Moment of Zen

Can you spot the rips? Rob asks me.

We’re standing on an empty crescent of beach, the sun coming up at our backs, a light breeze blowing offshore.

I haven’t looked yet, I say. Show me.

Absently smearing white sunscreen onto his cheeks, his forehead, his neck, he looks out at the long beach break in front of us. The sea here is empty, and for the moment, flat. And then, as if rising up to be counted, comes the first wave in the set. Coming in from our left, a wall of water stands up, totters as if hesitant, and then begins a long, curling crush of white. At nearly the same time, another wall forms to our right, this one longer and pushing at us from right to left.

See the peaks there, asks Rob. And there. Between them are the rips.

He indicates diagonal stripes of smooth, beguiling green water between white walls.

You paddle out on the rips, between the peaks, he says as he takes a quick step away to grab the board that Victor is unloading from the truck.

I nod politely, thinking that it seems straightforward enough. I have surfed before, quite a few times in fact, but am far from being a surfer. I’ve surfed the way a New Yorker might ski: a week this year, ten days the next. Maybe the next year gets busy, and I don’t get any days at all. That’s been my surf training. It’s what happens when you live a thousand miles from the ocean.

And that little primer that Rob’s just offered? That would be the sum total of all the surf coaching I’ve received. Curiously though, I would still count surfing as one of the more enjoyable activities I can think of. I spent half a dozen days surfing with my son and daughter in New Zealand a year before my three knee surgeries, and it made me long for more. I wonder how much more enjoyable surfing might be if I were any good at it?

Even as a complete kook, there’s just something so simple and real and rejuvenating about being in the ocean on a board. And to be in the water with both of my kids? If you’re a parent, you can guess at how special it was. If you’re not, I won’t bore you with obvious platitudes.

I'd love to follow in Rob’s footsteps, starting now, at the same age he was when he began his journey. Of course. If only to have more moments with my kids. My son, who’s going to college on the southern tip of New Zealand, is surfing several times a week and, from the videos he sends, seems to be picking it up quite well. As I write this, my daughter is surfing in Spain. It could be something our whole family could enjoy together. My wife is not a surfer, but can beachcomb with the best in the business.

Yet am I ready to make the sacrifices that Rob made to put in the time and effort to get better? That’s an open question. At sixty-four, would I really have enough days left to become a surfer? Not at ten days a year, that’s for sure.

Here is your board, Bill, says Victor, laying a pale green plank on the sand in the van's shade. At nine and a half feet long, two feet wide, and about three inches thick, it’s a lot of board, which is what I need. Victor chose it for me based on my self-evaluation: kook.

Spearmint, says Victor with a big smile.

Spearmint? I’m at a loss. Is he offering chewing gum? Herbal tea? And then I find the answer near the tail of the board, written on the underside next to the stringer: Spearmint. I will be surfing a board named Spearmint. And in seconds, without thinking about it, I’m humming a little tune. And then mouthing the words: that cool, refreshing feeling of Wriggly Spearmint gum puts a sparkle in your eye, a spring in your step...

Now I do think about it, and what I think is not good.

That jingle must be forty or fifty years old. And as I hum it, I can even see a television commercial of cavorting bikini-clad women. How much TV must I have watched to imprint something so lasting on my brain that I can recall it effortlessly through 50 years of stored detritus?

My mind is a dumpster. I’ve wasted my life.

But there’s still time to change, to cleanse. The ocean froths in front of me. Rob and Fred, straddling their boards now, scanning the horizon, bob by the peak. With my leash lashed to my left ankle, I carry Spearmint into the waves, fingers barely able to curl around the rail. I’m looking in vain for the rip that Rob pointed out, which was so easy to see before I needed it. And the waves, so tame and friendly from up on the beach, have now taken on a sinister quality. They’re out to get me.

Which they do, shoving me over, mashing me toward the shore.

Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face. Cursing, I have a burning urge to punch back. To put my head down and go to battle. But something grabs me: a hand, not a metaphorical hand, but an actual hand. And it belongs to Victor, who has suddenly appeared beside me.

We wait, he says.

Yeah, of course we do. I knew that. I was just warming up my muscles.

He backs up, stepping away from the oncoming waves until they’re knee-high. We stand there, waiting, as I see Fred and Rob both take off on a wave, Rob going left and Fred heading down the line to the right. The first wave of the trip. I should’ve been filming instead of flailing around here in the froth.

