Here by night, gone by light

It always begins with promise. An arriving familiar dark travels with a new light. Its iterations are as varied as the pulses of energy throbbing through the ocean. One night, last fall, the sun rose in the east as it has for billions of years. With the morning came the possibility to at last ride a wave. Walnut Street had morphed into a beach, as my eyes closed, subject to the whims of its oscillating tides. Walnut was just a block behind my parents’ house, site of my youth, a slab of macadam tunneled by towering oak trees and walled by two-story brick suburban homes with chipped gray shingles from the ruthless winter weather that fell on their roofs. It had been a street. But now it was an ocean with no name that flavored the neighborhood air with salt. Swell filled in; lines stacked for miles, the remnants of storm energy from even farther off. The Alexanders and Berkhimers and Reagles stood on sinking sand where the sidewalk once rested, next to new families that they hadn’t yet met, staring hypnotically as the sets approached. Beaches across the world experienced the same routine: waves pump, crowds gather, people surf.

I had been transfixed on surfing for years; boards sports and I had established a relationship. Skate, snow, and surfboards designed to be ridden, and me, designed to ride. Started in the Atlantic during undergrad, moved to Southern California to get good and study the ocean’s behavior. But after returning east, two hours from any rideable break, sessions grew less regular. I started reading about surfing more, temporarily filling it like an expanding sinkhole that was improperly repaired. In this case, permanent restoration meant surfing again all the time. Presently impossible. Magazines, Web sites, movies, books from friends: an arsenal of surf paraphernalia maintained to combat the passing time between one session and the next. Binging on the culture was how I justified calling myself a surfer when I wasn’t actually surfing.

As people caught Walnut’s waves that day, the adrenaline flushing through my body erupted in a smile of childish excitement. Finally, so close to the beach, a 30 second sprint from my dad’s garage. I bolted, tearing down my 6’2” thruster. Lying aged and dinged across the ceiling rafters, the yellow foam G&S with three glassed-on fins was a token of friendship. It was the board I learned on and Kyle gave it to me before I drove 2,875 miles from San Diego to Washington, DC, after sleeping on his backroom couch for three months in 2005. The nose had chipped, allowing water to erode the foam core; sharp, shredded fiberglass could rip flesh. The tail was a squash, rounded slightly on its cracked edges, but otherwise skateboard flat, which made stalling on the wave face easier. Midway up the board, stretching three inches beside the stringer on the deck to the left rail, a fist-sized air bubble expanded—a spongy pocket where the foam had detached from the fiberglass and resin. Its days of buoyancy were numbered. Uglier than Betty, for sure, but it worked.

The morning was palpably spring—65 degrees at dawn and expected to rise mildly. The gulls gliding overhead shaded black against the sky blue. Trunks tied and a black, one and a half millimeter wet suit top filled with my torso. Only a few minutes had passed since I ran to grab my gear, but as I hurried back, surfers were catching final waves, riding the whitewash to shore on their stomachs after their wave broke. The disbelief I breathed in exhaled as frustration. That fast, the sea had gone flat. No, it couldn’t have. Not in ten minutes. I hustled out to the lineup anyway, paddling feverishly, trying to get just one wave. Nothing. A human buoy, my legs submerged as the board floated on the surface with my back facing land, alone, the ocean and beach both emptied of company. I had missed the swell, unprepared when it showed and prepared too late. Clouds slid across the sky, cooling the wind and convulsing my body in the quiet water like the mixing of a recently purchased can of paint. Today, just like the others, I would not surf. Today, just like the others, surfing would be just beyond my reach.

Then I awoke, with nothing left to do but anticipate the inevitable recurrence. No surfing in life meant none in dreams.