kooks like you

[lummox]

there are kooks like you everywhere.

from latimes.com

 

Foam and chaos

By Nathan Myers

 

"Is this wetsuit on right?"

 

"Absolutely. You want the zipper in front for easy access. For when you need to leave in a hurry."

 

I've got them. This gaggle of kookdom. This flock of flounder. This school of delusionals. I've got them lined up. Belly down. On the beach. On their surfboards. Fake paddling. Fake paddling. And they can't even do that right. Their arms flail about like seagulls tangled in fishing line. They've never even been in the ocean. Most of them probably can't even swim. They don't even want to swim. They want to surf.

 

"Stop paddling!"

 

These blank faces. These sun-blinded groundhogs.

 

"Surfing is the hardest thing you will ever try to learn, and if you end up loving it, it will ruin your life."

 

Just look at me. A UC Berkeley graduate teaching surf school. All day hanging out with these kooks.

 

They stare up at me as I pace. These hunks of meat. These green recruits.

 

"You will never get tubed."

 

Some wince. Some giggle.

 

"You will be lucky if you survive this lesson. If you have any doubt about your ability to perform today I want you to get out of my sight. Now!"

 

This scrawny, inland nerd scrambles to his feet. This computer accessory. This worker bee. Scurries for his car. There is an awkward moment when the leash Velcroed to his ankle trips him to the ground. He squeals, then struggles to freedom. The rest of the class holds my icy stare.

 

"All right," I growl. "You still want to learn to surf, do you?"

 

Muffled replies. Scattered nods. The smell of fear.

 

"First off, let's get one thing straight. You are a kook. In fact, you're not even a kook yet. If someone calls you a kook, you should feel honored. If someone yells, 'Hey, kook, get the hell out of the water,' do it. And don't forget to say thank you."

 

We flop on the boards, plant our hands on the rails and practice popping to our feet.

 

"There's a reason surfing looks so graceful," I explain. "You either do it right, or you don't do it at all."

 

Already it's clear who falls into the latter bracket. One student can barely get from her belly to her feet. It's an arduous, 20-second process that leaves her severely winded. And we're still on land.

 

"That's something I'm going to have to work on," she offers.

 

I agree. Quietly. Sadly. She will make me fail today. I try not to hold it against her.

 

"How do I know which foot goes in the front?"

 

"Generally, people just flip a coin, but really it doesn't matter one way or the other."

 

There are more than a million surfers in California alone. More than 100 surf schools churn an average of 1,000 students through their programs every summer. Each of them. That's more than 100,000 fresh kooks a year. And that's not even counting the people who learn from friends or, God forbid, just pick it up on their own.

 

Southern California waves are choking on foam and fiberglass. Crusty old log-riders demanding their right-of-age; punk-rock chop-hoppers back-dooring their rights-of-way. Rails knock. Heads butt. Hostility. Anger. Screaming. Fighting. "Surf rage" grabs headlines. Take-offs get deeper and deeper until too deep still isn't deep enough to avoid pure mayhem.

 

The plague is upon us, and it tastes like chicken. It looks like a condo, and it's made in Thailand.

 

Nothing frustrates me more. And yet here I am, teaching a dozen neophytes how to cramp the soul of surfing. Pumping them through this surf school assembly line. These watery widgets. These cogs of cool.

 

Am I insane?

 

"What about sharks?"

 

 

 

"Sharks should be your No. 1 concern in the water. One in five surfers are killed by sharks during their first year of surfing. After that, the statistics go sharply up."

 

We're going surfing. Me, a couple of 8-year-olds and some middle-aged women. The XXL woman is with us but, judging by her performance on land, I don't think she's actually going surfing. She's bringing a board and coming along.

 

We wade out toward waist-deep water. Complaining of cold. Trembling with fear. Jettisoning everything I told them on shore. Before I can begin attempting to trick these over-evolved fish to their feet, everything falls apart. My featherweight pre-teen rides a rip current out beyond the breakers and screams in panic. My businesswoman gets smashed by her board and whines of injury. My behemoth can't push past the 6-inch walls of whitewash. My little princess freaks at the seaweed. My schoolteacher sprawls sideways on her board and is swept down the beach by the littoral current.

 

So this is surfing.

 

For the next hour we battle the onslaught of whitewash as I hustle from student to student, pushing them into waves. I help them walk out into the surf, help them wheel their boards around, help them somehow crawl aboard, help each shove off into the wave while pressing down on the tail to avoid the inevitable pearl (the surfing equivalent of riding a bike into a low wall) and then dolphin-glide behind them to help steady the board as they attempt to clamber to their feet and fall dramatically into the ankle-high water.

 

"Great job," I say. "You're getting really close. Just keep doing that."

 

And off to the next one I go.

 

It's all an elaborate charade. "Oh, yeah," they'll tell their friends. "I surf."

 

We call it training wheels, this piggyback stabilization of the board. It's a pretty good tool until someone falls back onto your head. Which isn't nearly as bad as snagging your leg in a student's leash and being dragged underwater for 20 yards, snorting salt and sand between curses. Or spending an hour and a half jumping over whitewash and chasing after stray surfboards while their keepers struggle for excuses to quit: "My eyes sting." "I'm too tired." "I'm cold." "This is too hard."

