It doesn’t need to be so quiet. Photo: Quincy Dein.
Start talking. Open wide and say “Ah.” Shout something. It doesn’t matter what it is – shout anything. Forget the bald eagles, the whales, the slow motion save the puppies commercials. Your voice is dying. Our voices aren’t voices anymore. They are compacted bits of butchered words and abbreviations bouncing around aimlessly between satellites that do more thinking in a second than we do all day.
There is little refuge from this plague. When it gets to the point where you had rather not answer the phone and just text back the person calling you, it’s pretty clear that the disease is here. We’re all infected. It’s our generation. Our phones might as well be attached to us, right? They go with us everywhere: to work, to the bathroom, to bed. We’re naked without them. Automatic tellers give us our money. We order our pizza online. Passive stimulation surrounds us, often preferable to conversation (we can talk while Netflix is buffering). Technology is compressing our attention spans and suffocating human creativity – turning potential novels into 160 characters or less. Advertisements championing smiling faces on the screens of tablets would have us believe we are all more connected than ever, but there is only a widening rift of disconnect. In all forms, it really comes down to one unfortunate and sad truth: human interaction is fading from us.
Surfers have something though. Something that is increasingly rare. A place where groups of friends, family, acquaintances, and complete strangers can exchange audible words. The ocean may be one of the few remaining places of voluntary public interaction. Every break has people that could be worth knowing, people that could teach us something, if only we’d open our mouths. But somehow, that closed-mouthedness has taken on a borderline negative stigma. One of my favorite surfing pieces of all time, “How to Be a Good Surfer” by Brad Melekian, has a portion I also adamantly disagree with. “Shut up,” he says. “Realize there’s not a whole lot to say… a good surfer shuts up.”
Why is it a bad thing to have a conversation with another surfer that goes beyond a mutual agreement about wind predictions? What’s wrong with saying something more than “Fun, huh?” It wouldn’t blacken our souls to be happy for someone who had to drive four hours from landlocked bluesville to share in our local wave bounty. We’ve allowed a fear to irrationally grow that somehow any words with strangers will ultimately lead to inconvenience and nuisance.
Perpetual silence in the lineup may be a symptom of simply taking ourselves too seriously. We’re all guilty of this on occasion, especially when it’s elbow to elbow and waves become a limited resource. We all want to get our fix, and I’ll be damned if you’re going to distract me with thoughts on beach erosion and non-invasive solutions. It would serve us well to keep in mind a fundamental truth: in reality, we’re just playing in the ocean. Silence and stink eyes aren’t typical of sandboxes at recess – the kids play together. They’re loud. Happy.
And yes, I will be the first to agree there’s a line between being talkative in the lineup and becoming obnoxious. But you don’t have to cross that line to exchange a few sentences and find out the guy surfing next to you lives a couple of streets down and can shape you a board for cheap. There’s nothing wrong with discovering the older lady on the longboard actually teaches school down the road. We should take advantage of the dwindling opportunities we have to talk to actual, living people. Who knows what we could learn if we could just communicate for a few minutes. About the area, about the waves, anything at all. Why not make surf “community” hold meaning? We’re already doing the same thing together in the same place, anyway. Can that not be acknowledged with, shit, getting to know some of the people at your break? Where else do we really get the chance these days? We don’t really live life in person anymore.
Maybe surfing can stand as a point of reversing the trend. Let’s cut some wires. Untangle ourselves from chargers and unglue ourselves from high definition images. At the very least, for a couple of hours in the ocean we can speak with real words instead of text, ride real waves instead of watching ones we will never ride on the Internet, and make ourselves really happy instead of checking to see how “happy” our “real” Facebook friends are. Let’s not wait for a natural disaster or national tragedy to make us all friends again. Meet your local surfers and recognize what surf lineups can be, because there are not many places like them left. Let’s keep talking.
