Photo: Brendan Simmons
Ah, surfing. The sport of kings. The pinnacle of leisure sports — minus the lucrative leisurewear market. The gateway to teenage rebellion and a lifetime inevitably wasted chasing moving collections of water.
But us surfers are a special and rare breed, right? We’re tan, rugged and mysterious. We’re the envy of middle-aged golf geeks. Men want to be us, women want to be with us. Am I right? Not even close. Let’s face it, we’re about as extreme as floral demonstrations. Oh, the fireworks of color and shade. We also put up with a lot of shit just to be a surfer.
Girlfriends will leave us because we’re too useless to pay bills or undertake social human activities like “brunch.” We’ll wake up before dawn to beat the crowds only to find the parking lot already full and bustling. We’ll spend endless hours in transit stuck between a caged chicken and a Puerto Rican drug mule only to arrive at an overcrowded tropical paradise. Then there are all those reef cuts that never heal. We live with sand in every crevice. We find a clump of seaweed wrapped around our legrope right when a set is feathering on the horizon. We forget our wax and have to be “that guy” asking to borrow some. We chucking out a sickie to go surf and have to explain to our boss why we’ve rocked back to work looking burnt like a Brit in Ibiza. We try tirelessly to explain to civilians what a quiver is and why we need them…why just one board doesn’t do the trick. And of course, we all watch in sheer excruciation, any depiction of surfers in mainstream film or media.
Oh and how about those countless hours spent paddling around? Just paddling!
So, what’s my point here? Maybe surfing just sucks. Or maybe all the annoying shit that comes along with this lifestyle we devote our meager existence to really is worth it. One must know what it means to suffer in order to understand true happiness. All I know is I’ll keep going back time and time again for that fleeting moment of gliding on a wave.
