This Week In Not Surfing

1. On the plane to California I watch Atomic Blonde three times over other passenger's shoulders. I watch Beatriz at Dinner then The Hero on my own itsy-bitsy screen. All three films make me wonder what it means to live every day as if it is your last, to appreciate every moment the way they say you ought to, our popular religion in which everyone is chatecised but where no one receives communion. 

2. At one point I let myself believe that when we die we don’t really die but our positive vibe soul pixie dirt carries on to join other soul pixie dirt of a certain cosmic simpatico, forming a kind of enthusiastic pixie clod, packing in with other pixie mounds to coalesce into some sort of terrestrial rebirth. The better you do, the more ethical positivity you can achieve in this life, the way cooler your subsequent reformation will be in the next. Not you, so to speak, but the remnants of you partying along with other way cool, thoughtful remnants making the universe a better place.

3. When we get to Grannie & Papa’s house I find my old Patagonia wetsuit hanging where I left it in the closet, a relief as I once left my favorite black belt (my only black belt) in this same closet only to find it irrevocably borrowed upon my return. 

4. Nina had warned me the waves would die just past Christmas. I figured she was speaking in a California surf vernacular, “flat” on the West Coast having an entirely different meaning to “flat” on the East Coast. But she’s wrong in a different way. It’s flat even before Christmas. 

5. I now reckon every successive evolution in our belief is just a bridge to the next. Bridges upon bridges next to bridges as far as the eye can see, spanning a chasm between the places birth & death. People get stuck in the middle, so taken with the view they’re sure they’ve reached terra firma. Or they've just decided to stay suspended in place. Which is understandable. Sensible even.

6. On the flight to California there are three different films on three different seat back screens simultaneously featuring men in cowboy hats. Out of 43 possible Halloweens I can only remember dressing up as a ghost (the Charlie Brown kind), a lion (with a plastic mask, the kind with a rubber band), a pirate (like Johnny Depp) and a cowboy (lots of times.) (Most times.)

7. At the end of The Hero there is a poignant scene (spoiler alert) where one character (a beautiful woman) reads an Edna St.Vincent Millay poem to another character (a cowboy actor.) My three year old interrupts this ultimate, meaningful scene four times, twice kicking the headphone jack out of the port. When I do finally finish the scene, I cry. Because I’m watching a movie on an airplane. And she's reading a poem to a cowboy.

8. California has never been my home. I lived here a while, a tourist the whole of it.

9. Fatherhood is a bit like tourism. I suppose I don’t have to explain that. 

10. Being married is like being a tourist. But that probably needs explaining. 

11. There is no tourism to surfing. Just suffering. 

12. On my mobile phone I have a link to a webpage titled 10 Cultural Values of the Lakota, or something like that. Most of them have something to do with being quiet. My relationship with that sort of quiet has been a spotty one my whole life.

13. I pull out one of the softtops from beneath the house and paddle from Grannie & Papa’s to Tamarack and surf for an hour off the north jetty in something knee highish. One of the regulars hoots me into waves, talking loudly and telling everyone to paddle harder, then laughing ecstatically. I paddle back to the house not long after he shows up. 

14. We drive to LA in my wife’s late grandfather’s Lincoln Towncar. I walk into a hip restaurant and all the waiters are wearing mustaches. I am also wearing a mustache. I told my wife last year I think I may never not have a mustache again. The upper lip protection somehow translates into lazy confidence. 

15. Graham’s dad shaved off his mustache one summer during high school, becoming so much nicer, more jolly, more jovial. Seemingly overnight. An almost instant loss of authority.

16. In Venice Beach I dip into the water just after sunrise, watching a 3 foot tiger-striped ray glide past my feet as I shuffle out. There are a handful of novice surfers hanging around the pier going straight on nothing shorey. I think for the first time that I understand the draw of owning a cat.  

17. I observe the strikingly Gallic features of my handsomely hangdog friends at their new music venue/bar/restaurant on the other side of Echo Park. The place feels triumphant, victorious and hollow in a youthful way. The product of grit and can-do. It’s beside a dry river bed under the shadow of brown scrubby mountains. I imagine those mountains have sage brush rolling atop them.

18. At the hip restaurant I sit across from three twenty-somethings with three matching meshback caps: Marmot Mountain, Patagonia, REI. They sport thin hair on their lip and cheeks. The baristo has his own attenuated twenty-something mustache and a full sleeve tattoo of some swirly waves. His dusty lip fuzz is feathery and perched. I regard it with vicarious satisfaction, proud of its precarious confidence. The manager walks by. His mustache is very blond. Too-blond mustaches don’t always capture the feeling. I indulge in using my thumb to press the cauliflower rice onto my fork. Like a cowboy.

19. I paddle from Granny & Papa’s almost all the way to the Oceanside pier before I find a little sandbar in front of a seawall just past the Teutonic housing development. The paddle is windless and I glide smoothly over the clear water that feels like I’m looking through a green beer bottle. Surfing isn’t suffering when there is no wind and the water feels like an empty beer bottle. That comes later, on the flight home.

20. I celebrate New Years with a woman who looks out over the sea every morning when she wakes up and every night before she goes to bed. And has done so for around sixty years. I also celebrate with the guy who almost got run over during that surfing motorcycle stunt at Cloudbreak. 

21.  When I get home my son’s godmother is there, dog and house sitting. I’ve left my family in California to return to work. My son’s Godmother makes dinner of polenta and pan friend meat with sage on it. During the meal she tells me about parking her car in a very dodgie neighborhood in Queens but not at all feeling threatened as everyone she passed was too busy looking down at their phones. She convinces me to catch the late night screening of the famous Irish method actor’s final film. Getting to the theater a little early, I drift to a bookstore and read the titles off some of the books heaped on the little islands. “Men Explain Things to Me” by Rebecca Solsnit. “How To Ruin Everything” by George Watsky. “Why Buddhism is True” by Robert Wright. Each title like a small dagger in the heart. 

22. Walking back to the cinema I get a text from my sister-in-law with pictures of my elder son surfing under the moonlight, being goaded into waves by his uncle, the same uncle who pushed the reigning Adaptive Surf champion in the AS-5 category (surfers who ride in a non-standing position and need assistance to paddle into waves) to victory in last month’s title event. When the champ touched down in his native Australia they blew massive firehoses over his plane and put him on the front page of the newspaper. They do this for surf champs in Australia. 

23. My son doesn’t get water cannons for surfing by moonlight. But I do when I hear he’s been quoted exclaiming, “this is the best night of my life!”

Notes On a Surf Staycation

I’ll be live-blogging my 2017 Summer pseudo-surfcation. Stay tuned for the boring and involuntary. Or voluntarily boring. I’m not sure when gainful employment will cut into this dance, or whether it will at all. The guts of my family, of my life, are on another coast as I shack, literally, with my dog on Long Island, hoping to, as they say, “get things done.” Over the next series of days things may get terribly maudlin. Stay tuned to this channel.

Day One

You can be almost 100% sure that if you invite me over for a barbecue, at some point I will excuse myself for a few moments, head to your bathroom and rummage through your medicine cabinet looking for q-tips. I have been disallowed from having them at home and I'm always on the lookout for an opportunistic fix.

