The Best American Sports Writing 2014(119)
In the summer, things picked up. I took a plastic lawn chair out to the parking lot and moved it throughout the day so I was always in the sun. Being inside, ready to greet customers, was not a requirement. I could just chase after them at the last minute. People would drive in from San Francisco to take surf lessons—when I started, with one of the two owners, but after a few years it seemed like every boy I knew was giving lessons. Silicon Valley companies were sending their employees to us on weekends for expensed team-building exercises. These were the people who went surfing once and dropped $1,500 the following weekend on all the equipment. It was understood that we were not to make fun of them. For the renters, I took credit card deposits, selected foam boards and wetsuits, and gave directions to the beach. A few hours later, they’d return, shivering, starving, caked in sand, either humiliated or ecstatic. The chief perk of the job was the key to the shop, which meant it never mattered if I forgot my own wetsuit at home on my way to the beach. Rather than drive the five minutes back up the hill to retrieve it, I could just grab a rental suit instead.
I haven’t been on a surfboard in years, and until coming out here I had forgotten that I know something about it. I know that certain numbers—degrees of water temperature, knots of wind speed, seconds of swell interval—are, for surfers, indicators of happiness. I know what the horizon looks like when a set of waves is coming in and to expect a terrible ice cream headache after a wipeout. I know what a surfer’s truck smells like (mildewed neoprene and coconut wax), and that there is no greater feeling than being cold and then peeing in your wetsuit.
The first heat ends a little after 9:30 A.M., and I only have a half-hour to get down to Dock H, where I’m supposed to go out on a boat that will get as close as it can to the break. I eat two Clif Bars and half-run down the hill to where about 25 other passengers are boarding the El Dorado. They include one extremely intoxicated couple, multiple people in those slip-on checkered Vans bassists in ska bands wear, and two French children who become ill within minutes and retreat below deck, where they remain for the next four hours.
As we motor out of the harbor, the wake created by the boats ahead of us—Rip Tide, New Seeker, Pale Horse, Lovely Martha—is enough to pitch us substantially and often. Jellyfish float by, and some forlorn strands of kelp. When the water splashes against the bow, a feathery spray shoots up and produces a very brief rainbow. We pass some outcropping rocks: huge, dark brown, like half-submerged dinosaurs. They’re the kind of rocks that surfers always describe as “spooky.”
The white, fuzzy patch of sea that the surfers take off from is coming into focus. For now, they just sit there, saddling their boards, maybe even talking to one another. They’re eyeing the horizon, looking for the next surf-worthy waves. When a set comes, the surfers will make their way to a location that to a viewer will seem mysteriously precise but to them intuitively obvious. Then they will paddle with all their might.
The San Mateo County sheriff has a boat out here, and so do the Coast Guard and the local harbor patrol. There are guys on paddleboards and motorized rubber rafts and guys zooming around on Jet Skis, here in case probability strikes and someone goes under. They occasionally stop, idle their engines, and pound a bag of trail mix. The water we’re floating in is a sort of blue-green that’s so pigmented it’s actually tacky, like the color of a cartoon girlfriend’s eyes. But just yards away it’s frothy and white—what surfers call “soup.”
Zach Wormhoudt, in green, is confidently zooming left on a wave when a mantle of foam suddenly obscures him. The wave he’s taken off on has collapsed, going from a dark, coherent form to chaos—messier and whiter and maybe even bigger than a cloud. We all gasp. About 20 seconds later, he bobs up like a rubber ball. I can’t make out his features from here, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he was grinning.
Peter Mel, known as “the Condor,” takes off behind two other competitors. Within moments, it’s obvious that the wave is his. He is the one who has chosen the perfect starting spot, the place from which he’ll acquire maximum stability and speed. He drops in at what must be an 87-degree angle. A slight frizz of white appears at the top of the wave and he cuts down—plummeting tens of feet in a matter of milliseconds. By the time he’s at the midway point of the wave, the white frizz has grown to an anarchic mess of bright foam. It looks like a horizontal avalanche, and Mel, a man escaping it.
Mel remains a few feet in front of the white for an improbably long time. He traverses the wave vertically, maneuvering up the face and back down again, over and over again, crouching down, holding the rail of his board, sometimes grazing the wave lightly with his right hand—it’s affectionate, almost romantic, but also possibly a little hostile. Surfers have complicated relations with the waves they ride, somehow both adversarial and amorous.