Dawn Magic

On the visceral beauty of surfing.

Sharing some writing on a course recently, I loved pulling out of the archive some favorite scribblings from a cafe one November morning, a few years into my San Francisco life.

September and October is really when the ‘season’ begins for wonderful surf at Ocean Beach. And November is when the light goes nuts…:)

I pulled up alongside the ocean, driving eyes easing right.

The sky cracking open for business. This purple swathe of watercolors, yawning out of the black pencil line of horizon.

So good to see John Brown again.

Mid-life men with the giddiness of kids on Christmas morning. Except the anticipation of unwrapping the ocean comes too with a crinkled tinge of fear...

We peered over the roadside dunes together and saw a neat, glassed march of aquamarine swell lines.

Rows of dark blue corduroy spitting into the feathered white horsetails of a lurching wave, all in a peeling symmetry. The sacred shape that surfers call 'A-frame'.

Niggles of nerves light up in my stomach. And an adrenaline-filled ten minutes later, the cold Northern Californian shore-break is icing my bare feet and siphoning up the warm neoprene wrap of my wetsuit legs.

Ocean Beach in San Francisco is best handled with a zig-zagging paddle to get out beyond the break line. What would be a straight paddle anywhere else leaves you feeling like a rolling marble at Ocean Beach, as the shifting peaks shunt the surface water in different directions.

Turning on my triceps in every stroke, my eyes are taking in the purple-blue wash of color in the sky and the oily and ruffled purple-green canvas of the ocean, shifting as the day’s light starts to play on the water's surface.

In a pause from the endless gruel of ducking and paddling, I noticed how my senses were taking in more than my brain could process. Some kind of smiling sense of overwhelm!

The colours, the sounds of shorebreak disappearing behind me, the smell of the ocean so dank and raw and vibrant all at the same time. The quiet fears in my stomach…

A tight flock of pelicans gliding low and tight, tracing over a rising swell line. Me and them.

And, for a split-second, paused in connection and curious stare, two species acknowledging each other in the elite member’s club of dawn.

Had this flash thought then to the moment a sommelier sips a freshly opened wine on first pour, my eyes blinked closed to savour the momentary bomb of sensations.

A momentary lip-twitch in a droplet of salt water landing. Ears — ear-plugged with silicon putty — are buried in the acoustic of your own heartbeat and heaving breaths.

In my fingers, feeling cycles from the oppression of cold water on warm blood, to the tickle of tiny mini-currents feathering between each finger, as each hand pulls and treads through the water.

Dropping into a wave, there is no greater moment than the split second of relief that you've got the critical physics just right, your body's weight on the wave-side edge of your board holding onto an inhaling arc of ocean.

A steepening slide that suddenly shifts up to a standing wall of water to cling to. My left hand stroking the skin of the wave’s face, respectfully.

The physics keeping it all together as water sucks upward, and bodyweight and board glide downward, in perfect counterweight.

Man and nature, hanging onto each other.

A moment in the session took me back to St. Ouen’s beach in the English island of Jersey, in June 1998. When this visceral compulsion all began, an afternoon in the sun, with the best of friends, unable to get out of the water as the tide rose and the sun set...

It’s been a couple of decades now.

So so so many, many, many…many hours.

So so so so much frustration, so so many falls.

Tens of thousands of spilled waves, it feels. That don’t matter. Tens of thousands of spills that are the addiction, in this cherished thread in my life.

And moments of fear. One or two instances of real, deep fear over all those years. The pit-of-your-stomach fear, the self-loathing that you’ve got yourself into a tricky situation, when the size of the ocean’s chaos lurches up a notch while you’re out there.

The wrestle with the ocean that is surfing awards us some kind of heightened state again and again, in the hard work and in the soothing absorption of nature all around you.

And it brings kindred spirits and friendships that become deep bonds. The drives, the trips and sessions when nature and the ocean is not as you hoped.

And, so often you drag yourself home with hardly a decent wave caught.

But too, you drive yourself home not even caring about that, however hard it is to explain to the rest of the world.

For me, it’s been 23 years of captivation and grit, though hardly a talent. Surfing is a 'sport', but when you arrive at the water's edge, you know that you're there again because it's art too.

In all these magical moments out there for us surfers, we’re absorbed like a painter at the canvas.

And what we paint is not the point…