Ungently Going

“Do not go gentle into that good night…
…Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

                                    Dylan Thomas

 

                                               

 

I ate shit in the water yesterday. Took three waves in two hours. Two late drop lefts where I barely made the bottom turn before I was quickly swallowed by closeout sections; the last was a steep right where the board flipped vertical under me and the rounded-pintail narrowly missed impaling my buttocks, glancing instead off my upper thigh first before I bounced off the deck and skittered down the face before the lip drove me under.  Pissed, I immediately hauled myself back onto the board and started paddling back out, raging to redeem myself.  But a five wave closeout set caught me and swept me to the inside before I could make it back to the lineup. And that was the end of my session; my watch read the stark reality that I had to exit the water immediately if I hoped to get to work on time.  It was an ignominious, humbling, and even somewhat humiliating session.  Ate. Shit.   

 

There are those who will tell me that at 54 (FIFTY-FRIKKIN-FOUR,) I’m old.  That I’m too old for playing in the surf.  That my broke down body is a by-product of that aging process, that it is inevitable, and that I should just give it up.  Some of these people are the same ones who told me almost four decades ago that surfing was frivolous and a waste of time.  I even think they take some glee when they hear me whinge about my bad knees, back, my aches and pains, and how it inhibits my surfing; they tell me that it’s just the process of aging, exacerbated by all my time in “that cold water,” and that it’s no wonder my body should be falling apart…and that I should give it up.  They always want me to give up, give in to it…be old and fuddy like them.  They can eat shit. 

 

My body IS old.  But cold water doesn’t break you down.  Surfing CAN break you down.  Most of my contemporaries, and those who were a few years older than me when I started, have had back and neck and hip issues; some of these surfers have given it up and I never see them in the water anymore.  I understand why they don’t surf anymore, but for me, even though I can’t perform the way I used to, and on some days when I’m really KOOKING, like yesterday for example…I want to cry and scream and rage against the body that is betraying me, the slowed reflexes, and stiff joints…but I won’t, I can’t, it is inconceivable for me to quit.  I’ve always said: “I started on my belly, belly surfing little slabs of Styrofoam…and if it comes to it, I’ll end my surfing days on my belly.  If it comes to it.  I’m not there yet.  My age, the cold water, the bullshit that other people, (non-surfing people always,) want to heap on me…none of that is real, and none of that will make me quit.

 

I have an auto-immune condition.  Ankylosing Spondylitis.  AS for short.  I won’t bother with the specifics, that’s what GOOGLE is for.  Suffice it to say, like many auto-immune diseases, it mostly manifests in achy, creaky joints, and chronic fatigue.  The rheumatologist I used to see would always ask about “morning stiffness.”  If you saw me crawling out of bed each morning, stumbling around on stiff and painful limbs, unable to bend or squat or turn my head without the whole body coming along for the ride because my neck won’t turn, you would never believe that I could even put my wetsuit on, let alone paddle out and try to surf.  And what is surfing like? Imagine Oz’s Tin Man trying to surf…all those clumsy, clanking, stiff and metallic appendages… 

 

I have bad days, and I have better days.  I never really seem to have GOOD days anymore, and that hurts.  My AS is of course exacerbated by other orthopedic issues in the way of old injuries and surgeries I’ve incurred from a lifetime of playing sports.  People told all the time when I was playing those sports and getting hurt and blowing out knees and shoulders, that I was too old then too.  That I should give them up. But I didn’t listen to them then either.  Soccer used to be a passion but I no longer play because of my knees.  I miss it.  A lot.  But I live with it.  It doesn’t kill me like giving up surfing would.  I can’t, I won’t give up surfing.

 

What DOES kill me about my surfing is when I can’t perform the way I used to.  I understand that the glory days of my youth are long past and that an erosion of skills IS inevitable with age.  But this is more than an erosion; this is a cataclysm.  I’m a kook most days.  The young surfers paddling around me, looking right THROUGH me as if I’m invisible, a non-factor in the lineup…I want to slap them sometimes.  I know what I must look like, a complete beginner, a kook…missing waves, and then stumbling to my feet and sometimes not even able to make it to my feet, like I’m a total beginner, flopping off the side of my board as the wave engulfs me because my hips and my knees and my back just didn’t want to cooperate and allow me to draw my feet under me smoothly and I stumble and fall…I just want to slap them, because I KNOW that I’m NOT a kook, that I used to be a better surfer than they will ever be… But my body betrays me now.  AS robs me of surfing’s most basic, but critical skill, the pop-up.  Timing is everything on a takeoff, and because of my slowed reflexes, my stiff joints, I’m often in the wrong place at the wrong time and my body just won’t do what I ask of it; my pop-op is more like a groan, push, slog, drag and stiff crawl to my feet; usually the wave passes me by before I get that far…it is maddening.  I want to rage and scream…somedays, like yesterday, I just drive away from the beach, crying…

