Chapter Eight

Ray loaned me a nine-foot tri-fin board and told me to keep the wet suit. He dropped me off at home and I felt like a king. Now I had my own surf gear. I could surf whenever I wanted. Suddenly summer didn’t look so bad.

Ray would show up and we’d go back to the Farm—Nirvana Farm—where I started to get the hang of catching waves, riding on my belly and then finally on my knees.

But the breakthrough happened about a week later. I was all alone at the beach. The fog was back, thick as pea soup. It was seven o’clock in the morning and I had skipped breakfast. I rode my bike to the beach, wearing my wet suit and towing my board behind me on a handmade one-wheeled trailer I’d built. I heard the waves before I saw them. It was like cannons going off. I knew I shouldn’t be out there alone but I had a fire in me. Today was it.

As I paddled out to the place we called the Reef (because of a rocky reef a hundred yards from shore), I felt both scared and thrilled. It was so foggy I couldn’t even see the waves until they were on top of me. I had to paddle straight through five head-high walls of glass until I was beyond the break line. Then I turned around and sat on my board.

You couldn’t see the shore from here. You couldn’t see the waves coming. But I could feel a set approaching. I remembered Ray’s advice. Don’t go for the first three waves in the set. I let them pass under me. Then I lay down and took four deep hard strokes into the cold dark water.

The wave was getting steeper. I began to drop. I pushed up and got to my feet just as I hit the bottom of the wave. I stood up and leaned left, digging in with my back foot until the board began to turn. I was riding high and fast on this amazing wall of water through an invisible world. I could hear the wave breaking right behind me. I adjusted my footing, inched forward on the board and started going even faster.

Suddenly, something snapped inside me. I felt calm, unafraid. Time stopped. I let out a loud yelp that could have been heard a mile down the coast. I leaned back a little, readjusting my weight, feeling the power of the wave and tapping into it.

The wave sectioned. It began to break ahead of me as well as behind me. I tucked down and grabbed the rail of my board as I drove straight into a four-foot hollow pocket that was in my path. Suddenly I was tubed, and it was glorious. But in the split second after I was gobbled up, sucked to the top of the wave and bashed back down over the falls, my board caught sideways between my legs.

It hurt a little. Well, it hurt a lot. When a gremmie gets overconfident, it is the job of the mother sea to put him in his place. I was rolled, spindled and mutilated, but I came up gulping for air and feeling like I was fully alive.

I was a surfer now and there was no turning back.