the chance to do it all over again.