An Almost-Lethal Dose

Like all Americans, surfers on the East Coast watched in horror last week as Hurricane Harvey decimated Texas. Unlike most Americans, however, we also had our eyes on another storm the National Hurricane Center was monitoring.

It was an area of thunderstorms and low pressure over the Florida peninsula, and though it was predicted to become a hurricane after the air mass moved into the Atlantic, the storm never quite got there. It did, however, join with a front moving off the coast and together, the storm blew up into an unnamed extra-tropical storm tracking along the Gulf Stream with hurricane-strength winds. And those winds delivered a couple of days of epic surfer here on the Right Coast.

I spent Wednesday, Aug. 30, tracking the storm and marine reports, and keeping an eye on my local break here in northern New England. Between visits to the beach, I’d tune in webcams from eastern Long Island, N.Y. Seething with envy, I saw surfers enjoying beautiful, overhead waves caressed by light offshore breezes. That evening, a friend from New Jersey said he’d surfed Sandy Hook and that it was “just like J-Bay. Not kidding.”

Friday’s waves were a far cry from Thursday, but I had fun with longboard and a couple of GoPro cameras…

Late in the day, I took my SUP out for a brief paddle in choppy conditions with an underlying swell that was just filtering into the area. It wasn’t much but you could see things were building. And build they did, overnight and into Thursday.

I awoke to solid swell and a deep high tide in the early morning. The tide meant my local break was simply waves crashing on dry sand so I had to wait a bit until the water level dropped a bit and the break moved offshore. It did so around 10 a.m. and I paddled out alone. Yes, alone: not one other person in the water.

A friend and one of the elder statesmen of the local surf scene had a bum shoulder and couldn’t paddle out, but he watched as I timed my paddle out perfectly and reached the lineup with dry hair. After just a few minutes, I turned and caught a nice wave: a good, big drop with a couple of lip moves and I quickly returned to the beach to drop off the sunglasses I’d been wearing to cut the morning glare. When I handed them to Jim and asked him to drop them off at my house, he was giddy. “That wave…it was easy one-and-a-half times overhead!” I’d have called it head high to maybe a little overhead, but hey, I’ll take Jim’s assessment. Regardless of size, it was fun and the sets were still building.

I paddled back out, still alone, and enjoyed several waves that were big and clean. The northwest wind was strong but not too bad, so the surface of the water stayed pretty smooth, making for good riding.

And then, about an hour and a half into my session, came The Wave.

It was a set wave, bigger than any I’d seen or caught earlier. I was in just the right spot — a rare event at this break which is infamous for its fierce currents that drag surfers all over the place — and caught it easily. Up I jumped and off I rode, sliding to the bottom of a wave that was easily twice my height. Nice bottom turn…off the lip…another bottom turn…cutback…

…it was during the cutback that I vividly recall thinking to myself, “This might be the biggest, cleanest wave I’ve ever had here — and I’ve been surfing this break since I was a teenager.” Such thinking in the middle of action is never a good sign — I always say that hockey is the most Zen thing I do precisely because there’s no thought whatsoever once my blades hit the ice — and that omen was fulfilled a few seconds later when the wave closed out on me as I was bottom turning again. As I made the turn, I caught a glimpse of the small groyne on the beach and began to panic a bit as I  realized just how close to the rocks I was.

The wave tumbled me underwater and I covered my head with my arms, scared shitless that the lip was going to suck me over the falls and onto the rocks. I waited for what seemed like a minute (but was really only a few seconds, I’m sure) for the imminent back-breaking, head-crushing blow but it never came, and as soon as I popped up to the surface I began scraping for the horizon, out away from the shore and the rocks, and under two more waves in the set.

Obviously, since I’m writing this, those waves let me go. In the relative calm after the set, I gathered my board and began paddling in. The current, still increasing, pushed me north — farther north than it had ever pushed me in past sessions — and it took several minutes before I reached the sand. A few minutes of breathing on the beach restored my calm, during which a woman who was on the beach with a bunch of friends and a gaggle of kids running around, came up to me and said, “It looks dangerous out here.” I told her it was, and that she should keep an eye on the kids because the currents were so fierce.

I went back out for more in the afternoon but the swell had already dropped a bit and the wind had picked up, raking the waves with a chop that made riding them herky-jerky. Others were out now so there was (presumed) safety in numbers, but the conditions, while bigger than usual, were benign enough that nonchalance was an option.

