The view from the beach.
I sat early one morning in the shadow of the popular Cocoa Beach Pier, the waves violently sloshing through the 800- foot pier’s pilings, the air warming, not a cloud to be seen. I was with a teen surfer, his 5-foot orange short board personalized with decals, the twin- fins customized and partly of bamboo. Five large brown pelicans flapped silently overhead. We were joined by another young fellow, both guys sporting bright board shorts, one with a Billabong tee, the other a FoxTech hoodie and bold Oakleys. Both admitted to being regulars here and in high school. We drew in the bracing salt air, silently, the waves as always drawing our gaze. A billion shards of light. Listening to their brief stories of rushing to this spot after classes left me with a certain envy of their proximity to the ocean, my own distance from it.
After my last day’s final paddle, and wonderfully exhausted. Intoxicated with a week of challenges and thrills, I realized I had seen no one else my age with a board. Clearly the sport is peopled largely by youth, though elite big-wave pro surfers who visit Teahupo’o in Tahiti, the Mentawais in Indonesia, Waimea and the Pipeline, Mavericks, or Todos Santos and Puerto Escondido are often in their thirties.Wall Street bankers in their fifties, sixties and even older, fly off in their own jets to exotic surf breaks for getaway weekends.
For all, regardless of age, surfing’s benefits go well beyond its frankly pointless, beautiful, elegance. If we cannot stay young, at least we can stay well and actively engaged, ready to face the challenges of aging. For me, surfing is a pure adrenalin rush; exciting, physically demanding, fantastic exercise, and yes, addictive. And you know immediately if it’s for you. You move to the margins of your mind the occasional sightings of Portuguese Men-of-War or, rarer still, shark attacks.
We so often get trapped in our lives, worried, complacent and unaware that there are ways to punctuate the everyday with a thrill. If we don’t do this, we sell ourselves short. It’s important to set ourselves reasonable goals. Surfing is not only a great stress reliever, but at the same time allows us to face fear and, yes, danger. But it can also enhance what we might call our coastal or shore consciousness, what the native Hawaiians call manakai, the life of the sea. Surfers the world over have united to derail threatening coastal development.
Scarcely able to await my next Cocoa Beach visit and the palm-fringed jukebox glow of Ron Jon’s, my anticipation builds. The life of the sea does, indeed, become part of you and you carry it with you. If, as the Buddhist axiom tells us, this world is an illusion, then I wonder: how could I have had so much fun? New York- area writer and surfer Thad Ziolkowsky writes in The New York Times of an almost religious feeling he had upon returning after a hiatus in the east to a favorite surf spot in Hawaii: ”On my first morning there, I dropped to my knees in the coarse yellow sand and, under cover of waxing my board, let out a sob of joy mixed with regret at not having made the pilgrimage sooner.”
And me? I’m singing “Happy Birthday” to myself. No sense wishing I was twenty. There is only now.
