Surfing

Surfing August 25, 2008
We are coastal people. We live on a beach just south of Charleston, South Carolina. We eat shrimp, crab, and grits morning, noon, and night. We tote coolers to the beach loaded with bottled water, Kool-aid, and apples in the daytime. In the night, we sit around illegal campfires with friends drinking beer, reminiscing bygone days of shagging and high school pranks. On some of those evenings we just sit and listen to the waves moving in and out. Good company, peaceful world, summer and winter.

Our waves are small, not like those seen on TV at those beach competitions. We don’t have the large violent, loud crashing waves conducive to sports or thrill-seekers. Our waves are small, perfect for young children and weary adults. While the daytime brings playful laughter and busy families onto the beach and drowns out the noise of the waves, the nighttime is different. The nighttime is quiet and all that can be heard is the sound of the waves.

Our waves come in with small rushing, tumbling noises, end, over end, over end. You can feel something coming toward you like a gentle push backwards. Then you hear a little crash as the wave is played out, grips at the sand and tries to hold on. The water flows back out to the ocean and you, the beachcomber, feels the gentle sucking pull of that wave back out to sea. I often sit on the beach at night just to have the day’s problems solved by this washing of my soul. We do have big waves once in a while; they come with the hurricanes. These waves are big and powerful, ripping sand right off the beach. Dangerous. It is then that the locals turn out with their surfboards to challenge Mother Nature. These waves don’t happen often but we all have boards.

Life is good. We give our address as “On the Beach, South Carolina”. We treat our house as a temporary shelter; since the beach is more home than the house. Our house is a place where we sleep and store our clothes. Otherwise it is just a series of laundry lines and porch railings that are decorated with beach towels and bathing suits. Our lawns are decorated with plastic buckets, shovels, and sand castle molds. There are sand shoes, boat shoes, plastic boots, bathing suits, visors, reed mats, plastic fishing poles and a Wal-mart four-foot pool in the back yard with a layer of sand covering the bottom. The garage is just an extension of the yard except we keep bigger stuff in there like boogie boards, skis, surfboards, fishing poles, shrimpin’ baskets, waders and two boats - one for the ocean, and one for trolling creeks.

Our life and that of our children is so intertwined with the ocean that we were surprised when our daughter decided to go to school in Chicago. Her mind was made up and the school had accepted her long before she told us. Her father and I had four weeks notice that she was leaving, hardly any time to think or to talk her out of it. She is twenty-two, and fully an adult. After graduating high school, she chose to get an undergraduate degree from our local college having lived with us instead of in the dorm. It was a good arrangement – for us and for her. Many of her friends came and stayed with us, adding to the commotion in the house and the excitement of the beach. During her college years, three hurricanes skirted our coast. She and her friends got good on their surfboards. They practiced on the little waves in the days prior to the storm, then rode the gradually increasing hurricane waves for twelve hours, sought refuge in the house for the peak of the storm, then, went back out to the ocean until the waves petered out. In preparation for those hurricanes, my job had been to stock the frig; however those were some starving college surfers. After the storm, I was re-stocking the frig as soon as the grocery store opened back up. Thank goodness, we were never directly hit by the storms, so those times ended up being good times and good memories.

Our daughter was moving to Chicago. We couldn’t talk her out of it, wouldn’t have tried anyway, so we just worried about the little stuff. We worried about how our daughter would survive way out there in the “Great Plains” region - the Midwest. There are no oceans, beaches, or waves. Chicago is on Lake Michigan, and it’s very placid. Chicago’s cooler in the summertime and absolutely freezing in the winter. Our neighbors are from south of Chicago; they moved to South Carolina to get away from the cold. They told us about the wind off the lake and how no winter coat could stop the cold. They told us to have our daughter stock up on sweatshirts, long johns, thick socks, boots with good traction, scarves, gloves, ear-muffs, and hats: None of which are familiar to us here on our beautiful coast. I remember one time when she was in kindergarten and I didn’t even double shirt her for cool days until January. Our neighbors told us about frost bite, occasional brown-outs, and frozen transportation systems. But what got us was the mention of frozen nose hairs and how quickly that could occur to a person standing in a strong blast off the lake. I had nightmares of breathing through icicles. She was going to Chicago, a frozen tundra compared to our beautiful beach. She was leaving everything she knew. We tried to be supportive, but all I could see was disaster for both of us.

She packed everything. She said this was more than a move to another college; it was probably going to be her official move away from home. She’d be gone for three years and if things went well she’d probably stay in Chicago and work afterwards. The college had a good placement rate and there were lots of big law firms in the city. So we packed up her bed, desk, and lamps. I re-covered the old loveseat sofa she had studied on while here at school. She would probably need it to study on up there. Dishes went, as did the coffee pot. Things went that we had shared for twenty-two years. It was almost unbearable. I walked away from the packing many times. I went to the garage on those occasions to cry. All that garage stuff was there – boards, boats, buckets.

The packing was finished. She looked around for anything else, but she had got it all. The last act of packing was to sit on her suitcase and zip it up. The truck was in the driveway, mostly loaded. She was going to drive herself to Chicago in one of those rental trucks. I followed her down the stairs and through the garage. She set the suitcase in the last remaining open space in the back of the truck. At the very top of the truck, on top of piles, lay her surfboard.

“Daughter,” I chuckled, “there are no waves where you’re going,” pointing up at the board.

She pulled the rolling door down and locked it. “I know,” she said.

“Then what are you going to do with it?” I asked.

“There’s skiing up there.” She pulled her phone out of her purse. “Well…” She said like an announcement for the good-byes to start. I wasn’t finished.

“Wait. Skiing?”

“Yeah. Those people up there ain’t seen nothing yet till they see me surfing down the mountain.”

My baby:)