The Waves at The Tables

“Surfing only looks like a sport. To initiates, it is something else: A beautiful addiction, a demanding course of study, a morally dangerous pastime, a way of life.”

One might ask why someone would take up something like surfing well into their thirties, when it wasn’t like anything else they’d ever done in their life. It was a question that took me years to answer. But in a nutshell, it completely untethered me from every single experience, every previous label, every activity, everything I was before. It was something fresh, unknown, challenging, and new.

I grew up in Texas. I was also an athlete. In fact, for the first 23 or so years of my life, that’s how I defined myself. Football, baseball, basketball, track, golf. Name it. Even after my sports-playing days were done, my innate athleticism made it easier for me to pick up new sports than it was for other people.

I can recall the first time my wife got me to go skiing with her at Mammoth, California, when I was already into my thirties, actually staring 40 in the face. No lessons. I’ll figure it out in my own, I thought. And I did, through trial and error and lots of hard falls. By the end of the week I wasn’t exactly shredding black diamonds, but I was cutting some pretty aggressive lines down most of the blue runs, to my wife’s astonishment and terror. “Slow down!” she kept shrieking at me.

It would prove to be the same with surfing, although I wouldn’t pick it up quite as quickly. I had to work at it. But it wouldn’t be like any of the other sports I had ever played; it would provide greater independence, respite, solitude, and self-awareness than anything I had ever experienced.

Sure, all the sports I had played as a youth and into young adulthood had their unique experiences and qualities. Team sports offered the chance to exhibit toughness, learn resilience, teamwork, and overcoming pain and adversity; all qualities that taught life lessons.

Even the only individual sport I ever played, golf, used a scoreboard. The great thing about golf that made it different, however, from the team sports, was that you had nobody to blame if you played badly. It was all on you. But the opposite was true if you scored low; you got all the credit. I think golfers at the highest competitive level might just be the most mentally tough athletes in sports, simply because they are out there all by themselves. And there are no teammates to pick up the slack if your day is going poorly. Golf actually required more mental toughness than any of the team sports I ever played.

But as I would come to learn, surfing was something else entirely. Pulitzer Prize winning author William Finnegan observed in his surfing memoir Barbarian Days:

“Surfing always had this horizon, this fear line, that made it different from other things, certainly from other sports I knew. You could do it with friends, but when the waves got big, or you got into trouble, there never seemed to be anyone around. Everything out there was disturbingly interlaced with everything else. Waves were the playing field. They were the goal. They were the object of your deepest desire and adoration. At the same time, they were your adversary, your nemesis, even your mortal enemy. The surf was your refuge, your happy hiding place, but it was also a hostile wilderness; the ocean was like an uncaring God, endlessly dangerous, power beyond measure.”

Indeed, as a character in the original Point Break movie observes, “You can’t just call timeout and stroll on into beach if you don’t like the way things are going.” You couldn’t quit if you suddenly found yourself in a bad spot with a huge wave or a set of them coming down on top of you. There were no rescues. There were no injury timeouts. If you found you had bit off more than you could chew and were having trouble steadying your purchase on the front end of a great wave — one you knew would crush you if you fell — you couldn’t just sit down like you could in skiing if you were going too fast down the mountain and the skis wouldn’t bite the snow. You can’t just run off the field like you can in football and tell the coach you can’t go. No. You were completely on your own and had to extricate yourself alone. It is you versus the sheer, powerful forces of nature.

And if you got thrashed into the bottom or worse, some rocks or coral, and got the breath knocked out of you, you had to do more than just lay there to recover; you had to figure out in which direction the surface was and muster the strength to get there. Then you could pull your board in and cling to it like a life preserver as you regained your air and your bearings. And there was no trainer or medical staff to look you over. You were your own medical staff out there. Am I bleeding? Did I hit my head? Am I dizzy or just winded? What’s that burning? Why does my shoulder hurt so bad? Should I head in?

Surfing, I came to learn, was in many ways a microcosm of life, in the sense that it taught lessons, but on a much shorter, compressed timeline, instantaneously and with immediate sanction if you violated certain precepts.