Knowing the question is coming and being prepared to answer the question are two different things. “Everything being equal” seems to be the qualific catch phrase in a phone conversation with my habitually estranged brother.

The first insecurity one is confronted with when alone for the first night on a surf staycation falls along imposter syndrome lines: I've been longing to be alone for so long, is it possible I've been treating myself to some tasty delusion?

The second is a terror of anxiety: to exactly which depths have my surfing abilities sunk?

Day Two

The magic of Long Island: Ruben Santiago-Hudson’s reading of Percival Everett’s “The Appropriation of Cultures,” inexplicably sharing a number on the radio dial with the local folk music station playing its morning Irish jig programming. A see-saw slugfest in two and five second chunks the whole way to Gilgo.

I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to go back to “real” surfing. A dodgie knee, a trick ankle and a deep aversion to feeling like a failure ensures I may just not. Granted, there are plenty of ways being a soft-top junkie makes one look plenty stupid. But it’s a stupid I can stomach. Lentini says someone out there is making “hand crafted” foamies that actually have rails and can turn and do the things a normal surfboard can do. They cost five hundred bucks or something. Unless they are making them out of biodegradable, recycled material, count me out. This giant hunk of floating petroleum’s only plus side is the fact that it doesn’t provide any of the normal technical amenities while making it easier for me to be lazy. Start messing with that without any improvement where it really counts and I call bullshit.

The waves are waist high and super fun. The first extended surf I’ve had since the last time I had an extended surf. Which was a while go. I spend the morning with friends in the water and the rest of the day cutting up brush and cutting down dead trees and burning shit in a big midday bonfire.

A few nights ago at a party full of children I witnessed my elder son learn one of life’s important early lessons: if, while playing Hide & Seek, you hide too well for too long, no one cares.

Day Three (or) Day Four

I think it must be Day Four.

Yesterday I have a second fun day at Gilgo Beach. With friends. I take the opportunity to flail a bit on a wave while Mike paddles by and he yells, “Trying to roll up the windows?”

I wander around my house like a zombie, the excitement which begot the productivity of Day Two having faded, leaving me what I imagine the lingering effects of shell-shock to feel like. At the added risk of minimizing something serious further, I wonder if there isn’t a PTSD analog that comes along with fatherhood. Or parenthood, motherhood or spousehood for that matter. It creeps up on you. Then it’s there, overwhelming; exhausting; haunting. It causes mildly sleepless nights. The sort of which you don’t realize the effects until its too late. Irritable, irrational, emotionally jumpy. When you are alone, if you are alone for long enough, it turns you into walking putty for a couple days. Or maybe more. I’ll let you know if I’m still like this tomorrow.

Judy Carmichael on the Jazz Inspired radio show to Dick Hyman:
“You actually make it a party!”
“Well, that’s the intention. We actually serve real potato chips and real soft drinks.”
This reminds me of a Jonathan Richman song.

This morning I wake up in a bed in someone else's house and we take my friend’s daughter to horse camp. I find a deer tick crawling on my leg. I go to Home Depot twice. Two different Home Depots. Later, I scrape paint off my house.

Just before dinner I go to Smith Point and body surf and wash my body in the warm salt water.

I slow cook bolognese sauce over the open fire. Two different neighbor’s cats press their nose to the screen door while I eat inside reading a Geoff Dyer book I’ve purchased twice because I’d forgotten I’d already picked it up once. You’re welcome Geoff. Jamie introduced me to Geoff over plastic cups of pink wine in the English countryside. It’s a funny thing to read the book of someone with whom you’ve had a conversation. Especially the way Geoff Dyer writes. I can hear his slim voice and I see his slim face while I read. The memory of him places itself in his story. I wonder if you’re the type of person who meets authors all the time whether this affects your reading experience. Perhaps that’s a dumb question.

This is definitely Day Four.

On the topic of cultural appropriation, Billy Bragg has a pretty good lick at the topic recently on Terry Gross' Fresh Air.

Day Five

For breakfast I eat yogurt and nectarines. For lunch I eat leftover pasta. My dog stares at me.

During lunch I read a book and the author references D.H. Lawrence. I think about what it means to be well-read in the age of 21st Century post-modernism. Of New York Times bestseller lists. Of Wikipedia. I still mostly read, when I get the chance to read, White men who often reference, in their own work, passages from the Great Canon of Other White Men, Mostly Dead. I wonder at this. I wonder that I regard myself as sufficiently well-read yet I am often sent scurrying to Google to slyly refresh my well-readedness. This, perhaps, is what it means now to be well-read: simply a willingness to read at all.

I scrape flaking paint off the house. I get bit by mosquitoes. I listen to podcast episodes of Fresh Air and Hidden Brain.

There is no surf to surf.

I go to Smith Point beach to clean off grime I've accumulated from working around the house. There is a large Indian family at the beach when I get there. They are handsome and happy and I catch them watching me body whomp.

Day Six

I pick up a day laborer at the 7-11 on Horseback Road. There are four 7-11s on Horseback Road. Or as far as I’ve driven on Horseback Road. Presumably, Horseback Road goes all the way to what’s known as the North Shore. Presumably, Horseback Road is named that because once upon a time there were a number of stables along that route. The day laborer I pick up is named Juan, presumably because he is originally from El Salvador. Not everyone from El Salvador is called Juan the same as not every route that had, at some point, some horses on it are called Horseback Road. So there you go. Juan turns out to be a reticent conversationalist, but puts up with my faltering Spanish generously.

I have some realizations today about needing to find ways to appreciate certain things in my life more. Classic being-alone realizations, I suppose.

There is no surf today. But, with the one-morning exception of a friend's outdoor shower, and the one-evening exception of a rubber tube extended from my kitchen sink, I have washed my body exclusively in salt water this week and do so again tonight. This reminds me that exclusivity is only fun for the exceptions.

Day Seven

You only get two opportunities to die prematurely. The first, when you are actually premature, a designation that has admittedly mushified over time, being gradually redefined over the past 60 or so years, and still in flux as of this writing, but safely, I think, defined by being a dependent child, or some young and precocious prodigy of an expectant sort for a limited amount of time past that. I think I can safely say, in my early 40s and with no world-altering talent of my own waiting to bare fruit, I am mature enough to simply die. Except! I happen to be lucky enough to fall into that other available category of premature death: I have premature things in my care. Having premature children, that is to say in this instance children who still rely on my existence, more and less, for theirs, I am a premature death waiting to happen by proxy.

Ever since I was a kid I have preferred unsalted potato chips. Tim's Cascade being the first, and for a long time only, version I could find. Utz has unsalted potato chips now. Yesterday, when I make Juan the Salvadoran Day Laborer lunch, he goes for the bag of unsalted chips. "Oh! Those are unsalted! Here these Ruffle ones have salt," I say to him. He gives me a funny look, slowly withdraws his hand from the potato chips altogether.

Today I drive home from my house near the beach (not the beach itself, mind you), unpack my bags from the car and eat the rest of the leftover unsalted potato chips. I walk the dog and get on my bike, heading to the bank to deposit a check. On my way there I imagine my premature death, a car on bicycle accident, unsalted potato chips spread across the street.

