Sound and Fury, Signifying Mostly Nothing
I hate the cold.
When late Fall arrives, setting stage for Winter, my thoughts turn to warmth. That may entail soup, or electric socks, or dreaming of a trip to some equatorial paradise. Since ocean temperatures drop to would-be-freezing-if-it-wasn’t-for-salt-content temperatures, surfing is right out of the question.
Yes, I’m well aware of the space age wetsuit technology on the market — amazing how light and flexible a 6/5/4 with booties, gloves and hood can be. None of this, however, alters the fact that after surfing, you need to get out of that wetsuit. No technology helps at this point, only sheer speed and maybe a half-prayed, half-cursed "Please don’t let the wind blow again".
Bottom line: I’m a wimp.
Consequently, all the time spent indoors leads me to find other ways to occupy myself. This includes a lot of reading about our sport. As I am the typical geek, I’ve confined this to writing on the Internet. As an aside: How’s that for some pseudo-post-modern-self-referential nonsense?
There’s plenty of information out there on surfing, from the storied prose of Legendary Surfers, to the technical Hydrodynamics of Surfboards. (Granted, I don’t understand most of the latter, but it makes me feel smarter.)
Somewhere in the middle, though, there are the repositories of opinion, newsgroups or forums or bulletin boards or whatever you want to call them. Unlike the humble little one located here, most seem like gold rush towns in the Old West. Everyone gathered for a common interest, a civility broken by the occasional violent shooting match. I love this.
It’s not just the volcanic eruptions over the "correct" way to measure wave heights, or the perpetual East Coast versus West Coast (versus Hawaii versus Australia versus…), or the tangential leaps into every topic but surfing — it’s the way everyone keeps coming back for more. I truly believe anticipation fuels these returns, the wonder in what will happen next.
The bad analogy exists between this and surfing itself. We go, we mix with others, there may be conflict, there may be challenges, it may simply stink. Yet we return, hoping for the good ride, the experience of it all.
I think this speaks volumes about surfing — about us. For surfers, it’s the forest, not the trees. We don’t gauge surfing by one wave, or one person, or one bad-weather day. The optimism keeps us coming back.