Surf Lessons

When we left Chile, I planned to leave the surfboard behind. My friend Cole talked me into keeping it. “Come on man,” he said, “You might want to try surfing again someday…”

It was the last stupid thing he’d convince me to do. After we arrived in Miami, he jogged off to a different terminal to catch a quick flight back to his home state of Colorado. Leaving me to travel the old-fashioned way; on a Greyhound bus back to Birmingham.

After three months, we were returning from Vina del Mar, a beach town on the central coast of Chile. No one had slept and the thick air outside the crowded Miami airport tasted sour with sweat. The flavor of southern Florida sent my empty stomach into a nauseas revolt. I needed sustenance. Anything would do; water, a coke, a candy bar. But, because I had decided to bring home that damned surfboard, I was broke.

The surfboard was considered “irregularly shaped luggage,” so to check it, the airline charged me fifty dollars extra. When the lady at the ticket counter broke the news, I had exactly forty-nine dollars in my pocket. The last of what I had made fishing in Alaska. Since keeping the surfboard had been his idea, Cole gave me the dollar I needed to get it on board. But he was long gone the next morning when I learned that the Greyhound carried the same policy.  

“That surfboard will cost you extra,” the cashier at the Greyhound station said.

I looked around the room. People carrying garbage bags for suitcases. Their arms and faces covered with the tiny cuts people acquire from sleeping on sidewalks. I imagined all the I- just-spent-my-last-dollar stories she’d heard while working the ticket counter.

“Do you have somewhere I can throw it away?” I asked. She closed her eyes and let out a long slow breath. Then she reached under the desk for a baggage tag. She wrapped it around the handle of my surfboard case. “Thank y-“ she shushed me with her hand before anyone else noticed her act of kindness.  

I’d bought the surfboard for a hundred dollars. I knew it was too short, but it was the cheapest they had. And in my mind, it was the only thing I needed to become the surfer of my dreams.

Earlier that week, Cole and I had paid for a surf lesson from a blonde Chilean named Gustavo. After stuffing us into rented wetsuits, we crammed ourselves into his two-seater pickup truck. I sat in the middle with my knees pointed towards Cole to make room for the gear shifter. Cole hung his body outside the window to make room for me.

That afternoon, Gustavo stood in the surf while Cole and I floated atop these ten-foot-long slabs of Styrofoam shaped like surfboards. Buoyant enough to float a family to another continent, I could stand up and tap dance on the board without it going under. As a wave would come, Gustavo would shout instructions in Spanish, none of which Cole or I understood. Then just as we felt the tide grab us, he’d shout, “SURF!” And we did. Riding wave after gentle wave all the way to the beach. My hair didn’t even get wet. Surfing was easy.

Gustavo, wherever your tiny truck is taking you now, just know, I don’t blame you for what happened next. You probably tried to warn me. It was my own fault for failing high school Spanish.

After the purchase of our new short boards Cole and I carried them down to the bus stop.  Our understanding of the public transit was worse than our Spanish. So, of course, we ended up on the wrong bus.

For forty-five minutes I watched the city give way to houses, then the houses gave way to a great desert. After everyone else had gotten off, the driver pulled into a large flat parking lot; the end of the line. He turned off the engine and rubbed his eyes. Standing up to stretch, he finally noticed Cole and I sitting in the back holding our surfboards. He laughed without trying to hide it and motioned for us to come to the front of the bus.

We took a seat just behind his and waited while he stepped off the bus to eat his lunch. A kid with a broom paused at the door when he saw us, then went to work, pushing the dust and dropped paper into a pile and picking out the loose change.

On the way back, the driver turned to us at the fourth stop. He pointed downhill through a row of houses. “La playa,” he said.

After winding our way through ten neighborhood blocks, the big black waves of the Pacific Ocean came into view. The sand which bordered it was covered with people in both directions. Suddenly, a fear that I hadn’t felt since my teenage high school basketball days returned. The dread of facing a dominant team from a neighboring city in front of a sold-out gymnasium. Carrying that five-foot eight-inch surfboard out onto the beach, I was no longer the accomplished world traveler I thought I was. I was the second-string point guard on a losing team warming up only to be humiliated.  

I followed Cole to the edge of the water and waited for the waves to break. Together, we charged. The black cold water grew deep quickly, so I dove onto my board, which promptly sank. A wave rolled in over me while I fought to keep the surfboard above the water. The crest boiled white along the top. I kicked hard feeling myself go up and up and up, then, falling back. Mid-somersault I lost my grip on the board. For a brief second I thought it was gone forever, leaving me to remain in the surrounding darkness where the memories of all my life’s failures await. Then the leash Velcroed to my ankle dragged me all the way to the beach to try again.

I can’t remember how many times I tried; six, seven. But I eventually made it through. When I did, I straddled my board like a cowboy in the saddle of a scuba diving horse. The rolling water up to my shoulders. I had to kick my feet to keep from going any deeper. I pointed the nose of the board back towards the beach.

Looking back, I stared at the thousands of unknown faces searching for a lifetime of joy in a day’s worth of sunshine. Taking in the distance of the black water separating the rest of my life from this crazy attempt to find my own version of happiness, I feared that I might never make it back.   

I paddled in to where the waves started to break. With my head inches above the water, I kicked hard but the wave overtook my effort. With a deep breath I went under, returning to the familiar darkness where I’d rolled in the beginning. Drifting deeper, I spread my arms and stretched my closed lips into a smile. I knew this wasn’t the end. Any second, the Velcro on my ankle would catch and I’d be tugged in, free to try again. Or, not.

That afternoon, I put the board in a closet. I didn’t bring it out again until it was time to go home.

It took twenty-four hours for the Greyhound to make it to Birmingham. I sat in an aisle seat that wouldn’t recline. Tired, broke and starving, I was forced to sit upright and watch as the bus filled with men carrying sun faded backpacks, women in secondhand clothes. Body odor wafted in body shifting puffs, but I got used to it. No one but the driver spoke. His voice constantly crackling through the intercom, reciting his rules for the bus. “No loud talking, no pets, no smoking,” each offense sharing the same punishment. “If I catch you, you’re off the bus.” No one dared to laugh, or even roll their eyes. We were a busload of American dreamers in full retreat.  

It has been fourteen years since I was tossed around by the Pacific Ocean. And I haven’t ridden a Greyhound since. The last time I saw the surfboard it was being overtaken by a patch of weeds beside a pile of leftover lumber in my parent’s backyard.

When I began writing this, I imagined the surfboard’s ultimate demise. The rain finding a way through the outer fiberglass surface and forcing the inside to swell. Cracks spidering out creating needle thin openings for the sun to suck out the moisture. The pointed nose that was so prone to going underwater would then start starts its descent down through the surface of the earth, until the leash that tugged me to safety tangled with the web of roots that feeds the weeds.

But then I called mom.

“I put your surfboard in the storage building a long time ago. It’s behind the old bikes…I was thinking of painting it and turning it into a table at one time.”

So, thanks to Pinterest, the surfboard lives on. And I have to admit, that after all this time, Cole was right. I do plan to go surfing again someday. Only next time, I will pony up the extra money for a longer board.