 

 

I have a friend.  A dear friend.  After a thirty year career as a nurse’s aide, and raising four beautiful and wonderful daughters, she has embarked on a life-long dream of becoming a nurse.  Currently she juggles nursing school, still working as an aide, and ongoing motherhood to her four daughters.  My friend taught me everything I know about being a nurse’s aide and she is the most caring and compassionate aide I’ve ever worked with.  All her residents, all her patients, absolutely ADORE her.  I do too.  She will be an AWESOME nurse. 

 

My friend has a hearing disability.  She wears a hearing aide but still struggles to hear things clearly.  Being a nurse, hearing is vital.  Especially when using a stethoscope to take blood pressures and listen to lungs and all the rest.  Normal stethoscopes do not work for my friend so she ordered a special one for people with hearing issues such as hers.  When she received the instrument however she discovered that she still was having trouble hearing properly with it.  Hearing is critical in nursing.  And recently, as my friend confided to me on the phone yesterday--as I got home from my aborted surfing excursion, still crying inside--she overheard two of her nursing classmates talking about her, saying she had no business trying to be a nurse, on account of her hearing disability…

 

My humiliation and tears quickly transformed to rage as my Irish temper flared inside.  Bitchy cattiness is rampant in nursing.  And these two bitches sparked that flare in me.  How DARE they say something so mean and cruel and bitchy… They don’t know my friend like I do.  They don’t know that she is destined to be an AWESOME nurse, that she will be ten times the nurse they can ever hope of being!  How dare they.  Fucking bitches.  But people say mean and hurtful and cruel and insensitive…and incredibly fucking stupid things sometimes…

 

I was never in the military but I did grow up in a military family.  My dad and two brothers were career military officers.  Sometimes growing up, I wondered if Dad didn’t understand that our large Irish American family was not his own little platoon to command.  But as trying as it was sometimes, growing up in that environment, there was much teaching and leadership and wisdom that came from that military way, that approach to life…  In the military they have a saying that they employ when encountering a problem or obstacle that seems insurmountable; Clint Eastwood once uttered it in a somewhat sappy military movie called “Heartbreak Ridge,” when his platoon was whinging about how they could possibly find a solution to an obstacle.  “We improvise, we adapt, we overcome!” Eastwood growled in his gritty way.

 

Improvise, adapt, overcome.  Good life words there.  As I spoke to my nursing friend I remembered them.  I suggested a few improvisations, adaptations, and possible ways of overcoming her hearing obstacle.  And even as I was trying to help her, to be a good friend, and hopefully in my small way, assist her in realizing her dream…the back of my mind was registering those same words, the wheels began spinning, as I conjured ways of overcoming my own obstacles in the surf… 

 

There are no shortages of mean, stupid, insensitive people who will demean, ridicule, and tell you all the things you can’t do, things you have no business even attempting.  There are no shortage of people who in their own misery, their own failures, their own lethargy and defeat, will try to ensnare you and pull you down so they can confirm that resignation and giving up, the paths THEY chose, were the proper ones.  But there is no problem where a solution cannot be affected.  There will be setbacks and retreats in life, but if you keep paddling, if you don’t give up, if you keep improvising, adapting, overcoming…you will leave all the gutless quitters in your wake. 

 

And as every surfer who has ever exited a tunneling wave, spit blasting across your back, you will realize a nobility and glory that the masses will never know…

 

 

 

Lone Wolf

            Our restaurant of choice was named: “The Ham & Egger” and on weekday mornings they served an: “All You Can Eat” pancake breakfast special.  They hated to witness us crashing through the door, emanating the odors of wet neoprene, salt and rockweed, seawater still dripping from our hair, beach sand flinging off our flip-flops with every step.  We were loud and boisterous and most certainly annoying, and perhaps even vaguely intimidating to the mostly elderly or young family clientele.  Nothing turns heads quicker, freezes eating utensils mid-air more effectively than a pack of surfers, fresh from the ocean, ravenously hungry, whooping and talking story, even as they commandeer a few booths to pillage innumerable plates of heaping buttermilk flapjacks, oiled with viscous native maple syrup. 

