Ocean Surf 64

Surf Mama

My mom, the surfer, had a million rules for survival in the ocean, like avoiding kelp because it will drag you down or get tangled in your board’s leash. Undertow is really dangerous but easy to spot when the beach’s incline is a slant of thirty degrees or more especially when the high tide is breaking right on shore, which is no fun anyway. Rip tides don’t have to drown you if you learn to swim sideways along with them until you’re out of danger. In the ocean, watching for holes in the sand is important because the holes might be deep, even though the water in them is placid and warm and quite tantalizing to a kid who has never swum in a swimming pool.

And don’t for God’s sake swim during red tide because it might be pretty to look at when night falls, the phosphorescence, but that stuff is algae and can’t be good. It kills fish. Swimmers should stay away from the mouth of the river after a storm because that sewage treatment plant in Tijuana sort of overflows and the bacteria aren’t the best. When Mom was younger, swimming in it could mean ear infections, but nowadays the super-bugs can be flesh-eating bacteria, just ask the Navy SEALS, who don’t train on our beach that borders the border anymore.

I wait thirty minutes after eating and don’t try to swim when the surf can be heard crashing against the jetty as far away as Third Street. I dive under the biggest waves instead of trying to go over or through them, which is pretty useful if you don’t like sand up your nose or getting knocked flat or whirling underwater in a circle with a few thousand pounds of water pounding your body against the rocks and sand.

Plus there’s a way to gauge a wave as it forms, you can see it on the horizon like a whale coming to surface except it’s the entire line of swells, rising, rising, rising, and you can catch one, speeding down its face with the salt flying in your eyes and the wind and water rushing, crushing, with a sound that’s a roar of pleasure or maybe that was just me shouting into the fabulous fury.

Mama, obsessed with the beach and the water and the waves, taught me the protocol of who got the wave, how it was rude to cut somebody off if their ride started higher and sooner. You can’t just shoot in front of them and spoil their right to a ride. She sort of forgot to teach the other girly things of life beyond the Labor Day white-shoe/black-shoe rule.

I fled to college far away from the ocean to a citified campus in St. Louis where people treated me like quite the star with my long, straight, sun-blonde hair and awesome tan and no make-up ever, a genuine Miss California, 2002, except that I didn’t know the customs of the area, like asking for a sody instead of Pepsi.

In the September twilight, I stood looking at my black flip flops with the two guys speaking Farsi or Hindu or one of the ‘Stan languages outside the elevator in the empty classroom building, and I thought maybe I should take the stairs, but I remembered about being polite. They had gotten there first, they pushed the elevator button first, and they got in first. I didn’t take the stairs. I wouldn’t treat them as if I were some racist xenophobe as so many others did in the aftermath of 9/11.

And the men kept talking in the elevator over my head because they were taller than me, which isn’t hard to be. They quit talking when they moved closer; I stepped forward because there was no way giving myself more space could be rude. I smelled the citrus pomade from their black hair and something minty, probably Tic Tacs, and one put his hand against my back and one put his hand against my breast and I thought maybe I should scream but that might be dangerously rude too.

So I rode the wave. I tried to think about all the waves I’d chosen and all the waves I’d missed when someone cut me off, not paying attention to the rules. I thought about the rules Mama forgot to teach me about survival on land, not water. Evidently, there are quite a few.