I find myself alone in a house in Brooklyn looking at movie times. The only movies that look good are French. A memoirumentary about French cinema that starts at 8:30 and is three hours long and a film about a gay French man who goes on a cross country Grindr spree that starts at 6:40. The alternatives are Dunkirk, with Mark Rylance and that Irish actor with the crazy eyes that starts at 7:30 and an Idris Elba/Matthew McConnughy vehicle about a spooky cowboy that begins at 8:00. The best of the lot looks to be that French Grindr film. But I'm not sure I can hack it.

It ends up being more of an open road chase film. One lover closing in on another from Paris to Cannes. The director was there answering questions after the credits, mentioning that his producers were telling him to film the actors more, not endless shots through the windshield. He said he could control the actors, he could not control the nature around him. So he shot that point of view to the point of exhaustion. Probably why he felt committed to make sure as much of it got in the film as possible.

Day Eight

I wake late, the previous night's midnight run to the Chinese take-out leaving bags under my eyes and a doughy quality to my movement.

As I take the dog for a walk I mentally line up the things in my life, systematically attempting to define why I enjoy them; why I appreciate them. People, things, situations. For each one the outcome is the same. I enjoy the things in my life because they give me something real to feel now, and I enjoy the things in my life because they are fat with hope for feeling in the future.

In the afternoon my family will return and it won't just be me and the dog anymore. I will once again be carrying a raucous, bulging bag of emotions everywhere I go. Time frames will be reinstated. Expectations will be reintroduced. In preparation I spend the day cleaning house.

Notes On Surfamily Holiday

There is a special little evil demon lurking in the heart of every surfer. A little misshapen scowling gargoylish thing that hates. It's the secret tension that might just "make" surfing. Like Golem's precious, that little hoarding troll in our heart spews vile spittle at every other surfer in the water, in the magazines, on the video embed and wherever else it finds them. Billabong slyly used it against us. Rip Curl played upon its desires. But in the end, it comes down to a very simple fact: only a surfer knows what it feels like to not surf.

We sit, passively chasing the sun on Hanalei Bay. My younger son shoves his mug into mine and yells "Hi Papa!" He does this multiple times repeatedly at interval throughout the day. I wonder at his budding existentialism, desperately working at interrupting my customary otherness with an affirmation of us-ness. We are here! Right now! He points at the water and says "big water!" He sees helicopters exclaims "helptr!" Then "airplane!" He sees two helicopters and screams excitedly "two helptrs!"

The human intellect is a weighty burden. Its offering a slight two paths to wander, neither particularly gentle. On the one hand, it seems entirely bold to rebel against one's intellect, dismissing all the cognitive dissonance and embrace a binary certainty, an action fathomless to me. The other avenue is the lazy way maybe, the easy way, accepting the frustratingly simple complication of things, wallowing in the double binds and inherent contradictions that pepper our pot.

My older son wants a boogie board and I get him a boogie board. I ask him if he'd get up early with me and go look at the surf. He tells me he might not be into surfing so much. He says this, "Papa, I just don't think I like surfing as much as you do." My younger son screams when I take him to the water's edge. He screams and demands to be picked up and carried into the water and when the waves are too big and they crash into us he screams and wants to go back the ten feet to shore.

What's that line Matt Warshaw quoted the other day? The one about crossing the beach to get to the waves?

It takes me three days to surf after touching down on Kauai. Two of them shuttling the family from one rainy, windswept beach to another with a rented Wavestorm strapped to the roof of our family Jeep. It was my wife's idea, the Jeep. Standing at the rental counter I had been content with a little hatchback economy number, an acquiescence that darkened my wife's brow immediately. She is right of course, the rain of Kauai making each parking lot look like a wackamole game. By the afternoon of the second day I am petulantly pouty and by the third morning I am hurtling through the blackness of pre-dawn Kauai in search of a pulse. This Kauai darkness is a character trait the guidebooks don't forewarn. The absence of street lights, making pre dawn and post sunset Kauai more or less pitch black everywhere but on your lanai.

Pulling out of the sudden dawn onto the Robinson Estate on the west side of the island, Jeremy and I are treated to a beautiful Sayulita-like sternum-high left point. Jeremy is making a long term go of Kauai and I can see why. This begs the question burning on my pursed lips: why are family vacations so awful?

Hanalei reminds me a little of Montauk in the mid 2000's, just before the deluge of hip digital yuppies but some time after the Brooklyn artists and yoga instructors had descended en masse. This similarity driven home by the sight of Donovan Frankenreiter, a fellow I was once mistaken for at summertime Poles, finding myself congratulated for the great set I had apparently played the night before at the Surf Lodge.

Vacations of the beachy sort can be implicitly predicated on an admission that one isn't enjoying the quotidian life one wants to enjoy. That some other sunnier, sandier reality needs to be explored. This, and the fact that most family vacations don't allow enough time to actually vacate anything. By the fifth day, the day before we're set to return to the mainland, I am finally happy. Of course on the fourth day were chased off Anini Beach by a strung out mid-lifer waving a butcher knife.

We visit the exactish spot Wifey's parents parked the bus the day her little brother was born 40ish years ago. Powerhouse Road. We buy bumper stickers and hats at the little grocer where her parents weighed him in the vegetable scale. Wainiha General Store. We eat poke bowls and grill tuna steaks and eat bags of oranges (bags) and drink water and Kauai rum. Child One reads seven novels. Child Two becomes infatuated with the farm cats.

In the end I surf only twice on Kauai. Once on that wonderful little left hander and once in the lovely head high-ish rights of Hanalei Bay. I surf in Cardiff when we stop over in California to visit family and a couple days after we get home I surf perfectly fun New Jersey. My surfing magically mirrors my leg strength. Diminishing. Still, I manage to maneuver and twist and I think I've finally come to grips with a parallel stance I'm happy to embrace. The other day I was watching some Tom Wegener clips and I thought "yep, that's it."

I am now 42 years old and in 42 years I still haven't mastered a proper technique of standing and putting my underpants on without catching my big toe and almost falling over. In Italian one says "dio cane!" a blasphemous curse; a throw away line about God being a dog. I think I understand the impulse.

A colleague died of cancer a few weeks ago. We worked together for a number of months last year. She hated my taste in music and when she figured I was shooting too much footage she would sneak up behind me and hiss loudly, "we've got the pickle!" She was German and tall and difficult but had lived a full life. She had sailed all over the world and even sailed across the Atlantic by accident. I liked her.

Now I'm not some spiritual type. I mean, I've tried most mind opening, soul revealing special substances that are out there. From cheekfuls of dusty iboga in West Africa to mouthfuls of vomitous Peruvian ayahuasca. From LSD that had me swapping bodies with a golden retriever to mushrooms that had me prowling Prospect Park as a grizzled old lion. I've dug beneath the Wailing Wall and taken my shoes of at Al Aqsa. But the fact is the other night I took a kundalini meditation class and afterwards my knees hurt. But listen to this: the next time you're walking down the street and feeling like you hate everyone, or the next time you're in some sort of argument with some know-nothing and you can feel your patience slipping into dangerous territory, try looking between the eyes of that person standing on the other side of the counter, or those jerks walking down the street. Look right where the Hindus say the "third eye" is supposed to be, just a touch north of smack between the eyebrows. I don't know what it is, but whenever I do that simple thing it softens me right up.

