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!