San Diego Surfing
“There’s this…” my grandmother paused, her eyes focused straight ahead. “There’s this draw to the ocean.” Even before she started surfing, my grandmother found solace in the clear blue waves of ocean water. “There’s something about the water that’s always been magical. I had to move to the beach. I was too drawn to it.”
But just being near the water wasn’t enough; she sought something she had only seen from afar: the near impossibility of walking along the water of the incoming waves. “When I first started, it was hard.” Her arms tensed where they lay against the cushions of her lime green couch. “You have to paddle a long way to get to the waves, and you feel unstable even laying on your board. Day after day I would paddle, but I couldn’t ever get in a wave.” Her eyes trailed up from their spot on the horizon, watching the growth of the swell ahead of her. “Even when I got to where it was breaking, my board would take a nosedive. It would go on for weeks, and when I tried to stand up, I would fall off immediately.” Even now, decades after she began surfing, frustration still laced her words.
Here, though, the tone of her voice shifted. “I’ll never forget the day I finally paddled out there, when the wave got me, when I stood up—” a nostalgic wonder replaced the frustration, “—and I rode it.”
“It’s like I was touched by God. That was the beginning of me paddling out there again and again and again. Every morning until the sun was at its highest, and again after work until the sun went down.”
“To get really good, you have to know the ocean. When you catch a wave, you have to pop up like this—” she jumped up from her place on her lime green couch, her left leg in front and both knees bent, “—and if you wanted to turn left, you’d lean like this.” She looked over her left shoulder, torso twisting but legs firmly balanced. “After all that paddling with your arms, it’s all done through your knees and feet. You know, I used to put my legs up like this—” she sat down, placed her feet up on the ottoman, and straightened her back, her hands supporting the weight of her upper body like they would’ve upon her board, “—and it’s the best feeling in the world, looking back at the beach and the sky and the people on the sand.”
She continued for the next half hour like this, voice full of conviction and expression and yet so far away, eyes seeing something in this living room that I couldn’t, skin tingling from the rays of a sun that had already set.