I don't think the benchmarks Americans generally set for their intelligence are high enough.

And don't forget to feel your feet.

Notes On An Abbreviated Surf Vacation

First Day: I drag my finless nine foot soft top past my son’s leathery surf camp instructor. He quips with condescending glee “Missing something? Fins maybe?” He’s right, in a way. The waves are junk and trying to spin around would be an exercise in more frustration than it’s worth. I plug the fins in and smash my board repeatedly into the Sagaponak shorey.

Memory is a file we mislabel expectation.

Along the thoroughfares of the easternmost end of Long Island, the sense of entitlement wafts across concrete sidewalks like stray air conditioning from open shop doors.

Second Day: I drag my finned-up nine foot soft top past my son’s leathery surf camp instructor. He quips with condescending glee “I see you’ve added fins today!” He’s right, in a way. The waves are worse than yesterday but slightly more compressive in the shorey. I knee paddle into multiple suicide rail grab sandpaper blowouts.

My left knee wobbles. My right ankle crackles. My right shoulder becomes sore. My neck stiffens up. I fart. My wife tells me to brush my teeth.

We buy George Clooney tequila. We drink George Clooney tequila. We tell each other what we think continuously. The communication of our opinion is incessant.

Third Day: I wake up a little late. My wife has gone for a run. When she comes back she informs me she has jogged down to the beach, taken off all her clothes and had a morning swim in the nude. She then warns me that tomorrow she is going to kick me out of bed early so I don't forget to go surfing.

I am introduced to a man who after living his adult life as a corporate lawyer quit his lucrative career at forty one to roam the globe, exploring cities he'd only read about in magazines and newspapers. Someone asks him if he'd be free in a couple weeks for dinner. "No" he says, "I'll be in Machu Picchu."

More George Clooney tequila. An old friend shows up, falls off a bicycle and shows up. We jump into a pool without clothes on.

Fourth Day: A sleepless night a missed early morning surf an entire day spent body whomping in the Atlantic shorepound.

Fifth Day: I surf gorgeous, consequentially inconsequential shin high breakers. I surf the nine foot pink soft top without fins, spinning around, often in a stance just like that old monkey piggy bank.

I surf with a friend who has suffered a series of immense losses; compounding traumas washing over, and through, his body. We raise our hands and splash the water and quietly dedicate, silently remembering.

Sorrow is a fractal. Each person's sorrow the continuous wail of our deepest recollections; a biological pattern that does not cease. Lobsters, they say, could theoretically live forever, their cell renewal a flawless rebirth. Sorrow is like this.

Notes On A Surfing Holiday

"If I had to move away from the coast I would live in the desert," I hear myself opine while driving down long dusty avenues buffeted by verdant golfing greens and swaying palm trees. An empty statement, in retrospect. I technically live on the coast by dint of the fact that I live on an island, but that's just a technicality. In reality, I live in a city far away from the surf. I could probably live in the desert, a couple hours from a surf spot and surf more than I do now. The qualitative differences of living by a coast in a city and partaking of the coast in a desert is so stark as to call into question the whole definition of coastal. This reality hit me square between the eyes while visiting my mother in the desert for the first part of our holidays.

"Coffee people." That's the voice I hear inside her head when she thinks of us. "Oh, they're coffee people." My mother doesn't drink coffee. Or tea. She does drink nonfat decaf vanilla iced lattes, which I don't think anyone can refer to as coffee. Even non coffee people. That's more like vanilla flavored iced milk with a hint of bitter, once the slightly melted thing is delivered. And she sends us Starbucks gift cards for Christmas every year which makes me think she must really like those lattes quite a bit.

They call the day after Christmas "Boxing Day" in the Commonwealth. It is the day the Rich English give boxes full of the cruddy stuff they got for Christmas for which there isn't a return receipt to the Poor English. They give to them in boxes. Ergo Boxing Day. In Palm Desert the only place to get tea or coffee early in the morning on Boxing Day is Starbucks. My mother was ecstatic for her wishy vanilla milk winking-at-coffee drink.

"Is it crowded?" she asks. This is a real stumper for me. How crowded can a Starbucks get in Palm Desert at 7 AM on Boxing Day? I can't imagine it gets crowded on any day. But metrics are different in the desert. You can drive for a few miles only seeing a few other cars. Maybe driving a mile and seeing ten cars is "traffic" here. So I answer "Yes it was packed." This satisfies her.

Basketball is the most boring game. I didn't used to feel this way. I used to love basketball. I played with avid consistency. But something happened... they moved the SuperSonics out of Seattle, I stopped watching in protest, and now, when I try to go back, I just don't have the love anymore. It's just flat boring. So how is it that the best parts of the Amy Schumer vehicle "Trainwreck" are the ones with LeBron in them? Not that Amy Schumer isn't funny. She's genuinely funny. Funnier than most. But something about LeBron. He was even funnier.

In Hawaii there seems to be one team: the Seattle Seahawks. There are so many Seahawks jerseys and t-shirts it takes me by surprise. It is equally a surprising bit of comfort. I think to myself "Hey! If I get into a little trouble, I'll just bring up that I once served Steve Largent dinner and he complimented me on keeping his water glass filled!"

Waikiki is a great place to shoot guns. If you're looking for a gun holiday, head to Waikiki, soak up some rays, peruse the boutiques, drink some mai tais and squeeze off a few rounds in one of the numerous indoor firing ranges just steps from the the beach.

The drive through the middle of Oahu to the North Shore from Honolulu is surprisingly short. Forty five minutes about. We start by visiting a little coffee shop in the Ward part of town. A Vietnamese man is behind the counter, next to his Vietnamese cousin in the kitchen. He asks us if we're tourists. He has been on the island for 15 years, by way of Chicago. I ask him why Chicago, he says "work!" The Vietnamese Coffee he makes is very very good. I order iced tea, but I openly covet my wife's Vietnamese Coffee.

Is there something magical about the North Shore? Yes. Seven Mile Miracle? Sure. I've always been intimidated by the idea of surfing on the North Shore. When I finally see it face to face, it seems entirely doable. There seems to be plenty of places to paddle out and not get in the way and get a few messy rides. It is characteristically (characteristically of all fêted but truly hallowed places) modest when first experienced. "This is it? This stretch of two lane road and that bit of rock and sand?" But this is expected and I don't let the mildness of an hour spent squinting my eyes fool me. All of Hawaii has an abnormal vibe. The North Shore feels particularly charismatic.

Waimea Bay is truly beautiful.

We stop at the Kuhuku Superette per instruction. I order a plastic container full of poke. A Poke Bowl. We eat it outside Tita's walk-up under the shade of a bus stop. All four of us: woman and man and two children taking turns slurping down the alternately chewy and satin fish. We gobble at the onions and rice. Carnivorous familial bliss.

Along the way I see someone I follow on Instagram and he stops by the side of the road and we chat for a moment. It is as awkward as you might think, stopping to chat on the side of the road with someone you only know vaguely from social media. But he is generous, offering me a board to paddle out and a t-shirt souvenir. My wife rolls her eyes at me, my older son is shy, younger son squirms in the sun.

