"Twelve plus hours. In the water. No food, no (drinking) water. Hey, the surf was pumping!" Photo: Mike Incitti
We wore old hand-me-down wetsuits from an older brother who used to scuba-dive. Two piece. Pants that came up to just under the armpits, beaver-tail top over that. They called them beaver-tails because of the rubber flap that hung down the back of the top was supposed to wrap over your ass, up through your crotch, and then fasten to the front-side bottom of the top to create a singular unit. But because the fasteners were protruding metal buckles that would dig into the deck of the board, surfers who wore the suits left them un-buckled, the back flap dangling off their asses, like a…beaver-tail.
My brother’s wetsuit had a busted zipper. In those days the zippers were metal instead of plastic and over time they would corrode with green crud until they stopped working and/or the teeth started falling out. Being of limited budgets–as teenagers who had saved our meager $.50/hr baby-sitting wages over the course of the previous winter to buy our boards–there was nothing left over for real surfing wetsuits. So my brother held the top of his suit sort of closed by flapping one side over the other and tying two lengths of bungee cord, one around his chest and the other his waist. Ghetto.
The suits themselves, while providing some measure of warmth against the frigid Maine water, were leaky, stiff with dry-rot, and 1/4 thick. Akin to trying to surf in a straight-jacket I would imagine. Compounding the lack of flexibility, which is pretty much everything to a surfer, they used to chafe, raw and bloody, every folding part of the anatomy. Necks, crotch, back of the knees, insides of the elbows…but worst, the most crucial hinge for a surfer, his/her paddling armpits!
In those days, Mommies and Daddies didn’t cart their kids around in SUV’s and mini-vans to all their activities. So for me and my brother, it was a two-mile trek to and from our local spot. That’s four miles round trip. And depending on the tide, we would either be paddling across a tidal river, hiking over the dunes, then another mile of walking the beach, or…walking the whole damn way across the beach, dunes, and the tidally drained river! Oh the memories of waddling across the sand after a three hour session, every step, or every stroke (if we were paddling,) rubbing and stripping layer after layer of epidermis away, salt water stinging like novocaine in the exposed wounds.
The other thing we didn’t have in those days…sunscreen. Nobody had ever heard of skin-cancer, sunblock, or spf’s. And as we were a clan descended from pale skinned, Irish and Swedish stock, we…burned. Me especially. I was the lucky recipient of the palest, non-tan-able flesh in my family. Burn and peel. Burn and peel. But these weren’t burns of the mere “lobster-red” 1st degree variety. No, 2nd degree, blistering, stinging, pus oozing, sloughing off flesh swaths of sun-seared cheeks, nose, and lips. As Lost in Space‘s Dr. Smith used to whine: “Oh the pain! The pain!”
Zinc-oxide. White war-paint. You’d see some surfers with little dabs of the white goo on the tips of their noses. Not me. As my mother realized it was a futile endeavor to try to reason or even forbid me from heading out into the blazing sun (yet again) with my board under my arm, she insisted (and I relented out of the sheer agony of thrashing in my bed at night suffering those burns) that I slather it across my entire face as if I were some aboriginal war-child in some forgotten Papua New Guinean jungle.
Other surfers, the older ones, used to make fun of me and my white-face and blistering skin. But I suffered their ridicule. Nothing, not my mom, not the hottest star in the galaxy, or even some snickering older surfer, would deter me from being in the water, on my board. Chafed, or burned, or chafed, and burned didn’t matter; only the waves did.
My brother and I would surf for hours. In Maine the tidal ranges as much as a dozen feet or more. Most spots only work one tide or the other; surfers will take breaks to refuel during tidal changes so you can usually get two sessions in. In the summer when the days are long, three tidal change sessions are possible. But my brother and I were dopey gremmies; we surfed right through the changing tides, wondering where all the other surfers would go. As low-tide at the Mouth would shut down, we’d just paddle over to the Main Beach and keep surfing. Lunch was often sacrificed.
Perhaps our most epic session involved a twelve hour day in the water. We arrived for the low-tide dawn patrol, moved down the beach as the tide filled mid-day, then drifted back to the low-tide peak for the late afternoon/evening session. All we’d had to eat all day was a couple of bowls of cereal and some OJ that morning. Twelve plus hours. In the water. No food, no (drinking) water. In the hot summer sun. Hey, the surf was pumping!
We stumbled home, burned and chafed from paddling and waddling across the dunes…utterly famished. Shuffling through the door to the beach cottage our family rented, we pleaded to Mom: “Please make a big smacking pot of spaghetti, Mom, we’re starving!” Good ole Mom; she obliged and set to work, putting on her biggest cauldron to boil.
While we waited, we drank water. We drank juice. We drank milk. Any fluid we could find. Yet, still ravenously hungry, and unable to wait…we discovered on the counter, a bulk box of twelve dozen bite-sized-chocolate chip cookies. Do the math. We gorged. We gnarfed. We stuffed fistfuls. We. Ate. The. Whole. Box.
Bloated and drowsy, we then sloughed off to the living room where we each flopped at either end of the couch. We passed out in seconds, falling into deep, REM sleep. ZZZZZ.