For example, get too far forward on the board as you were trying to catch a wave and you’d get flipped over forward and sucked into the vortex of the wave as it crested and crashed into a tumbling roar of spinning fury, as if you were in some kind of horizontal Charybdis, until it spit you out and you could swim to the surface. Or the complete opposite; get too far back on the board and no matter how hard you paddled with the oncoming wave, it would pass beneath you somehow, leaving you shaking your head and wondering what you’d done wrong to miss it. Or perhaps the waves were all passing just off to your right or your left, but none seemed to be coming through your current location in the lineup.

Translation: Being in the right place at the right time is always important.

In July, we headed down to the new fortress of solitude for the first time. The small house sits back in a neighborhood across A1A from the beach. So when I go out, I carry the board under my arm across the highway which usually has only a few vehicles heading north and south early in the morning.

A neighbor told me there are some decent waves at a place called The Tables. It’s actually right out in front of a group of picnic tables. This is how a lot of surf breaks get their names.

I get out there, and it looks like I am alone. It’s so warm already I don’t even need a wetsuit; it’s trunks and a long sleeve Quiksilver rash guard.

It is time to paddle out. I secure the board’s leash to my right ankle, pick up the board, and walk out into the water, sometimes the most difficult part of the entire endeavor, fighting the tide and the few waves that manage to make it all the way in to the shore. I struggle to get to the depth where I can start paddling, and finally, I am paddling out, slowly but surely.

After about five minutes of paddling, I’m right where I need to be. I sit up on the board and rest for a minute. I scan the water to my left and right and still see no one else. I still have it all to myself, for the time being anyway. It is my favorite part of the day.

And so I sit, drifting on the board, scanning the sea for the next possible set. And on this day, I am lucky; after a while, they begin to arrive. The waves are “rights” meaning they break from left to right from the surfer’s perspective. So being a right-foot back rider, I am able to face the waves as I surf them. This allows me to see what the wave is doing and adjust to its changes.

I continue this pattern for a while: Paddle out. Wait. Catch a wave and ride it in. Paddle back out. Sit up. And wait. Look around and think. Ponder. Watch the sun slowly rise behind me to the east. The time between sets allows me to think and observe things in quiet repose.

I am right where I want to be. Out here, I am anonymous. No ties to the past. The name isn’t known around these parts and does not conjure up memories in the local people of things that are long ago now ancient and faded history.

It is different here. Different from the state where I grew up; different from the state where I went to college. We tried to go back to those places, and the places and the people never changed. There truly was no going back; no going “home” again, as one of my favorite writers Thomas Wolfe once observed. That was all past now. The present is here.

Here, people know me only by what I am here. And the entire situation is refreshing. It infuses me with a new sense of contentment and provides a much-needed feeling of regeneration.

Everything feels new again.

This is the main reason we come here and will soon settle here year-round. It is one of the few places we can go to live the way the way want to live. We know a few people in the area with whom we’ve been friends for many years. But it’s a small circle. And it will remain that way.

When we’re here, the pull of the world slackens. The old commitments still exist, but they are not the top priority. The old things that the world deems so important just seem to fade into the background. And the comfortable feeling of being separated from all of the “noise” is refreshing.

I consider all of these things as I drift along on the board and feel the swells pass under me. I don’t have to catch every wave. The sun is now fully awake and rising, warming everything around me. The water has an energy to it, almost buzzing. Our little spot along the coast is coming to life. In these moments, whatever is happening anywhere else is completely insignificant.

After two hours, the session is done, and I paddle back in. It is time to secure the board and hit Long Doggers for some post-dawn patrol breakfast. I get a breakfast burrito and coffee, and hang out with my laptop for a while. I check the local news. I write. The people who come and go are bright and friendly. I see a lot of veteran plates in the parking lot.

We feel like we belong here.

Glen Hines is the author of six books, including the recently published Welcome to the Machine, all available at Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble. His writing has been featured in Sports Illustrated, Task & Purpose, the Human Development Project, and elsewhere.