As I said, I stay no more than an hour on this liminal holy land. The humility of a husband on unexpected holiday with children in tow. Another piece of evidence in the case against my surfing bone-fides, a legal matter forever being wrangled in an esoteric court.

We play in the sand near the President of the United States. He does not throw me a shaka. I do not catch him bodysurfing. Instead, in town, I buy new flowery swim trunks that fit me snuggly. My wife says they make me look less fat than the baggy ones I had been sporting. I wonder aloud if I wore speedos if I wouldn't look slimmer still. She says she wouldn't go to the beach with me if I did that. We order another Poke Bowl from another grocery. The fish is even more slippery and we gobble with even more enthusiasm.

There is a moment during my time on Oahu when I nearly break down. It is our last day and I want to surf. There is, and there isn't, enough time. I am ready to mutiny and I nearly catapult into the sort of fit reserved for my sons. Just as I shudder into apoplexy, my age takes hold and I remember my single New Year's resolution, a one-word mantra : elegance. I accept my fate.

In fact I was able to surf a few times on this little accidental family vacation. Ala Moana all, Rockpiles and Bowls and In Betweens. Maybe Kaiser's. The spots seem to mush together in my haole mind. There is an odd south island swell happening our first two days. I luck into four foot fun. Hawaiian waves do have the push.

Just paddling out into the water in Hawaii makes you feel like a champion surfer. It doesn't matter if it's three foot (Hawaiian) semi-mush. I mean, it didn't feel like mush to me, the wave jacking up for a fun moment then lining up for a mini stand up wall before closing out into the next reef. But to a Hawaiian surfer it was probably junk and I felt like a champ.

My son paddles out for a couple sessions. He does not let me help him. He paddles well and knows what he's doing. He still lacks the voracious appetite for surfing. Even after all we've been through, after all he's seen. He still decides whether he will paddle out. The calm, safe confines of the hotel pool still hold strong appeal. I wonder what surfing will become for him. I wonder if he will do to me what I did to my father with skiing. I can see it. But my father had three children and one of them still skis, perhaps saving for me a bit of acceptance in the old man's heart. Perhaps I should be more grateful to that brother. And to tell the truth, I adore my first son so intensely, I worry he can do no wrong in my eyes. Please do not let him know, who needs that headache?

On my last wave of my last session I lose my board and swim to retrieve it. I forget how shallow the reef is and my hand brushes an urchin leaving me with spiny black needles sticking out of my left middle finger. When I return my board to the shop, a real live son of a real Waikiki beach boy is hanging around the shop unnerving the demure Japanese expat shopgirl standing uneasily behind the counter. He is talking story to her and she is nodding her head and approving nervously. He has clear light eyes and the sharp features of waterman. I ask him about my urchin pins and he says "Pee on it! Something about your pee drives the urchin out. If you don't they live in there. They're living and will grow inside you." The intensity of his gaze makes me stick around for a while to talk to him about his fathers and grandfathers. He tells me about earning his first board by riding it in without falling off on his first try. Eventually, his intensity drives me away.

I pee on my finger religiously. Still.

We buy macadamia nuts. We drink POG. We hold our breath under water. We do not get sunburnt. I try the hotel's various versions of mai tais but end up preferring the local beer. Our last night, an asian man gets so drunk in the room next door, a friend has to come and get him bleating out in that curious asian-man-drunk-tenor. I've only heard that sound in the movies. But now I've heard it in real life. It is at turns fascinating, comical and deeply annoying. That last turn being the thing one is left holding.

In Carlsbad, I pull out a real board. By real, I mean a hard one, not a softtop. But I also pull out a softtop. I strap both to the top of the Nissan Pea economical rental car and surf Cardiff Reef and Swami's. On the softtop. I don't know if I can go back to a real board. My degenerated ankle is so grateful for the squish. My degenerated ego is so grateful for the reduced expectations. The waves are small, clean. The water is so clear I feel like I'm back on Waikiki. Where the water was actually not so clear. But such is the magical mnemonic spell Hawaii must conjure.

I have a hard time watching movies on plane rides. It feels better to read. But every time I scan the movie list on the seat-back video station for a Japanese movie about a single lady living a solitary, nearly monastic life and the goodness she spreads around her while she struggles with a hidden inner torment. This is a real genre in Japanese filmmaking I've noticed and if I'm lucky, I happen upon one. In the last six months I've watched two films about older single ladies with coffee roasters perched on cliffs overlooking the sea and a film about a single lady who makes beautiful dresses but refuse to mass produce them despite the attentions of a young handsome suitor who works for a department store. These types of films hold my attention just fine.

The Only Thing To Do On Vacation Is Hobble (or) Notes On A Montauk Family Surf Excursion Vol. 3

For years I didn't drink coffee. Like alcohol, cigarettes and truly good cheese, much of my abstinence stemmed from the youthfully undeveloped tastes my brain wasn't able to place (A). But soon, as I grew older and came to embrace all these elemental vices coffee remained a nemesis (B).

I used to crow about my non-addictive personality. I've survived relatively hard drug use with uncommon ease, quit cigarettes multiple times cold turkey and never had a girlfriend longer than three months pre nuptials. I used to think I had a special constitution that just couldn't be beat that way.

I now know that to be a false understanding of the situation (C).

In fact, it feels like my abstaining ways and my subsequent aggrandizing about them are really just a papier mâché mask I wear over my addiction to feeling like I'm unaddictable; a permanent crutch of untouchability I bumble around on in a vain attempt to fool myself into thinking I'm free (D).

Lately I've been thinking about brain waves (E) and this idea that all these waves can get twisted in their own patterning, pinging about in our skull, creating cross currents, smashing up against each other, canceling each other out, drifting from this to that and becoming unpredictably dominant at the most useless times.

I've been thinking about how it feels after one gets out of the water and how this bliss sorta sets in (F).

I imagine that all these brain waves, muddled and myopic, fighting unknowingly for supremacy and function, might just get massaged in some meaningful way by the longer form, ultimately deeper, more environmental waves that fuel our time on the board. Like the ocean is this big kneading bread roller, evening out the patterns of our brain.

And I wonder if the roots to my aversion to coffee, basically the desire to feel free from the control of some outside stimulant, hasn't affected my relationship with surfing. Am I so afraid of being controlled by someone, something outside me that I'd risk losing it completely?

Maybe I should allow a new era of vulnerability (G).


_____________________________________________________________

 A (Watching kids at Sunday School sneak cups from the metal silos from the tables in the foyer, never being able to stomach the taste no matter how much milk and sugar I poured in.) or (Trolling at the Venetto's coffee shop between Thompson's Drug and the QFC, never quite truly believing seeing the point of the mocha beyond the nitrous oxide canisters used for the whipped cream.) or (Hanging out at late night Denny's smoking cigarettes and letting my mouth get so dry the bland coffee seemed a ridiculous choice over the massive glasses of OJ.)

B (Working the overnight shift at Hot Spots on State Street, self-righteous in my ability to stay awake without the use of the crack everyone else was chugging.)

C (I've been married for 18 years. There's gotta be some kind of addiction going on there. And I've worked at the same sort of job for the last 15 years more or less. There's some autopulverizing acquiescence happening there for sure.)

D (And I'm sure I hope others.)

