Every Saturday my father and I go surfing, and nearly every time we are faced with the same thing: closeouts. A closeout is when a wave, rather than having a discernible direction in how it breaks, crashes in on itself like a wall of thunder. You can still surf them on a longboard, but on a shortboard, that requires a surface on which to carve a path, it’s harder. Closeouts happen all at once, instead of peeling left or right like the lighting of a long fuse. They are a closing of the eyes to bad news, the slamming of a door.
You know what I’m about to say, what comparison I’m about to make. But as we come upon the anniversary of when life changed (at least for most of us in the US) as the result of the pandemic, it seems like the only cogent comparison I can come up with. This has been a year of closeouts. If you’re lucky enough to have the right surfboard for these conditions, you can make it work. But for most of us, it’s been a year of doors slammed shut, dreams deferred or destroyed. It’s been a year of ceaseless death, both on the societal scale and on the individual scale as so many of us have lost loved ones. It’s been a year of sudden loss and vanishing livelihoods, inequities and moral crises. It’s been a year of blinding pain, and profound loneliness.
I find myself lately blaming the conditions as an excuse not to go out surfing. Where I live, the conditions rarely change in this aspect; it’s almost always closeouts. But one of the reasons why I have been doing this is because my ambient anxiety, dread, and sorrow all come to the fore when I’m on my surfboard. It has always been this way; perhaps there is something uniquely psychologically resonant to lying stomach-down on a giant piece of fiberglass and navigating the treachery of the waves. But I have been holding so much in, and holding so much back, that when I’m on my surfboard, the terror of it all becomes overwhelming.
Surfing requires much more foresight and skill than swimming alone. It’s relatively easy to duck under a wave when it’s just you; but when you’re on top of something tremendously buoyant, and you yourself are rather small, you can’t shove yourself under the wave. You have to crest over it, which I have always found terrible. I would much rather duck under, descend to the black. These days, though, even that is frightening. For I hear, as I never have before, the silence of the drowned when I pull my head underwater. I am tormented by images of the legions of dead--the grannies, the dads, the grumpy bartenders, the teachers, the brick masons who breathe no more. The Indo-European peoples supposedly believed that when a soul died it went back into the water--be it the ocean, the lake, or the river. This belief is probably why the Vikings had ship burials. Perhaps this belief lingers on in me like muscle memory. I wish the drowned would talk to me. I wish they would not be so quiet. They must still have so much left to say.
The unpredictability of the ocean is also a visceral reminder of the uncertainties of this year. The ocean has its patterns; but within all patterns aberrations exist, too. You learn to expect this in the ocean, which means you must always be ready for the worst case scenario to strike at any moment. It is an environment of pervasive danger. We had a bumper crop so to speak of stingrays this summer because of the abnormally warm water. When the surf went out and the water cleared I could see them, hovering drone-like over the sand. Walking into the ocean felt like walking into a land mine in a way, because any step could result in injury. This just reminded me of what it felt like to go to the grocery store, and to go to work, and to visit a friend while sitting six feet apart. Would this be the inhale of breath from which I contracted the virus? Or the next one? Or the next one?
That has perhaps been the most insidious part of it all. In addition to the very obvious and undeniable effects the pandemic has had on our lives, there’s also been, at least for me, the slow withering of courage, the slow but steady growth of fear in seemingly every aspect of life. I never used to be this afraid of the ocean. I grew up in it. It used to connect me to a deep intuition within. Now it makes me feel small, hopeless, useless.
painting by me.
I do have my moments, but never on the surfboard. In December, I went hiking with a friend at Temescal Canyon, which was hilarious because it was insanely crowded. In the hour I spent on the trail, wheezing through my mask (I have asthma), I counted about two hundred other people. In the open air, it is less risky, of course, but it was still an intensely claustrophobic experience, and I insisted on going to the beach afterwards as we had originally planned to do that day. My friend agreed, and paid for parking at Will Rogers even though the sun was setting. That same friend had told me earlier that they’d be moving to a different state. Their house was already full of boxes. Yet another upheaval. And a wild urge seized me, and I changed into my bathing suit and charged straight into the water. My friend was too frightened to come with me. Will Rogers has a funny wave pattern: there is only one wave, instead of an inside and an outside, and it crashes close to shore with punishing force. But once you get past it, there is nothing else. No other obstacle besides the fast moving current.
The water was freezing, in the low fifties, and the surface shimmered with the diffused light of the sunset. It was opalescent, iridescent, like the underside of abalone shells. Lilac and green and spitting white foam. I took a deep breath, and went under. I came up, and felt gloriously happy for just a moment.
Maybe I was happy that I was somewhere no one could follow me; I was alone in the water, and I had space after an afternoon full of people. Maybe the unexpected pain of losing this friend to another state spurred me away from them. Maybe I wanted to show them that I’d be okay without them...after all, I was a part of this place and they clearly were not, since they didn’t want to swim in frigid water, but I did. Maybe I was showing off for them. But I wasn’t thinking about any of that at the time. I was mostly just reveling in the short-term absence of fear. And it was a total absence. I was not afraid. I could have stayed there, twirling and frolicking and dancing in the waves, for hours, if it had not been so close to sundown.
More recently, a couple of weeks ago, I went for a swim again, this time while my dad surfed. It was low-tide and crowded, so I resigned myself to picking up trash on the beach (on that day I found decaying roses, brilliantly red against the sand, a rusted tent stake, a single Adidas sneaker, an orange needle cap, chewing tobacco wrappers, and numerous fragments of Styrofoam.) Picking up trash on the beach is one of the many pointless things people do, even though they know they’re pointless and futile, because they hope maybe it will matter to God. But then as before I was seized by a longing to enter the water, so I took off my clothes (my bathing suit was on underneath) and left them in a heap on the sand, and walked in.
This time my entry was more tentative. The water was especially cold around my knees. The sky was smoggy, and the two parallel lines of shipping barges snaked along the horizon in the distance. If you watch them long enough, you will notice that the shipping barges lined up to come into Long Beach and Los Angeles are always turning and re-orienting themselves. Maybe they do it to stay on the right side of the wind, I don’t know. I like to look for Maersk barges because a friend of mine works for Maersk. It reminds me, when I see it, of the blue of his eyes. But often by the time I remember to check the barges, they’ve all turned their backs to the beach and I can’t see the logos on the sides. They had their backs to me now, stacked high with containers. I stood there with the water up to my knees for a moment, gathering myself, before fully running in, and letting the waves crash over my shoulders.
When you cannot go anywhere or do anything except take exercise outside, it becomes its own special thrill to be chilled by the ocean. It is almost like being held. This time in the water I felt even more aware of my body and just how cold it was. But it was a joyous feeling. It felt like coming home, or like I was fully inhabiting my body for the first time in months. The primary way I have gotten through this year mentally is by never being fully here. Feeling connected to my body, and by extension my health, felt too close for comfort most of the time. But in the water I was granted a short reprieve. I was allowed, for a moment, to just be and not think or worry or cry or hold my breath.
And then came a wave, a backhanded wave, a closeout, and it knocked me off my feet.