#40, April 19, 2000
"What will you do after we've saved the earth,"
she asked, seriously but with a smile. The four of us were deep in campfire
conversation, deep into the High Sierra backcountry, deep into our early years
as undergrad eco-activists. I replied without hesitation: "Go
surfing!"
I lived a Frisbee toss from a UC Santa Barbara beach.
Surfing was more than just fun, or exercise, or a way to be cool. It was… well,
it was surfing. Put a pair articulate surfers in a car to Rincon Point or
Bolinas Reef and they can fill the hours bearing witness to the many dimensions
of their true love.
Even from the most objective perspective, surfing is like no
other sport or outdoor activity. You ride a wave of energy, manifested in the
rising-falling oscillations of water. While the water basically stays put, the
wave has come hundreds, even thousands of miles to reach you. And when its
dangling feet begin to touch the reefs and sandbars along the shore, it leaps
up and throws itself forward. That's when it gets really interesting.
Breaking waves are sources of infinite beauty, richer and
more varied than snowflakes or snowstorms. Naturalist Loren Eisley wrote
"If there is magic on this planet, it is contained in water." Magic
images and sensations of breaking waves, seen from every perspective, have been
burned into my memory… Pausing on the shoulder, I watch a massive sculpture of
art noveau cut-glass ripping into the dark mirror of a foam-flecked trough.
Stroking up a wave face whipped with the texture of howling offshore winds,
then launching over the ragged lip, I land spank in the salty center of a
full-circle rainbow.
Paddling out at sunset, I push through a breaking wave,
leaving my eyes open long enough to watch the lip feather into fantastic
patterns before it cracks onto my ankles. I fly along a peeling wall as the
hissing lip pours across my shoulder, my fingers unzipping a rooster tail on
its underside. Tucking inside a tube, the foam ball churns at my heels, and
before me the lip is rising out of nowhere, spinning over, exploding to my side
then front, sealing me in the roaring silence of a watery womb.
Ocean waves are salty like blood, and they stay in your
blood, even when your ten foot tankers and tri-fin thrusters are collecting
dust in the garage. Surfing becomes a metaphor for other challenges,
metamorphosing into a management philosophy. "Surf your work!"
says the poster above my desk, and I do my best. My project starts off as a
minor product release, then changing business conditions cause it "jack
up" like a mid-ocean swell hitting a shallow coral reef. At first it's all
I can do to stay on as I bounce over the chop of unfamiliar players and issues.
But soon my adrenaline connects with my experience, and I am screaming, pushing
turns and opportunities harder, attempting new maneuvers to improve the ride.
Always I seek the high energy of "the pocket", between stalling on
the shoulder of irrelevance and being drilled by the lip of burnout.
One of the blessings of advanced parenthood is getting your
older kids into the sports you gave up so you could coach their basketball and
softball teams. My sons have taken up surfing, giving me the excuse to get back
into the water. Now there's a new dimension to the joy-- watching my boy take
his first soup ride all the way to the sand, stepping off, then turning to
share the universal surf-stoke shout with Dad. Whooooooooooh!
There is a lot to be learned out there among the Brown
Pelicans. Despite the Great Whites, it's safer and far more healthy than being
a car. In time, you realize that you don't need Pipeline conditions to have
fun. What you take into the water--your attitude and expectations--is way more
important then the what the water brings to you. You make the best of any wave
you can catch, and sometimes it's enough just to "get wet."
So let's go surfing!