E (Gamma: associated with the formation of ideas, language and memory processing, and various types of learning) and (Beta: generally the mental state most people are in during the day and most of their waking lives) and (Alpha: when you close your eyes your brain automatically starts producing more alpha waves) and (Theta: light sleep or extreme relaxation) and (Delta: when your dominant brainwave is delta, your body is healing itself and "resetting" its internal clocks.)

F (Return traffic notwithstanding.)

G (Nine years ago on the heels of my first son's birth I bought an espresso machine.) 

The Only Thing To Do On Vacation Is Eat (or) Notes On A Montauk Family Surf Excursion Vol. 2

It is, I assume, perhaps project, a rather ordinary thing for someone to cringe when overhearing themselves described as, or being floridly introduced as, a "surfer." I guess I assume this because the guttural contraction I feel, the suddenly tightening sphincter reassessment my body undergoes, is of such an involuntary nature I can't imagine anyone not finding this sort of thing terribly cringe-worthy and blatantly uncomfortable.

It has something to do with my own eternal, internal wannabe status, begotten of a Seattle-bred youth, reading surf magazines voraciously but getting into the actual act inadmissibly late in the game. My wife would, perhaps correctly, point out that this is just another instance of a self-imposed and entirely specious "outsider" insecurity I insist on maintaining on many fronts. But the fact is, I can't stomach being described as a surfer as I actually get into the water so inconsistently. Skiers, a group to whom I feel I have a far more substantial creation-myth claim to fraternity, have always had what I've found an annoying way of talking up how many "days" they've gotten in a seasonal year. The aggrandizement has always grossed me out. But the fact is, that sort of thing apparently still courses through my veins. I can't help but default to that claptrap when assessing my own identity.

Reading William Finnegan's Barbarian Days, or rather hearing him speak about writing Barbarian Days, or rather hearing him muse about how difficult he found the idea of writing the surf-centered memoir called Barbarian Days, opened my eyes to a different angle on this assumptive universal heebiejeebie. Finnegan has lived the life of the "real surfer" in the most elemental senses. His ruddered stoke has been so unfailing, his commitment so enduring, he is one of those types that you'd naturally introduce as a "surfer" without a single blanche. He of the Californian and Hawaiian wave-drenched childhood; the months spent surfing Kirra on the Gold Coast and the Maui's Honolua Bay; the camping out on untouched and pre-commercial Tavarua; the mastery of the critical Jardim Do Mar. And yet he has gone through his life never letting on, even purposefully obscuring the fact. In effect, it seems to be entirely readable that his anus twitters just the same as mine upon salutational definition of the dreaded taxonomy. Given, from a completely different set of insecurities.

I'm not quite sure how that makes me feel so much better about my presumptions, or why I insist on feeling good about having the presumption, but it does and I do.

Besides, if I were a surfer, would I be sporting this dad bod?

The Only Thing To Do On Vacation Is Complain (or) Notes On A Montauk Family Surf Excursion Vol. 1

A day after receiving a cortado that had a touch too much milk in it (with more or less the consistency of a semi-dry cappuccino) I return to the cafe and order a cortado "with just a touch less milk than usual." The barista behind the register rolls her eyes dramatically. (I didn't know baristas did that anymore.) (A real throwback to the days of video store clerks and the I.T. department.) I wait. (I wait for the dry cortado.) A bearded barista (baristo?) calls my name. As I approach he fixes me with a pitying if baleful grimace and instructs, "Next time you want a cortado with less milk, ask for a macchiato." The last time I was in this coffee shop it sported a clean white pine IKEA feel. The renamed cafe in its place has a rustico, reclaimed wood Restoration Hardware feel. Recently I gave up drinking coffee. I try to drink tea now. (The cortado/macchiato/dry-cappuccino was destined for wifey.)

Observations From A Surf Vacation Volume 5

Open the window. It's a midday flight.

Take off those sweatpants.  Have some pride.

You're not a business traveler, that oversized rollaboard isn't for you. 

When you bang someone's shoulder, "excuse me" is an appropriate follow up.

It's not true, whatever they taught you in flight attendant training every flight doesn't need a grumpy stewardess.

You don't have to recline your seat at warp speed as soon as the plane takes off.

You also don't need to be told three times to return it to the upright position before we land.

Stop bouncing your knee nervously.  

Observations From A Surf Fabrication Volume 4

Validation! They cry. Validation! They scream. Instant Gratification is a thing of the (recent) past. Instant Validation is the thing of the moment. Validate my thing! They plead.
Dave says you only need to know 1200 words to be fluent in any language.
Casey is sure Terence McKenna is the source.
I heard about a website that allows women to publicly rate, anonymously, their old boyfriends. After being in Southern California for a couple weeks I figure I'll start a sister site that allows people to proclaim fatwa-like edicts against cars that've cut them off in traffic. Road rage writ digital! Go get that guy! They didn't use their blinker! He was a mama's boy! He didn't pay for dinner! He paid for dinner! These things could get confusing.
Soft Top Revolution is still in full effect. This morning 6.6 tide smashing upon the rocks didn't bother me one bit. The 45˚ air temp was more daunting.
Puppies are cute. They poop and pee a lot. My son is stoked.

Observations From A Surf Staycation Volume 3

Sublime, The Eagles, The Doors, Green Day, Grunge Rock and Oompah Mexican ballads. The radio play soundtrack of SoCal.

Head dips, shoulder dips, barrel rolls, blue & white striped Wavestorm. Greybeard papa paddling his kids into waves while they jump, mid-trim, into the face on boogie boards from his massive glider. Smiles, giggles, tropically see-through water. Red's beach break was all time this morning.

Observations On A Surf Holiday Volume 2

I look around and see nothing but water. Watery water and the men and women who prefer to slide on water utilizing a seemingly endless library of sliding vehicles. Single fins and fun boards, fishes and thrusters, pigs and squashes, big and small, light and heavy, young and old. I see no small population of styles, methods and habits. I watch like an eagle heron frog tourist, smelling purpose, discerning taste and scratching head. I have my own ticks. I like the parallel stance, or at the very least I go very narrow. My drop knee is more like a nod knee. My hands end up in small robotic contortions, fingers splayed and then cupped, a kind of OCD tai chi sparrow-parts-the-mane. I like to go fast, in a straight line, then cut back with the aforementioned nod, not too proud to take a belly or knee ride if I'm late and in no one's way, just for the fun of taking the ride. I like to crouch, grab rail, hoot and laugh. I probably make too much noise. All of this I say only to differentiate my superior brand of bad surfing from other, inferior brands of bad surfing. And I say superior because I've noticed a style that leaves people without smiles on their faces. This style consists of typically using a shorter board, squatting just so for maximum stability, and exerting as much force as possible to contort both body and board into the most muscular thwacking, spray inducing, gut wrenching turn possible. At all costs. No matter how slow they're going.  I witnessed a lot of this yesterday at Sunset Cliffs. Rabid, macho, and snail's pace. Paddling back out from one of my more goofy ones, I can just hear the epic grunts as these low, wide, and earnest shralpers make the most out of a mushy lip travelling at speeds akin to a bullet shot through molasses. And the crazy thing? Not a smile, not a laugh, not a shrug of the shoulders in self-mockery. For these forthright souls, surfing is not for the lazy, it is for those who work hard.