            Catering mostly to tourists and long established local townsfolk, we were a noisy rabble of rude young outcasts, as welcome at their tables as a marauding incursion of barbarous Vikings, storming their peaceful sanctuary with intent of loot and plunder.  But the sign out front stated they would keep proffering their pancakes as long as we could keep ingesting them.  And anyone who has ever hung with a platoon of hungry surfers, knows that we can ingest a lot!  To the best of my recollection, despite their grim stares, tight lips, and searing looks, the owners never turned us away.  The cooks kept flapping and the wait staff kept lugging, while the other customers usually ate quickly and silently and made for their hasty exits.

            Of course we talked mostly about the surf we’d just left.  Hands and arms gesticulating and carving arcs through the air in simulation of turns.  White-toothed grins at the retelling of who kooked a wipeout.  Escalating tones of whomever might be verbalizing their lingering indignity at having been dropped-in on by one of the ruthless old-timers at our local break.  Between words, and sometimes even syllables, copious amounts of orange juice and coffee were quaffed, chews of pancake and bacon, and sometimes someone might even regale us with their tale out of one side of their mouth, while all the while a stogie of link sausage bobbed from the other side in their half-clamped lips.

            We were surfers, we were of a pack, and we were the coolest of the cool.  We not only didn’t care when we felt those disapproving eyes on us as we engaged our wild antics and orgiastic consumption of their food, we coveted those looks.  We rarely left sufficient remuneration for the poor waitress who’d suffered our invasion of her section.  The boys in the group usually had all smiled lecherously and offered lame pick-up lines and then leered at her retreat from our tables, ogling her body parts and judging and rating them, as boys do.  Myself and other girls who might be with us almost never offered any sisterhood like buffer of nodding understanding with the poor victim; on these excursions, we were “one-of-the-boys” and just as ruthless and lethal as any she-wolf might be to some poor lone soul outside her pack.

            We left the carcasses of our consumption scattered across the tables like so many de-meated bones at any kill site; plates with crumbs and syrup dribbles, wadded napkins, emptied oj glasses with only a few pulp tadpoles still clinging to the insides, mugs of cold dregs of unswilled coffee.  I’m sure the waitresses, the cooks, the owners, and especially the other patrons were glad to see us off, usually after having plundered in their presence for more than an hour.  We would crash back out through the door, into the light and warm sun.  Still loud, laughing, talking of the next adventure, we would pile into our cars and squeal out of the parking lot, off to late morning naps, and then the high-tide sessions in the afternoon.  It was the time of my surfing life.  That time when I was young, and fit, that time when I belonged to a pack….

 

            I’m a lone-wolf now.  Those days of my youth, when I ran with “the boys” are no more than a dim memory.  Marriage, child-rearing, divorce…and especially the cynicism that comes to the older surfer.  It’s not like it was.  It’s not as good as it used to be.  I drive alone in my car.  I arrive at the beach alone.  Surf breaks where there’s few or no other surfers.  I’m not as young or strong or as good a surfer as I used to be, and I don’t like to fight and hassle to catch the few rides I’m lucky enough to procure. When it’s crowded, I usually paddle further down the beach, away from everybody.  As alone with my thoughts as I can be these days when most spots, even the obscure ones, are overrun.  Surfing sometimes is more like a job or an obligation; if there’s swell, I feel I have to paddle out.  Often times, I’m hurting, wounded, lame…I’m not “surfing” fit and as a consequence, I don’t perform as well as I wish to, as I used to.  It hurts to be old and washed up sometimes.  Especially when I remember when I was pretty good and the days were long and warm and I ran with a pack and we were loud and obnoxious and we didn’t care about anything or anyone, except us. 

I miss that camaraderie; I yearn to be part of a pack again sometimes.  Sometimes I feel that call of the wild and I want to run with “my boys and my girls” and surf and feel the sun on my face and the wind in my hair and I want to crash through restaurant doors and be boisterous and obnoxious and surrounded by those I care about and who care about me, and all of us just wanting to ride the waves and hoot and holler, and just… howl!