COWABUNGA

Your thoughts tend to drift when you’re floating on your board in the lineup at a surf spot. That’s just how it is, the very nature of the experience. Today’s stream of consciousness includes my seam-split thirteen-year-old wetsuit that, by all appearances is still going strong, despite the rip from a driftwood snag stitched up with dental floss on the back of the right shoulder. Also my wife, my daughter, and the in-laws I’d soon be meeting at the Homer Farmers’ Market. The six weeks my daughter spent in neonatal intensive care in Tampa right after she was born eleven weeks premature. Snickerdoodle cookies, and why I love them so very much. I recall being told in grade school that the snickerdoodle was a personal favorite of George Washington, who presumably owned enough human flesh to make him a fresh batch every afternoon. At least I still have my own teeth to chew them with. 

It’s a fun day in the water, chest-high peelers coming in from an early storm out of Kamishak Bay. Sunshine, salt, no wind, wet neoprene. This session was not remarkably different from a hundred others at this spot, and I got to wondering for no particular reason how many times I had gone surfing in my life. Like an actual count.

A week after she was born, my very premature daughter felt like the most delicate of songbirds when they first put her into my arms. It’s my first tangible memory of fatherhood, that and wandering aimlessly around the hospital hallways right after she was born trying to make sense of what had happened, undoubtedly a common experience for new fathers. I didn’t get to hold my child for that first week because her underdeveloped skin was so sensitive, like a fresh blister that has torn open. I still see her looking up at me, tubes and hoses connect to every orifice and appendage, gulping for life in the ocean of air.

As I’ve said, your thoughts drift. But this was a moment in my life I needed some water time. I mean, seriously needed it. There’s nothing especially remarkable about becoming a father—lots of guys do it every day around the world—but the experience can’t help but be earth-moving. Surfing time, already an increasing rarity in my life, became practically nonexistent. We ended up staying in Florida for a year so my wife could be near her family while she recovered and the baby got her land legs under her. There was at least the solace of the Atlantic beach nearby. I bought a fifty-dollar sun-yellowed beater board off of Craigslist, and spent whatever time I could watching the NOAA marine buoy data and doing surgical strike surf missions on the coast between Sebastian and Fort Pierce.

My moments were limited. Florida has surf, but it’s not really what you’d call world-class. And I was preoccupied by about fifty different things, not the least of which were starting a new business and figuring out how to be this guy called Dad. It took up the lion’s share of my time, to say the least, and my surfing ability suffered big time.

I will confess that the six-foot-two board I bought was a bit too small for someone my size. I knew this when I bought it, but my options were limited, and it at least the foam was thick enough to be fairly corky in the water. But almost every time I made the drop and went to pop up I wound up pearl diving for the bottom. There just wasn’t enough real estate on that little board for me to get up, and somewhere in all those wipeouts and missed waves, something very sobering happened: Surfing, for the first time ever in my life, ceased to be fun. And if surfing was no longer fun, there lurked behind that a much more unsettling thought, namely, Can I even still call myself a surfer? And if I’m no longer a surfer, then what exactly am I? Nothing?

This is a pretty garden-variety existential crisis, or to say it another way, it’s very much a first world problem. A good friend of mine, not a surfer, grew up in Cameroon and hit the road when he was seventeen for Cape Town, only to get picked up by the cops and thrown in the hoosegow for having a bag of weed in his pocket. The facility they stuck him in was the infamous prison on Robben Island, and in the twenty days he was held there he had ample opportunity to pass by Nelson Mandela’s old cell.

So I try not to get too whiny when I don’t get to surf as much as I’d like. Yet I don’t think I’m breaking any news by saying that becoming a father changes you and your life in profound ways. Among the harder aspects of the process is learning how to fit everything else you ever were before under the overarching identity of Dad.

But there’s an upshot. Out in the water off the Homer Spit, unnervingly warm because of the record-breaking hot summer we’ve had, my thoughts slid from the Florida bull shark that blasted out of the water ten feet away from me in pursuit of a mackerel to the idea that perhaps my daughter might enjoy surfing when she gets old enough. That’s not the first time I’ve had that thought, and I’m certainly not dimwitted enough to think she’s going to love surfing just because I do. It’s a running joke between her mermaid mother and me that she’s probably going to grow up with fantasies of moving to Phoenix, joining the Republican party, and working as a Wells Fargo clerk. Still, what is life without hope? Or daydreams, for that matter.

A dark smudge against the farthest reach of the horizon marked an incoming set of waves. I paddled myself into what seemed to be a better position (maybe it was, maybe it wasn’t—my wave timing has gone more or less to shit lately), then spun my board and charged as the wave stacked up behind me. I felt the board glide down the face, got up and leaned into a turn only to realize that I’d come in just a board-length too late. Whitewater surrounded me as I did a lazy el rollo into Cook Inlet.

Maybe it was the warm sunny day and the complete lack of a crowd. Or perhaps the happy thought of my wife and daughter. Or maybe just the silky caress of the cold saltwater. These things are often complicated beyond human ken. But when I came up I was smiling. The wave was hardly a contest winner, but for the first time in what seemed like forever, I was having fun on a surfboard. I was both Dad and a surfer. And I’d read somewhere on the internet that you can by coldwater wetsuits for kids as young as three. The salient word in my life, quite suddenly, was once again stoke.