Gnarly, Dude
The use of second person is a coping mechanism.
On the long drive down, you had a hard time believing that the inlet town of Denmark on the south coast of Western Australia gets its water from Antarctica. Maps were needed. Arrows were drawn. It just didn’t sit right until you touched it, until the fresh, turquoise Southern Ocean weaved between your toes and you said, ‘Jesus Christ, that’s cold!’
This is glacier water.
The beginning of your problems.
Mike has the tent and foam boards all set up when you arrive. He seems like some sun-kissed fusion of nonchalant and omniscient, like you’ve just told him a minor secret that he already knew. Mike smiles easily at the biting wind and big grey sky and says that, if it was up to him, he might have cancelled the session on account of the ‘heavy’ and ‘Antarctic’ conditions. You wonder who it’s up to if it isn't up to Mike. You think his accent might be San Franciscan but you are embarrassed to ask. He doesn’t say the words righteous (cool) or tubular (awesome) or kook (talentless) anywhere near as often as you’d hoped—come to think of it, you regret googling surfing lingo on the drive down. You want him to like you. You get the sense that most people he meets want the same. Mike says in complete and utter earnest, evidently forgetting about, you know, refunds, that yeah on second thought if it was up to him he definitely would have cancelled this session, since the weather is terrible, but unfortunately everyone had already paid.
Your shivering and your laughter stir together into one shaky, vaguely manic thing.
It’s probably okay—it might even be a good thing—to have a near-delusional self-belief on the inside of you. Keep it there. It would be a mistake to, for example, tell your family at Christmas lunch that you just have a feeling that you’re going to be really good at surfing. You actually say you think you might have ‘a knack for it.’ You who is pathologically afraid of skateboards, you who has a high hospitalisation rate on ice skates and electric scooters. It is only really now, teeth chattering, glancing at the turbulent sea, that you think about how small and inconsequential you must appear to the roaring Southern Ocean. This first tremor of doubt is indistinguishable from your body’s other cold-related tremors, so you let it go. You’re going to be fantastic. The best and most gnarly ‘grommet’ Mike has ever seen.
A surprising amount of the surfing lesson takes place on sand. Mike starts with a hand-drawn, arrow-heavy diagram of how and why waves form, which is both interesting and the kind of thing you’re likely to forget. Your eyes glaze a bit. Your extremities feel tingly and alarmingly far away. Mike gets you up the front of the class on a surfboard that is suspended above the sand by an inflatable rubber donut. And way up high, paddling through thin air, wriggling and wobbling to keep your centre of gravity nice and central, bucking as if riding a bull whenever Mike pushes on the tip of the board to simulate a wave, trying and failing to haul yourself to your feet in one smooth and compact motion, sensing that you are always only one teeny tiny overcorrection away from ploughing your face into the sand, you become suddenly aware, as if struck by a bolt of (icy) lightning, that there are many more ways to eat shit than you had realised. And that’s not a very ‘tubular’ reality to be confronted by before you’ve even gotten wet.
The Southern Ocean is not especially friendly to beginners. It actually feels, at times, a little homicidal. Though Mike’s diagram was helpful to understand the physics behind the sizable rip that’s sucking you out towards the bank of jagged rocks, conquering it is really more of a brawn problem than a brain problem. The water is slushy and grey and mostly waist deep, but there are potholes in the sand. The water can go from licking your belly button to choking your lights out in the space of two steps. In this kind of aquatic crucible, it is forgivable to forget your training once or twice. It is less forgivable to try to block an oncoming wave by holding your board sideways, like a shield, so that its full face takes the full force of the Ocean and knocks you cleanly off your feet. But don’t worry about that. Forget about it. You’ve got the knack. You are a titan and a savant and oh dear, you’re underwater again. And now your tightly strapped ankle is getting yanked towards shore by the board. Pull yourself together. Just wade like a normal person! Keep your head above water! Stop gurgling! Relax!
Enter: Brad. Brad is a gentle and smiling and physically enormous guy who helps Mike out with the lessons—though his true purpose was unclear until you got in the water. Brad had simply emerged from the treeline, nowhere near the car park, wearing a wetsuit with a pre-zinced nose. His native language appears to be the high-five. And seeing you wrestling your board and the sea and your own self-belief in shoulder deep water, Brad simply walks over and tows you out of trouble. Before you’ve even got enough breath back to thank him he’s counting down from three, and then catapulting you onto the lip of a rolling foamer. Paddling, even steering, is unnecessary. Brad has literally thrown you into the heart of the wave’s inertial forces.
It honestly takes you a moment to work out where you are and how you got there. It’s bizarrely hard to tell if you’re going too fast or too slow—there are different things you need to do with your legs, depending on which one you turn out to be. You waste too much time on this. The window is closing. You wrench yourself up to your knees and hang there for a bit, trying to find equilibrium. Balance. Stasis. Wait a second. Is this surfing? Is wobbling on all fours actually more difficult and therefore more gnarly than standing all the way up?
No on both counts, you are assured, when you pose these questions to your peers. Especially since when you tried to stand you went careening backwards off the board and managed a belly flop so concussive that it stung your skin through the wetsuit.
The next hour feels almost Sisyphean. You get pumelled by the foamy swill, fight the rip, catch a wave (thanks to Brad), hike yourself up to your knees, taste just enough success to think you really do have the knack, try to stand, and then flip, or slip, or flop, off the board. Repeat.
Written out like that it doesn’t seem like surfing—or whatever you’re doing is called—should be all that fun. But it turns out that being dumped again and again by gorgeous Antarctic water is just tubular as hell, and the water in your ears and the weary wishy washy feeling in your muscles and the potential concussions and the colossal wedgie you’re dealing with and the thick, blistering cold must have deoxygenated your brain into a state of tidal bliss. Delulu? Yes. Crazy? No. Like some salty, hyperreal dream.
Whoever said a grey sky can’t be beautiful has never been to WA’s Denmark. All above the sky is streaked and layered. Complex. Up close the foamy water is more green-white than blue—the true blue stuff is out the back. Waves roll in from a faraway storm, pinched by each tip of Denmark’s inlet on their way through. The sand is a creamy white. Limestone white. The rocks shoot fine foamy spray whole metres in the air with each rolling set, they look wisened and stoic and eroded into spikes. A whopping wave comes through the throng and Brad is counting down and this is the one. You can feel it.
To stand and ride a wave is to fly. You hang. Arms wide like a trapeze artist, butt just about higher than your head. You feel the power of the Southern Ocean coursing through your feet, you feel peace and a cosmic oneness with all things, like you’re gliding on nothing and everything all at once.
You will be surprised, and then mortified, when you watch the footage back. Not only are you moving embarrassingly slowly, but you have never seen a person who looks less at peace than you do riding a surfboard. You wobble along a rolling wave of ankle high foam. You remember it being faster. You remember feeling light and happy. You remember wanting to wade over to tell Mike that you’re in love with the feeling of riding a wave, knack or no knack. And you imagine with a strange certainty that if you had, he’d have smiled genially and tapped you twice on your heart and told you in a wizened San Franciscan whisper that that is the thing that’s truly righteous.
Thanks for using slow motion on the video so we can really digest it
I think you may have committed to actually being a pro surfer by next Christmas. This is such a great story. Submit it somewhere!!! Maybe Surfers weekly!!!