If you ask me, there are two excellent reasons for learning how to surf. When you’re young, it seems to be a great way to achieve a lifestyle focused on taking drugs and having sex. And when you’re older, the sport is a surefire wellspring for pretentious mystical ruminations, as memorably/disastrously demonstrated by John From Cincinnati*.
Well, I’m not young any more, but I’m also not yet good enough at surfing to bore you about it properly. Emily and I finished our Costa Rican vacation in Dominical, a town only recently connected to the rest of the country by reliable highways, and still tucked behind an intimidatingly industrial plane of geometrically-arranged oil palms. It’s everything you could want from a surf town: if there ever was an authentic local culture to feel liberal guilt about, it was washed away years ago by the slacker tide. Every restaurant is simultaneously a tourist trap and a locals’ hangout. Every shop seems both dangerous and sleepy. Everyone is always at the beach; everyone is always hanging out; everyone is beautiful, tanned and weather-beaten. They all look like surfers, because they are.
We stayed a kilometer up the beach, at a place called Roca Verde, which has a reputation for hosting a particularly noteworthy and raucous disco every Saturday night. We missed it; for us, the place mostly made an impression as being comfortable, stocked with good food, and run by a scrupulously honest and helpful owner named Frank. He’s the one whom we asked to book us a surf lesson — this was the one thing I came to Costa Rica really wanting to do, and it was the reason we had come to Dominical. Frank left a bunch of voicemails for his preferred surf instructor, but never managed to connect with him. Finally, he reached out to a different guy, a local by the name of Jose Obando. “To be honest, this might be better for you,” Frank said. “Jose’s probably the best surfer on the beach.”
Well, I’m sure he says that to all the clueless tourists. But Jose was certainly an impressive surfer, and a very good teacher. Emily and I managed to each get up on our first try! The rest of the lesson went well, too — well enough that I asked if we could take another lesson the following morning, before leaving town. I wanted to ride a real wave.
Jose said okay, so we met him the next day and drove to Dominicalito, a beach just up the road with smaller waves. As I said, our first lesson was on “whitewater” — waves that had already broken — and they weren’t much to worry about. But further out the swells at Dominical’s main beach are pretty big (the guidebooks insist: don’t surf while stoned), so it made sense to head to a less ambitious location.
It was still pretty tough. The first day of surfing — two hours of surfing, really — had left us beaten up. Emily and I both got sunburns despite conscientiously-applied SPF 30. We’d picked up some nasty board rash, too — proper technique involves a lot of time spent arching your back and placing your torso’s weight on the bottom of your ribcage. For me, this translated into a bruised rib (exacerbated by my stupid tendency to flop onto my board like a wet sack of meat), which is still a minor nuisance three weeks later. And besides the injuries, surfing is hard work, particularly when you don’t know what you’re doing and are therefore not doing it gracefully, and even more so when you’re responsible for managing an incredibly large (though incredibly stable!) surfboard.
By the hour mark of our second lesson Emily and I had both successfully caught several waves, albeit with helpful launching pushes from Jose. But my ass was dragging. Getting back beyond the break was a chore. Waves crashed over me, pushing me back, forcing me to roll with my board, only to be caught by the next wave, wasting energy, slowing down. My ribs burned whenever I lifted my head off the board, preventing me from paddling efficiently to where I needed to go. I still had a helpfully buoyant surfboard attached to me with an ankle leash, in water only slightly over my head. But I was swimming in the ocean, clearly near exhaustion, and there were moments when it started to get a little frightening.
We called it a day a few minutes shy of our lesson’s planned two hours. Our board rashes had begun to produce spots of blood; worse, the backs of Emily’s legs had been completely devastated by the sun — her reward for staying on the board and paddling like she was supposed to. I’m glad to have done the second lesson, and I want to do more. But I left it utterly beaten up and exhausted.
So you should dismiss the pretensions to surfing lyricism that you’re about to catch me spouting. My intermittently-ecstatic surfing experience was punctuated by a lot of exhaustion, pain and gulps of seawater. But I can definitely see why the surfer-cowboy-poets like it. The way Jose could pick developing waves out of the mass of water beyond the break; or point out riptides by sight; or know when to paddle hard to steal the wave’s energy; all that stuff mystifies and fascinates me. It’s somewhere between tracking a deer and doing a Fourier transform, and I sort of doubt it can be taught except by making someone’s unconscious neural machinery stare at an undulating plane of water for hours on end, bobbing contentedly and not thinking of much of anything at all. And that sounds alright to me, too.
So yes, surfing. I think this could be a pretty good sport for an old guy.
* I miss Deadwood
that they canceled deadwood to make John from Cincinnati is one of the first order crimes of television.