Observations From A Surf Vacation Volume 1

There are always waves here. I will never ever let any West Coast surfer tell me it's gone flat. Frankly, the only complaint these turkeys could level would be something about how some spot is overcrowded or way too vibey (more or less two sides of the same coin.) Even to that, I just laugh and tell them to try surfing one of their "flat" days at one of the "lesser" spots.  Turkeys.

There are giant grocery store chains in Southern California that carry only "gluten free" bread. Well, that's not totally true.  They also have "sprouted wheat" and "organic grass fed" bread, but the point is this place is the birthplace of all wonderful health fads destined for perversion into terrible health fads. Remember "nonfat milk?"  Yeah, I guarantee you it got its start here.  Or at least was accepted en masse here.  And what has that done for us? Stripped out all the good shit milk has to offer and replaced it with empty sugar. If you drink non-fat milk or eat non-fat yogurt just know now: I judge your rationality. Gluten Free is quickly heading down the same road. Granted, while the idea to curtail the crap starch bread wheat tsunami that is drowning us is an important bit of digestive business, the tumble, headlong, into sugary fillers and red-herring replacements all in the name of an anti-gluten crusade produces nothing better, giving people a false sense of confidence. Nonfat makes you fat. Gluten free makes you... gluten.

There are these giant islands of plastic swirling in the ocean and the plankton are eating them and the fish are eating the plankton and the other fish are eating those fish and we (and our cats and dogs and cows) are eating the fish because fish is the "perfect protein." Plastic Protein Revolution. Seriously, I swear it's nonfat and gluten free.

Speaking of revolutions, the Soft Top Revolution is in full effect.  I am a true believer. Not the best in every situation, but the squishy slidey, unencumbered goodness is not to be missed. Except of course that it's more plastic. In the ocean. Where there's shit tons of plastic already. Wait a minute...

Notes From a Surf Holiday

On Saturday night we returned from gentle Pacific waves lapping the North County coastline to the furnace that is reflected heat off Brooklyn pavement. To try and soften the blow, we planned a Gilgo Sunday.  Of course we slept in late.  Of course the waves were mush bog chop gunk.  Of course our car doesn't have AC.  Hard landing indeed.  But all is well.  There are no bad waves.  A few years ago I wrote something designed for Kurungabaa that actually never made it to Kurungabaa. If you haven't read through their archive of original writings by a host of talented writers of different temperaments, it's is fully worth the perusal.  Anyhow, Noah Sabich was kind enough to publish "Notes" there recently, doing the piece a great favor in realizing actual from potential.

Notes On a Surf Holiday, 2009

Late Summer 2009 my wife finagled us a stay on a Martha's Vineyard, a vacation with little or no surfing intentions behind it. I kept a short, daily sort of captain's log during the thing.

Day One

Early into our first day of summer holiday, so early in fact that our coffee is still bubbling into the cups, early enough that the sun has not yet peaked over the buildings and the elevated train tracks and would not for a couple hours, my wife informs me that I can't bring my board.

"You're kidding, right?"
"No, we can't take it on the ferry with us, and besides, I have no idea whether Leah's car will hold it."
"But I have soft racks, we'll just pack them."
"I am not about to walk off the ferry with some big surf board and say 'surprise, can we put this somewhere?'"

I don't know what to say. I had assumed I could take my surfboard to that rocky bit of Atlantic coastline, wide open to whatever summer swell might be available. We'll be there a week. It is my holiday. I don't know what to say.

The deliberation is short, nearly nonexistent. I won't argue with my wife. I'd like to say because I am good at letting her have her way, that I listen to her needs and appreciate her point of view. But really, it's because she's probably right.
I pack my swim fins and my farmer john and hope to luck into such epic body surfing that no loss of longboard security blanket could ruin. This is the way of it with non-surfing vacations, I think to myself. This is how it goes when you're not making the rules.

McDonalds has recently begun serving espresso. It is oddly as good, if not better than a certain ubiquitous espresso chain's espresso product. However, the breakfast sandwiches still come as close to digestible plastic as you'll find.

We descend the hill, walking west down the slope in the late afternoon sun away from the house, across a dirt road and down wooden stairs to the private beach. No swell to speak of. Just some boat wake. We are north. As far north as I've been on the eastern seaboard and the water is warmer than I had expected. Warm enough to jump right in. No thought to it. Warm enough that my three year old son happily flops himself belly first into my outstretched arms, practicing kicking his legs, splashing his hands. We stay for a long time in the buoyant, still waters off the leeward side if the island. Our first afternoon so far north.

Day Two

It is always startling what the salty sea air both quantitative and qualitatively can produce in sleep. This morning I wake a full two and a half hours later than my city clock will allow. And not the sort of hazy post-drunken two and a half hours. The kind that leaves you feeling caught up. It is also startling how once one has a child, one begins to speak through the children at one's partner.
"Your father will get you dressed and take you the beach, I'll be down later."
It is always a drag, no matter how pleasurable the vicarious missive might actually be, to be told what to do through a sentence directed at your son.

The main house has two separate libraries. Both have shelves categorized by book topics. Biographies, histories, classic fiction, detective novels, travelogues. The guest house has a whole wall of books itself. Topics more or less bunched the same way.

No surf today.

Day Three

Talk in the northeast turns to culture more often than not. Paul is an information architect writing a memoir. Leah is a copy editor with deep Boston roots. Somebody's friend's uncle drove the car away from the bridge at Chapaquah.

A friend of the family visits us at the beach bringing a boy the same age as our son. They play in the sand. The mother is also an author. A well known author. She also has deep Boston roots. The kind where streets are named after her grandfathers.

There is not much sun today but it's still warm. The already secluded private beach feels like a desert island. The websites say tomorrow will be fair and waist high on the eastern side of the island. Last night we drank beer and smoked after-dinner cigarettes and talked about how culture hinders technology. Time Warner and Verizon don't want to let Google give everyone free WiFi. Moore's law states that every two years processing power doubles, or something like that. In six years we ought to be set, Star Trek style. Hand held translators, computer robots who understand emotion tinged voice commands. But American culture isn't ready for that. Apparently they're ready in Japan. It's already happening in Japan.

Surfing is a funny thing. Really, what surfing is, what we call surfing, isn't the act of riding a wave-propelled swath of water. That part, that part where we actually ride, that short, ecstatic moment, is totally other. Something undefined, no matter what pattern recognition our minds can apply. Surfing, rather, is the bits in between. Bobbing on a board, going to the surf shop, watching a movie, telling tall tales, remembering heroes, reading magazines. This puts the very definition of surfing square into the auspices of culture, baggaged with all the inherent addiction to inertia.

We drive into town and I rent an eight foot soft top board for twenty dollars. I strap it to the top of the sedan with the soft racks I brought in my bag. When we get back to the house I drink two Budweisers and fall asleep on the veranda. When my son wakes me up, I paddle him out around the little bay at the bottom of the hill. Tomorrow morning will hopefully offer knee high point break waves. Tonight will hopefully offer some kind of fried fish.

Day Four

I wake up this morning at 5:30 to the sound of seabirds.