 

"There's no shame in sitting on the beach," I lie.

 

"What if I can't make it back to shore?"

 

 

 

"Then you will most certainly drown. Supposedly it's one of the nicer ways to die."

 

By some trick of the lull, my shark food and I have managed to paddle en masse to the outside, where the swells roll beneath us like hulking ghosts, calm before the breaking storm of foam and chaos.

 

"See how peaceful it is out here," I explain. "This is where you'd be sitting if you could actually surf."

 

Come to think of it, we probably shouldn't be out here. These anti-coordinated pre-kooks are having trouble just sitting upright on their gigantic floating-sidewalk surfboards. Not being able to straddle these boards is like not being able to sit on the ground without falling off, and yet these chunks of chum cling to their foam slabs like survivors of a shipwreck.

 

What can I possibly say to inspire coordination? How can I verbally instill balance in these bumbling bits of flotsam and jetsam? Despite my moral conflicts over further polluting the lineups with beginners, I take my job seriously and would love to see some of my students experience the unparalleled stoke of riding an unbroken wave. But it's entirely out of my hands.

 

Before I can further explain what "real surfers" do out here, a big set wave looms up on the outer sandbar, slinking toward us like some cartoon villain. I look to my little cluster of flustered land mammals splayed hopelessly across their boards, and I just give up. At least this will be a good lesson. A lesson every surfer must learn again and again. A lesson in getting worked. The wave stands up, and fear crosses one face. Just one, though. The others remain oblivious until the point of impact, maybe longer.

 

I hope they appreciate what I'm doing here.

 

I paddle two strokes and abandon my class with a simple duck dive under the lip. The wave handles them the way a toddler handles a chess set. Pieces scatter everywhere. Boards fly into the air. Bodies surface and are sucked back down. Game over.

 

"How do I know which wave to ride?"

 

 

 

"Don't worry about that. Every wave is exactly the same."

 

I started teaching surf school because I was broke. It struck me as the only thing I felt qualified to do besides submit long, sarcastic soliloquies to slow-to-cut-a-check surf magazines. I found the surf school business operating in a laid-back sort of surfy chaos. Fliers blowing down the beach. Credit-card machines jammed with sand. Hand-written liability waivers muddled by saltwater. Former busboys and pizza delivery specialists unable to address concerned parents' nervous queries with a straight face.

 

The beach is a difficult place to be professional. Surfers are difficult to pass off as professionals. It's tricky business all around, but the pioneers of this small-pond industry leapt in with open arms because they believe in the product.

 

Southern California surf patriarch Dorian "Doc" Paskowitz took the first surfboards to Israel in the '60s to get Arabs and Jews surfing together. His '70s-founded California school is run by his children, who also ride tandem with autistic children.

 

Twin sisters Izzy and Caroline Tihanyi started the all-girl Surf Divas in La Jolla to retard the testosterone buildup in the lineups.

 

And Mary Setterholm, a '60s surf champ, returned to her sport a few years ago, shocked by the drowning of a city kid. Today her Surf Academies in Huntington Beach, El Segundo and Santa Monica cart busloads of children from Compton and East Los Angeles to the beach for free surf lessons. "The ocean is equal opportunity," Setterholm says. "The same wave is going to smash into anybody."

 

The same loose surfboard. The same out-of-control kook.

 

And as if all this weren't exciting enough, my paychecks generally bounce.

 

"Is it OK to pee in my wetsuit?"

 

 

 

"Urinating in your wetsuit is just about the best way to get eaten by a shark. Sharks, as we all know, cannot resist the aroma of human urine."

 

By the end of class I'm generally pretty bummed. I've failed. This illusion of surf. This beach boy façade. This California postcard.

 

I'm not mad at these people. These hillbillies. These aliens. I just don't want to hang out with them anymore.

 

But I have one last trick up my neoprene sleeve. One stupid question of my own.

 

"So," I ask, "did everyone have fun?"

 

And I see it on their faces. The glowing truth. The exhausted elation. "Oh, yeah," they say. "That was so great. Wow. I've always dreamed of doing that. I can't believe I surfed!"

 

And I feel better.

 

The businesswomen lean back in the sand and watch the waves. The children run to tell their parents. The schoolteacher asks more about tides and swells. We all hang around talking and laughing, and I rib them about their scary moments and white-lie them about their good ones. Because now, in some strange way I'm not entirely pleased with, we're family.

 

And then the same kooks show up the next day. They sign up for more lessons. They ask what size board they need to buy, what type of wetsuit fits best. Then they show up with a brand-new surfboard under their arms and their uncle's beavertail wetsuit. "How many more lessons until I'm not a kook anymore?" they ask.

 

"Look," I say. "There's really nothing more I can teach you. Now you've got to just get into the ocean and figure it out. That's surfing. You've got to feel it for yourself."

 

And they beam back and ask: "What's the best beach for me to go to?" "When's the best time of day to surf?" "Where are the best waves in the world?" Until I'm left no choice but to grab my own board and paddle out beyond the breakers where I know they can't reach me.

 

For a while, at least.

 

*Dedicated to all my surf students. You did great out there. Really

[Jake]

Not bad.

[EWolfe]

Nice, Lummox