By the next morning, the swell was pretty much gone. I goofed off with a longboard in the tiny, choppy conditions, playing with a couple of GoPro cameras, but it was pretty silly, to be honest.

But still, lingering in the back of my brain, was the memory of that wave — equal parts exhilaration and the feeling that I’d dodged a bullet. Since then, I’m back to watching the tropics for the next dose of surf. Here comes Irma…

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It’s a Young Man’s Game…Or Is It?

A bunch of different threads in this post today, the result of a bunch of different threads “runnin’ around the ol’ Duder’s head”  the past few weeks. So bear with me while I talk through things out loud. Hey, it’s cheaper than therapy, although a lot less effective, I’ll grant you (and probably not very interesting to you).

So, a month ago I wrote about how I’d thought about spending the summer when I was 26 at the surf break known as the Mexican Pipeline. I finally made it there this year, in March, when I turned 51, and I wasn’t ashamed to say that, upon my arrival, the waves were intimidating.

Puerto Escondido definitely intrigues me as a potential long-term destination. (I have every expectation that if I wind up dying of old age it will be in a foreign country. After seeing the way my father, a World War II veteran, was mistreated by this country’s health system, what can a selfish deadbeat like me expect as his body starts to wind down? But that’s a topic for a separate post.) But when I thought about spending significant time in a surf-focused life, I wondered if that really made any sense to an aging (as are we all) middle-aged man.

Puerto Escondido is a destination for young surfers from all over the world, and there’s a reason that particular demographic overruns the town during peak season. It takes strength and fitness just to step into the ring at a serious wave. And while I still go to the gym and play hockey and lead a generally fitness-focused lifestyle, well, there’s a reason I play in the over-50 hockey tournaments now. Can I still handle a wave like Puerto? Yes. But it’s exhausting. And potentially dangerous. And my recharge capabilities aren’t what they once were. Those are just facts.

So when I look at potential paths I might take — and I do that a lot as this year in which the generations of my family changed hands winds down — I question whether such a pursuit is an appropriate core focus of my life. In fact, I question WHAT should be the focus of my life to come.

And that’s an important question because in just a few months my father will have been gone for a year, at which point (or shortly thereafter) my role as executor, trustee and caretaker of the family’s assets and physical legacy will come to a close. And I have some decisions to make.

Do my brother and I keep our family’s house (our sister has no interest in keeping her share)? Does that mean I remain living there? If so, what do I do for a living around here? If not, do we rent out the house? Or do we sell? If we rent or sell, where should I go and what should I do? And if we keep the house, how do my brother and I come to terms about what we should do about various aspects of the house’s management and upkeep (and who should pay for them)?

Questions of career, location, home, legacy — questions that have built up over the close-to-a-hundred years of my parents’ lives and the lives of the children they produced, including me — are about to require an answer. And as those of you who know me well can attest, I have a wide range of interests and dreams pulling me in an even wider range of directions.

The security of a “straight” job back in Corporate America has its appeals but in my field those options are largely out west. And even if they’re in around here, among the reasons I didn’t opt for a commuting-into-Boston career when I got out of college is the fact it’s a hellacious, dangerous, expensive and exhausting commute from Plum Island. And it still is. But shouldn’t I be maximizing my income (and savings) at this point in my life in an attempt to set up my so-called “golden years”?

Or: What about carving out some sort of niche, working-for-myself career? Can I parlay my skills (cough, cough) and experience into something that lets me work from, say, the office on the third floor of the house at Plum Island? Travel — to Boston, New York and beyond — is easy enough. My mother always implored me to be my own boss (as she was), but I’ve yet to make that happen. Maybe I can create enough of a career yet stay at home — and keep that home in the family. But can I even create that career now, at this age?

Speaking of which: underlying all of these internal (now external) debates is the aforementioned fact that I recently turned 51. I’ve already experienced light doses of ageism and I can only expect them to increase, right? Is Corporate America or building one’s own career every bit a young man’s game as living for surf in a grubby apartment in Mexico?

Then there’s the age-old dream — and those of you who’ve known me for any length of time have heard me talk about this since I was a teenager — of buying a sailboat and taking off. I came close back in the ‘90s (Mom, in her infinite wisdom, refused to help me out financially then, for which I remain thankful). I came close in 2011 (which, given what happened to Mom and Dad in 2012 and 2013, I’m glad fell through). And when I returned to New England last spring I planned on two things: one, helping Dad; and two, buying a crappy, old boat and fixing it up to head south in November. That plan went with Dad in July, but there’s no reason the plan can’t be resurrected this year.