The little Honda we've been granted as our car to use has a sticky gas pedal and a broken radio. All one hears and feels in the morning, driving around the dappled, winding roads, morning sun poking through passing canopy, is the incessant pressing and depressing of the gas. The pedal sticks at 28 miles an hour, unsticking at 50. The speed limit is 35.

The one beach I know about, the one that has the surfing for sure, has a name like a Harry Potter character. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if the author of the Harry Potter books studied the place names of the American Northeast when she was concocting character names.

The waves are small. Achilles high from shore, I'd say. But clean and wrapping as far as achilles high peelers will wrap around a tiny, mid beach point. It never fails to amaze me, coming back to a point break after beach break waves, how much wrapping point waves, no matter the size, embrace the eye.

I wade out over the rocks and look down at my soft top BZ, hand resting gingerly on the particularly unsoft top. The nose looks more like the prow of a ship. Three fins are bundled, dartboard style, on the underside of the precipitously foiled tail. These things ought to be called marshmallow rails or heavy sog cushions, not soft tops. As I settle my knees on the thing I tip back and forth. The stability is tenuous at best. They should call these things mush canoes perhaps. I paddle out and float at what I think is the takeoff, a disconcerting measure from the shore. A dog walker has stopped to stare at me, perhaps waiting patiently for the local great white to pass by on his morning commute. The rule around here seems to be standard poodle, black lab or golden retriever and you have to look like Morley Safer. Out in the water I swear the stout, observing octogenarian with his giant black poodle is in fact Morley Safer.

I feel for the first time the precariousness of my circumstance. The water is black. Pitch black. The boils bubble from the rocks underneath making spooky swirls. All the seabirds are perched on the rocks. None in the water. It is not even six in the morning yet and there is an eery calm. I am the eastern most soft mammalian pink-thing floating in this part of the Atlantic ocean. I am starting to reassess the increasingly ridiculous notion that I ought to be fitting in a surf on this holiday. A surf on a spongeboard in ankle high nothingness seems like an odd way to go. I haven't felt this weird, or alone, in a long time. When I look back at the beach, Morley, my companion, and his beloved poodle whom I've named Hooch, have deserted me. I consider, seriously, trying to find them.

As I turn back around a bump rises not ten feet before me. I think it's a good bump. I paddle for a moment, two strokes perhaps, and feel the blubbery thing beneath me get taken by the wave. I nearly lose my balance finding myself doing what amounts to a tiny squishy bottom turn into a thigh-high wave opening up in front of me the way only point break waves open up. More than anything I steer the board down the line and onto the rocks. I immediately paddle back out.

I find the soft top needs a lot of weight attention. Heels down and shuffle. Hand out to the tail doing a tripod for added purchase perhaps. I swear the thing nearly flies down the peeling 24 inch faces as I put that piece of shit through its paces for the next hour and a half of mid-femural fun. The Morley Safers gawk at my foamy virtuosity. Their dogs bark their approval. The white sharks stay away.

Leah's seventy year old father likes movies with tits and guns. He lets this fact fly as we are preparing a late dinner of bluefish and corn.
"But," he says, "my wife has a headache and gets to choose the movie tonight, so it will be some masterpiece pride and precious bullshit."
He looks happy enough about it. He is some sort of doctor to many of Boston's most prominent business people and politicians.
He is Irish Catholic from humble roots. He has made it.

Over dinner, Leah refers to my outlook as ecumenical.
"How ecumenical if you," she says at some point.

The dinner conversation of the upper economic reaches of the Northeastern American seaboard is a brand new affair. Where I come from, conversations are there to make a point. To argue a point. To pass the salt. In the Northeast, conversations have no point. Topics turn tangentially, based on whatever seems the most interesting line of thought to follow. No one demands to be heard. No one needs to make the defining point. It is an extremely comfortable way to converse. The rhythms take hold and you simply talk. Expound.

After dinner, during after-dinner drinks, one of the younger cousins asks me how one becomes a television commercial editor. The room grows silent in anticipation. I have no way to answer this question; no previous experience in answering this question. I answer truthfully.
"You have to look a certain way. Have a certain obvious sensibility. Talk the right way. Maybe be mildly good looking. Most of all, you have to be in the right place at the right time."
This seems to hit the Harvard and Yale educated like something straight out of town.

Day Five

There are stark differences between the east and west coasts of America. Granted, there lies a starker one in between. Yesterday, after my epic surf, I bought a newspaper at the grocer. The newspaper cost two dollars. In New York, when you buy a newspaper that costs two dollars, you bypass the line, slip two dollars onto the counter, wave the newspaper in the air and you're on your way.

"The paper is two ten," the pursed lips spit as I trot by, paper aloft.
I freeze.
From behind the counter, she regards me clinically.
"Excuse me?"
It feels like the grocery store has stopped any commerce to watch the off-islander get his comeuppance.
"2.10, that's what it costs with tax" she says.
I give her the extra dollar and wait while she counts out ninety cents. Slowly.

There's the difference. In New York they'll wave you on just to save time. The government's tax takes too much time. In New York, time is everything.
In California, they'll wave you on just to screw the Man. The government shouldn't be taxing the newspaper anyhow.
But here, in the Northeast, they are the government. This is the fertile crescent of our country's governing independence. They'll be damned if you're not going to do your part. Odd, given the whole Tea Party thing.

We walk down the slope past the big stones through the trees and over the ridge. We pop out into the dirt road, turn the bend, down the gradual path, a right at the clearing, down the wooden stairs, past the assorted junkpile of lobsterpots, unused sunfish and plastic kayaks and onto the sand. The water, despite its northern Atlantic nature is warm to the toe, less inviting to the torso and then delicious to the shoulders. Once you're all in it feels downright tropical. The bay is calm. Twenty feet off shore, beyond the initial rocks and seaweeds, is a sandbank where the color turns from New England brown to Caribbean green. I outfit my son in a yellow life preserver and paddle him around. His first time away from shore, in the water, on a surfboard. A soft top. I hope he forgives me when he's older. Maybe I'll lie and tell him it was a Brewer and the waves were overhead. We glide along the smooth surface and he is tense. This is a new experience for him. His tenseness makes me somehow more relaxed.

I drive into town and return the board. The same conchy looking guy is manning the rental station as before. I desperately want him to ask me how the surf was. I want to go into the story about how bad that board is but how anything can be used to have fun. It would be even better if he mentions that his friend saw some kooky guy ripping the shit out of an eight foot soft top at knee-high Harry Potter Point yesterday morning. I would chuckle and say something low key like like "yeah, it was fun." He doesn't ask anything. He just takes my money.

I buy another case of wine for the house.

Day Six

It's our last day on the island and I find a stand-up paddleboard stuffed into the tall grasses off the beach. I put my son on top and we paddle around for a long time. He is far more relaxed today. I am a little more tense.

The big paddleboard is solid under my feet. The water is calm, the wind light, the air warm. I think of all the chatter I hear on surfing blogs, all the derision and complaining about SUPers clogging the lineup in California. Clash of cultures stuff. The spillage of lessened elbow room from land into water. I think perhaps I'll go out and buy a paddleboard. My son seems to love it. And it will piss people off.

We leave late in the afternoon and eat at a McDonalds on our drive back. We order ice cream sundaes.