Anyway,

2007年08月21日

What Is Surfing To Me?

People are always asking me what is surfing to me. I don’t know how to answer. Maybe we should just say that surfing is what surfers do, everyday and all the time.

Then what is a surfer?

Well for one, I guess I am a surfer. I have been surfing since I was in middle school, although some years I didn’t even surf at all. In other years, like when I lived in the city of San Francisco, I surfed four hours a day, five days a week. I feel that once you are a surfer, you don’t have to even be in the water to be surfing. You are surfing all the time anyway.

Even when you are walking down the street, you see a curl in every hedge, a lip on every overhang, a perfect point wave in every puddle outline. Every small wind is that perfect off shore breeze. You can’t even look at a body of water without seeing a wave in there somewhere. And when I’m at the beach, I don’t even have to go in the water to find myself surfing. Even if I am just standing there with my feet planted firmly in the sand, I’m surfing.

There are so many kinds of surfers. There are body surfers, body boarders, short boarders, long boarders, and paddle boarders. I guess even people on wave skis or kayaks that ride waves are surfers.

I think the one thing that all surfers have in common is that we have all felt the glide at one time in our lives. The glide is that magic moment when you feel yourself being pushed by the wave, when you feel that natural energy flowing out of the ocean depths thrusting you forward. I think the closet I ever felt in another situation was when I was a kid, and I felt the wind fill the sails on my father’s yacht for the first time, propelling us forward.

Once you have felt that glide, to me you are a surfer. You may never, ever go back into the water, but it is something that will never leave you. Maybe the purest surfer in the world is one that felt that glide and never surfed again. Never had time to get caught up in the styles, the moves, the localisms or the hype. Someone who just has that one memory of the instant the ocean pushed him forward. I think he will remember it forever in his heart, when ocean and man were one.

My wife and I took my son to the local beach break the other day to get him a couple of waves on his body board. The wind was on shore, the waves were crap and it was super crowded. Taking turns, I rode a couple of waves in on the body board, right onto the sand. But I have to admit, I had as much fun out there that day on those terrible waves on a body board as I recently did on a perfect overhead day at the local point break that I usually surf, on my long board! It is not the type of surfing, or the type of wave. A surfer is just someone that can have fun out there. A surfer is someone who is looking for, and feeling the glide and getting a kick out of it.

So the next time someone asks me what is surfing to me again, I will have to tell him or her, I still don’t know. It is just something that I cannot live without. Maybe it is a state of being.

And then I will take him surfing and try to get him to feel the glide and quit asking me these silly questions.

投稿者 George : 10:48 | コメント (0) | トラックバック (0)