I suppose I should have known there could be surfing there. If you imagine the entirety of Long Island as a giant fish, with Brooklyn and Queens as the head swooping underneath Manhattan and the Bronx toward Staten Island and New Jersey to the southwest, its body and tail would stretch one hundred miles northeast into the Atlantic. Montauk would sit at the southeastern tip of its tail, and the Rockaway Peninsula would form the bottom of its jaw, with Jamaica Bay filling its open mouth. The underside of that jawbone would rest against the ocean, unprotected from the Atlantic’s might—the last barrier between the city and the sea.
Swinging east toward the enormous Far Rockaway housing developments that appeared in the distance, the train trundled past the brick apartments of a public housing complex and the small-scale, new-urbanist dwellings of Arverne by the Sea, a sprawling urban renewal project that was transforming vacant lots between the train trestle and the ocean into something reminiscent of The Truman Show. At last we screeched to a stop at Beach Sixty-Seventh Street, where I disembarked, my butt, hips, and legs stiff from sitting so long. I gingerly descended to the damp, deserted street and made my way past traffic lights hooded in tattered black plastic to a patchwork of white- and beige-sided houses with aqua- and celery-colored doors and huge piles of dirt that loomed behind blue plywood construction barriers. At last I came to a narrow path of sand that led between wind-whipped juniper bushes up and over a hill to the beach.
“Hey, howya doin’?” a dark-haired man in a black wetsuit called out as he hustled up the dune and approached me. “Are you Diane?”
It was Frank. He was neither young nor tremendously athletic-looking, but he was enthusiastic, with an easy smile, thinning salt-and-pepper hair, and kind hazel eyes. He directed me up to the boardwalk and down to the beach, where I found the other student who had made it out that day, a slim young woman with dirty-blond hair, and an instructor named Kevin, a wiry, fair-skinned, fair-haired fellow with a no-nonsense manner.
The summer season had already ended and there were no concessions or bathrooms, so after selecting our gear from a tangle of wetsuits, booties, and gloves on the sand, my fellow student and I suited up on the beach. She pulled her own nimble-looking, off-white board out of a protective sleeve and headed into the water with Frank while I stayed back with Kevin, going through a brief warm-up, a few basics of water and board safety, and the pop-up. He said he’d be pushing me into the waves, but he wanted me to paddle to help get going.
We walked over to the board, which lay in the sand like a toppled megalith. Eleven feet long, it was at least two feet wide, maybe four inches thick at the center, and covered in a dense chartreuse-colored sponge soft enough to keep me from hurting myself—or anyone else who might get near me. Most surfing injuries result from haphazard contact with a board or fin, my instructors told me—someone else’s or your own. Surfboards, generally fashioned from a Styrofoam-type material that’s cut and planed and sanded before being wrapped in tough layers of fiberglass cloth and resin, are engineered to be lightweight but hard, and need surprisingly little force to cause a whole lot of hurt.
But this was a beginner board, no doubt about it, with each of its elements aimed at staying safe and making it easier to catch waves and remain steady in them. The overall size—known as volume in surf-speak—would help it float, meaning it would take less paddle effort to get it moving than a shorter, narrower, thinner board. The fat, smooth curve of the side edges, called rails, along with the rounded tail and nose, would make it easier to keep the beast traveling along a line, especially given the soft, “mushy” waves that Rockaway was known for. All of that surface area in the water, though, would make it harder to execute sharp turns and would create drag as it moved, slowing it down—which wouldn’t be so bad for someone just starting out. Except for being a surfboard with fins and a leash, it had practically nothing to do with the thin, curvy shortboards professionals tend to use, their sharper rails, more extreme slopes, elaborate fin setups, and pointier ends all meant to help build speed and allow for more radical maneuvers on bigger, faster waves that rise at steep angles or form hollow curls.
I had been on a long soft-top in Montauk, too, but this thing seemed even more hulking—the Big Green Monster, I’d already named it. I leaned over to grab it, but its sheer size and weight daunted me, and it slipped from my hands to land back in the sand with a thud. “Let me get that for you,” Kevin said, smiling and smoothly hoisting it under one arm like a light jacket. “It takes some getting used to.”
We made our way into the gray-brown water, which was choppy but not rough and seemed lacking in much of what had been scary in Montauk. Rock jetties sectioned the ocean along that stretch, but the bottom was almost entirely sand. We walked out, with Kevin guiding the board, showing me how to hold it near the nose and punch it through the waves as they crested.
We were about waist-deep when he turned the board toward the shore and told me to climb on. Again I struggled to haul myself into the proper position. Kevin said that instead of grabbing the rails and trying to pull myself across, I should put my hands flat on the top of the board, called the deck, and push up through my arms and chest to create the room and momentum to launch myself on top. I looked at him, uncomprehending.
“Here, I’ll show you,” he said, demonstrating what he meant with feline ease. “It keeps the board a lot more stable that way.” Then I tried. I understood exactly what he’d done, but, like seemingly everything else in surfing, I just didn’t have the strength or coordination to pull it off.
After a couple of tries I managed to belly-flop onto the board, like a flounder. Kevin stood in front of me, holding the nose, pale-blue eyes scanning the horizon. “Okay, here it comes,” he said, stepping around the side of the board and guiding it forward. “Start your paddle, please.”
I began to stroke, windmilling my arms through the water, but it felt like I was at a standstill. “Keep paddling,” he said. Finally the board started to slide forward and sharply accelerated. “Up-up-up-up-up-up-up!” he shouted.
I stopped stroking, pushed up from the board, and for just a second stood, still looking down at my feet on the chartreuse deck, gray water swirling around me as I defied the physics of my normal life and recaptured the childhood feeling of wheeeeee that was once as accessible as a playground slide. And then I splashed into that water as the board continued to hurtle toward the shore. But just as in Montauk, that tiny moment was exhilarating. I could barely remember ever feeling that free.
We went on for a few more waves, and then Kevin decided to move us out a little deeper, closer to where the other student sat on her board with Frank near the end of the jetty, where the waves were cresting and beginning to roll across the section before breaking. A wave started to rise behind her. She turned toward the shore, fell flat on the board, and paddled furiously. I could see the wave lifting the tail of her board as Frank leaned in over her, screaming, “Paddle harder! Give it all you got!”
If she caught it, I realized, we would be in her path, but Kevin didn’t seem concerned. “Do we need to get out of the way?” I asked.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “She’s not going anywhere.”
She wasn’t, it turned out—How did he know that?—but neither was I. I was getting to my feet, but I could stay there for only a second or two before tumbling off the board. It wasn’t at all scary or painful, but I was beginning to feel frustrated and wondered if I would ever manage to get a longer ride. I was running out of stamina, too, with my arms and shoulders aching from my efforts. We took a break, heading back to the beach so I could rest and have some water. I didn’t have too many more attempts in me, I told Kevin, so he suggested I stop trying to paddle and just concentrate on getting into a better standing position.