I follow the journals of friends who are living a life of early retirement. I follow those who continue to work but live on the road. I monitor the experiences of those courageous souls who never bought into the system in the first place. Hell, I even adore the fictional character Travis McGee and his plan for “taking retirement in installments.” So the pull of that dream I’ve had since I was a boy remains strong. And this might be the time to make it happen. Selling the house would certainly generate enough cash to go. Keeping the house and renting it out would generate at least some income on which to live. Hell, there might even still be enough money left in my savings to go as I’d planned to last year (though I’ve been burning through a lot of it this year as I’ve been living at the island and chipping away at what’s needed doing), but would managing that be more trouble than it’s worth?

No matter what I wind up doing, I still need some sort of purpose in life though, don’t I? Elon Musk raised the question of a universal basic income as a response to the rise in workplace automation, but questioned what, if anything, such “free” income could do for people in terms of a reason to live. As I’ve been mostly idle for the past year, I’ve come to realize that a focus, a calling, a purpose is a good thing. It’s a requirement, actually. Elon’s right.

Which brings me back around to today’s original question: What to do when those things that might function as a focus in my life are largely geared toward those (much) younger than me? Do I rage against the dying of the light? Or take up a serious golf habit?

These are the things I ponder of late. A lot.

Navel Gazing, New England, Ocean Fun, Personal, Travel, , , , , ,

A Tale of Two Surfs

This (from a few years ago) or…

It was the best of sessions, it was the worst of sessions, it was the warmest of water, it was the coldest of seas, it was the week of serenity, it was a day of mental turmoil — in short, the two periods could be received in the degree of comparison only.

Okay, so, maybe I’m pushing the imagery a wee bit. But allow me to highlight the contrast in the six days between Wednesday, March 15, and Thursday, March 9, if you will.

On March 15, in the wake of a just-departed nor’easter that delivered slushy snow and an official wind gust of 77 mph to Plum Island (I measured a gust of 61.9 mph on my handheld anemometer on the beach before the peak winds hit), I paddled into the surf in nearby New Hampshire. Fierce offshore winds made it challenging if not impossible to catch any waves. The wind chilled my face — the only part of my body exposed — and the spray made it difficult to even see. And despite the fact that I run pretty warm and had never really been cold when surfing this winter, my toes and fingers were numb before I’d gotten halfway to the waves. Speaking of the water temperature: 39 or 40 degrees Fahrenheit, tops. Air temp in the teens; and with those westerly winds, take a guess at the wind-chill factor. Sub-zero, for sure.

…this? That’s what I thought.

Six days earlier, I was wearing shorts as I paddled into the 81-degree Pacific Ocean, where light morning offshores caressed rising groundswell (from a storm thousands of miles distant in the far South Pacific) into waves that threw out in an arc enabling even me — a tall, hulking, klutzy surfer — to pull in and savor the feeling of being in the ocean’s warm embrace for an all-too-brief but still life-altering moment.

So yeah, I whined to myself a bit as I sat in the frigid waters of New Hampshire fighting to catch at least a semi-decent wave. Sue me.

All kidding aside, the contrasts created psychological challenges well beyond excessive internal dialogue. The difference in my attitude as a result of the toe- and finger-numbing lack of water temperature and the brain-numbing lack of wave quality was disappointing to me. At the point in New Hampshire, I waited where the lines of waves wrapped and peeled along the point itself. Before they did that wrap, those same swells exploded on the reef at the tip of the point itself. And though the waves were (I believe) rideable, the consequences of the cold and the chop if you fell were enough that I opted to stay put at the shoulder. A week earlier in Mexico, after working up to the main break in Puerto Escondido, I took off on waves where the likelihood of making it was way less than 25 percent.

Did I wish I was still in Mexico? You bet I did. My courage, it seemed, had frozen along with the precipitation still piled on the roadways. And that was a bummer. To me, anyway.

On top of that, it turned out that the New Hampshire town I was in had declared a snow emergency and all street parking was banned. I got back to my car — where I stripped and changed out of my frigid wetsuit in those arctic wind blasts — to find a parking ticket on my windshield. Fuck! Viva Mexico!

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