Photo: Ryan Mack
Living down the street from the most photographed wave in New Jersey gets a little annoying after a while. A good swell usually means the circus is coming to town. The lineup will be cluttered with all kinds of acrobats, clowns, and sometimes a couple of trained animals. Nowadays getting a day by yourself is a bit of a rarity. Paddling out to an empty lineup made me feel like I was the last man on Earth. I looked back at the beach and saw Rod Serling perched at the jetty. He was narrating my every move. Did I just cross over into The Twilight Zone?
It seemed that I traveled into another dimension. The first wave came right to me like a magnet is pulled to a refrigerator. This time there were no trapeze artists or jugglers to take it from me. When I stood up, I heard the roar of the whitewater as it crushed onto the sandbar. This wave was all mine.
Photo: Mike Incitti
While waiting for the next swell to appear on the horizon, I realized I wasn’t entirely by myself. I was in a dimension not only of sight and sound, but of mind. When you are alone, your subconscious is always there to keep you company. Sometimes when you enter the doorway to your thoughts, it’s like opening Pandora’s box. Instead of thinking about what’s for dinner, the only thing on my mind was the sounds of the 80’s rock hit, Love Is a Battlefield. I usually keep this Pat Benatar classic reserved for an unexpected Thursday night karaoke mission, but that day the radio had other plans.
Two hours later, I was still cursed by this Grammy winner’s tune. It kept playing over and over again; it was stuck on repeat. Eventually, I gave in to the insanity. My humming turned into singing. I don’t know the lyrics so I started making up my own remix. I wondered if I would’ve been in this predicament if there was someone else surfing? The waves only got better but there was no one to share the fun with me, nobody to laugh with. I felt lonely. I kept looking back at the beach, expecting to see someone running down with a surfboard, but there was no one. It was desolate. I shouted, “Where is everybody?!” Nobody could hear me except Mr. Serling. He was slowly strolling up the beach making his closing statement…
“Here we have Tom Petriken. A young man who has fallen behind the barrier of loneliness. The palpable desperate need of the human animal to be with his fellow man. Out there, out there in the vastness of the ocean, out there is an enemy known as isolation. It sits there in the waves waiting, waiting with the patience of eons, forever waiting in The Twilight Zone”
To read more from Thomas Petriken, check out TheTommylog.com
