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I couldn’t have put words to it as a boy, but later I understood what seized my imagination that day. How strange it was to see men do something beautiful. Something pointless and elegant, as though nobody saw or cared.
We didn’t know what endorphins were but we quickly understood how narcotic the feeling was, and how addictive it became; from day one I was stoned from just watching. We talked about skill and courage and luck – we shared all that, and in time we surfed to fool with death – but for me there was still the outlaw feeling of doing something graceful, as if dancing on water was the best and bravest thing a man could do.
Loonie and I went back and back and back that summer. We hitched and rode and walked, begging boards from the Angelus crew when they paddled in for lunch or at day’s end, and week by week we literally found our feet, wobbling in across the shorebreak, howling and grinning like maniacs. Even now, nearly forty years later, every time I see a kid pop to her feet, arms flailing, all milk-teeth and shining skin, I’m there; I know her, and some spark of early promise returns to me like a moment of grace.
I will always remember my first wave that morning. The smells of paraffin wax and brine and peppy scrub. The way the swell rose beneath me like a body drawing in air. How the wave drew me forward and I sprang to my feet, skating with the wind of momentum in my ears. I leant across the wall of upstanding water and the board came with me as though it was part of my body and mind. The blur of spray. The billion shards of light. I remember the solitary watching figure on the beach and the flash of Loonie’s smile as I flew by; I was intoxicated. And though I’ve lived to be an old man with my own
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Now the wind comes through me in circles, like a memory, one breath, without pause, hot and long. It’s funny, but you never really think much about breathing. Until it’s all you ever think about.
More than once since then I’ve wondered whether the life-threatening high jinks that Loonie and I and Sando and Eva got up to in the years of my adolescence were anything more than a rebellion against the monotony of drawing breath. It’s easy for an old man to look back and see the obvious, how wasted youth and health and safety are on the young who spurn such things, to be dismayed by the risks you took, but as a youth you do sense that life renders you powerless by dragging you back to it, breath upon breath upon breath in an endless capitulation to biological routine, and that the human
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Son, he said. Eventually there’s just you and it. You’re too busy stayin alive to give a damn about who’s watchin.
Well, you’re glad there’s no stupid photo. When you make it, when you’re still alive and standin at the end, you get this tingly electric rush. You feel alive, completely awake and in your body. Man, it’s like you’ve felt the hand of God. The rest of it’s just sport’n recreation, mate. Give me the hand of God any day.
I fed on lives that were not at all ordinary, about men who in normal domestic circumstances might be viewed as strange, reckless, unbalanced. When I failed to get more than sixteen pages into The Seven Pillars of Wisdom I thought the failure was mine.
Oh, fuck, said Sando. Everyone’s a chicken. That’s why we do this silly shit. You reckon? Yeah, to face it down, mate. To feel it, eat it. And shit it out with a big hallelujah. He laughed. And I laughed because he did, to hide my fear.
Years before people started speaking about extreme sports, we spurned the word extreme as unworthy. What we did and what we were after, we told ourselves, was the extraordinary.
Somehow I’d gotten used to a certain underlying level of fear. When it was gone I missed it. After a huge day at Barney’s or a rare session at Old Smoky I came home charged – the euphoria lasted for days. But when it dissipated I became restless, even anxious.
Sando was good at portraying the moment you found yourself at your limit, when things multiplied around you like an hallucination. He could describe the weird, reptilian thing that happened to you: the cold, supercharged certainty which overtook your usually dithering mind, the rest of the world in a slow-motion blur around you, the tunnel vision, the surrender that confidence finally became. And when he talked about the final rush, the sense of release you felt at the end, skittering out to safety in the beautiful deep channel, Eva sometimes sank back with her eyes closed and her teeth bared,
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Being afraid, said Sando. Proves you’re alive and awake. Whatever you reckon, said Loonie, not relishing the prospect of another of Sando’s little seminars. Animals react out of instinct, Sando continued. Like they’re always on automatic. We’ve got plenty of that, too. But our minds complicate things, slow us down. We’re always calculating the odds, measuring the consequences. But you can train your mind to live with fear and deal with the anticipation. Aw, boys, said Eva coming into the room, where the fire smoked away untended. Now you got him going. Every day, said Sando, making an
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Once you’ve had a taste of something different, something kind of out there, then it’s hard to give it up. Gets its hooks in you. Afterwards nothing else can make you feel the same.
She relished opposition, yet her only real opponents had been the facts of life: gravity, fear and the limits of endurance. She loved snow the way I loved water – so much it hurt. She didn’t want to see snow anymore and most of the time she wouldn’t speak of it. But for the best years of her life, years she believed were gone for keeps, she’d trained to fly over it. That was the simple objective, being airborne, up longer, higher, more casually and with more fuckoff elegance than anyone else in the world.
People talk such a storm of crap about the things they’ve done, had done to them. The deluded bullshit I’ve endured in circled chairs on lino floors. She had no business doing what she did, but I’m through hating and blaming. People are fools, not monsters.
Do you lust after your neighbour’s wife? asked the girl with the slashed arms. Really, she said drolly, you can tell us. My wife, I said. My wife is now my neighbour’s wife. And my old neighbour’s wife is dead. Man, that’s fucked up, said someone. No lust? Not much, I said. Not now.
I didn’t exactly pull myself together – I got past such notions – but bits of me did come around again, as flies or memories or subatomic particles will for reasons of their own. Bit by bit I congregated, I suppose you could say, and then somehow I cohered. I went on and had another life. Or went ahead and made the best of the old one.
My favourite time is when we’re all at the Point, because when they see me out on the water I don’t have to be cautious and I’m never ashamed. Out there I’m free. I don’t require management. They probably don’t understand this, but it’s important for me to show them that their father is a man who dances – who saves lives and carries the wounded, yes, but who also does something completely pointless and beautiful, and in this at least he should need no explanation.