But there’s no time for self-recrimination. Victor gives me a pat and, with a nod of his head toward the suddenly still stripe of water between the waves, he effortlessly paddles out. I follow, not effortlessly, but energized by the flat corridor of water, and make it out before the next set stands up.

There’s something so satisfying about straddling a board, bobbing in the sea beside friends. A shared magic that I’d never mention aloud or bring attention to. I’m not a surfer, but do have sense enough to steer clear of certain unspoken codes. And so, I sit silently, buoyed by an unspoken goodness, with these three men, somewhere off a Central American shore.

Here is your moment of Zen, says a sonorous voice from somewhere deep in my soul.

Wait, that’s not some siren song from my soul. That’s John Stewart, coming in from Manhattan, introducing a recurring bit from The Daily Show.

Never mind becoming a surfer, I’d settle for some inner silence.

But not right now., apparently because Victor is pointing his chin at a fast-approaching wall of green.

Turn around, he says. Now you go!

The wave’s not breaking yet, but I’m right in about the spot where it soon will. This is what surfers want: to put themselves right in harm’s way, at the vortex, where the energy of the wave is greatest.

I did mention that I’m actually not a surfer, right? If I’d been alone, I would’ve paddled hard for the safety beyond the break. But I’m not alone. I’m part of a group, and it seems to be my turn.

Wheelie-ing the nose of the board by skooching my butt back, I rotate by clawing at the water. As the board turns toward shore, I feel it surge forward and realize that Victor has given the tail a strong shove. The tail is rising up, and the nose is pointing down the moving slope of the wave. It moves with speed and purpose, an inherent confidence I don’t share.

All right, Spearmint, let’s do this thing.

I do not remember how it happened; one second I’m on my belly, tearing at the water with cupped hands and a surging heart rate, and the next, I’m standing. The thrill is instantaneous, glorious, and fleeting. For now that I’m up on the wave, I feel an urge to perform. Do something! Something that resembles surfing!

The wave's green face is ten feet to my left, while behind me it churns white. I want to be on that moving green mound! Pressing down on the balls of my feet, I will the board to turn and get me out of the white water, out onto the smooth face. And it’s going to work! The rail grabs, and the board lurches forward with purpose. And … SMACK. The top of the curling wave catches me square in the mug. A white flash ignites behind my eyes, and I keel over backward.

That will turn out to be my best wave of the day. The next twenty attempts don’t go nearly so well, and finally I decide to head in to film Rob and Fred from the shade of a palapa with a long lens.

Another van has arrived from Amaru, bringing the total number of surfers on this break to eight. The new group includes a blonde, sun-tanned instructor in a black one-piece bathing suit with a matching black hat named Anabel, and her clients for the week: Jessica and Maria from Florida, and Charles, a tattooed man from North Carolina. They wax their boards and practice pop-ups on the sand as I film the boys.

Fred tries for many waves, churning, kicking, propelling his shorter board up to speed with a frenetic energy and about a fifty percent success rate. Still, he catches a couple dozen, mostly rights, which he rides with an aggressive elan. Rob doesn’t paddle for nearly as many waves, but when he does, he catches most of them. Once up, his surfing seems studied and careful, as if feeling out the moment and the new board.

I follow him with the long lens as he rides past the obvious exit of a peeling left to bounce into the shallows with the last energy of the white water.

That’s right, take it all the way in, says Fred, watching Rob in the camera’s small screen, over my shoulder.

Rob hops off the board with a deliberate shove that pushes it away to a safe distance, landing on his butt in the whitewater.

That’s how you do it, says Fred. Nice and safe.

I keep the focus on Rob as he unwraps the leash from his ankle, picks up his board, and walks up toward the beach. His whole body seems to smile, a relaxed satisfaction evident as he strides toward the still-rising sun at my back. Before he reaches us, however, Anabel, the woman who’s coaching the other group, trots up to him, gesturing toward his board, and then up to where our coach, Victor, stands on the sand.

Rob seems to understand what she’s saying, smiles, and hands her his board with a big smile, looping the leash over the rail as she trots with it back toward the water. This is another one of those moments I wouldn’t have noticed if I wasn’t looking at it through a long camera lens. Far out of earshot, I’m watching a silent film unfold. After all the drama around surfboards, the airline refusing to transport Rob’s prized single-fin, the next board that he scraped and waxed and put his own fins on gets run over by a truck, and now that he’s finally found a board he likes, he gracefully hands it off for someone else to use. Hold on tightly, let go lightly. A true moment of Zen.