We quickly established a rhythm, with me straddling the board facing the shore and him sitting parallel to me, facing out to the ocean. As the waves would rise from the surface, he’d tell me when to lie down and paddle, spinning his board around and paddling alongside and just a little behind me. As the water lifted the tail of my board, he’d give me a small shove and yell for me to stand up. Surprisingly, it was going relatively well, despite the low-level ache in my head and occasional roiling of my gut. I was getting to my feet and every so often coasting for a good three or four seconds—an eternity, it seemed, in comparison to my first trip out here.
It was thrilling and fun, and though I was still too new to it all to focus on much beyond my feet and the board, I was loving the feeling of gliding over the ocean surface, propelled by that magic motor from the deep, and I didn’t want it to stop. I could see the nose of the board cutting a path through the gray peaks ridged in white, rising and tipping over and swishing around me.
Eagerly I thought, Maybe I’m starting to get the hang of this. I wondered if I would soon be able to rent a board back in Rockaway and go out to practice by myself.
I asked John if I might be ready for such a step. “Not yet,” he said. “You can’t paddle fast enough to catch waves on your own.”
A sobering assessment, but true. Even with him helping, my energy was flagging, my arms starting to feel like putty. I got up on the next wave and rode it until it broke, the sudden pulse of the water tossing me off. I came up and got a hold of the board to realize that John had hung back and caught the next wave: he was sliding toward me and then beyond, stepping lightly and gracefully up and down the length of the board, somehow steering it this way and that through the foam washing over the rocks. He was like some sort of aquatic twinkle-toes. I had no idea what he was up to, but I wanted to be able to move like that, too.
“Come on, let’s get back out there,” he said as he came back toward me, where I was standing hunched over my board, waiting for the sting of overuse to stop spreading through my shoulders as I struggled to stay upright in the whitewater.
“I need to rest for a minute.”
A wave broke just in front of us, and the onslaught of its churn almost swept me off my feet.
“Okay, we can hang out here,” he said sharply, water streaming from his head, “but we’re just going to keep getting pounded. You can rest out there.”
Irritated, I considered turning around and just heading to the beach, but something shifted for me, just as it had after I’d spotted the yellow house in June. Don’t quit just because it’s hard. If you want this, you’re going to have to keep trying.
Determined to ignore my throbbing trapezius muscles, I got back on the board and paddled out, coughing up the saltwater draining from my sinuses into my throat as I made it back to where we’d been sitting. I was still struggling to sit upright in the unstable conditions, but I managed to regain my breath and a wisp of composure while John surfed a few waves. After a while I told him I was ready to try again, but probably only a few more times. He got me into a breaker, but I could stay up for only a moment. Disappointed, I thought I should try for one last wave before ending the session.
We waited for what seemed like an eternity. Finally a suitable wave gathered behind me. I paddled, he pushed, and I jumped to my feet. Riding along, I managed to stay up even as the wave broke and to coast practically all the way to the shore. As I got close to the beach, I remembered John’s warning not to ride all the way in, to avoid snagging the fin or scraping the board on the rocks lining the shallows. I looked down. It wasn’t too rocky yet, and the board was moving so slowly that it seemed I could just step right off. But suddenly something wiggled beneath me. I lost my balance and, trying to stay upright, quickly pivoted my body seaward. My feet, however, stayed planted, as if they were glued to the board. I felt torque and then a mild pop in my left knee that instantly became a ferocious, radiating pain as I tumbled awkwardly, lurching and spinning until I found myself, inexplicably, sitting astride the board facing out into the ocean, pantomiming a howl, and grasping my throbbing joint.
John barreled toward me from outside, paddling on his knees, yelling, “Are you okay?”
“Not yet,” I said, straining to get the words out through the bilious ache. “I think I did something to my knee.”
“Can you walk?”
“I think so. But I don’t know why it’s getting worse.”
I stood up, and he took the board and deftly carried both his and mine to the shore as I hobbled onto the sand. I could indeed walk, but not for long and not at all well.
“I’ll take you back to the house and you can get out of the wetsuit,” he said, propping the boards back up against the dune. “Do you need help?”
“I think I’m okay,” I said through gritted teeth, unwilling to surrender to the tiny jackhammers chiseling away somewhere deep in the joint, and wholly unprepared to handle physical contact with John. If I hopped on the good leg for a few paces and then just barely touched down with the bad one, I was finding, I had a shot at making it to the car without passing out.
I hopped and limped slowly through the dirt parking lot, passing a lush thicket edging the path, as John occasionally stopped to wait for me.
“You sure you’re all right?” he asked.
“No, but I will be,” I said, one of my stock, optimistic responses to injury. And I believed it, that I would be all right, even as I stood in John’s grandmother’s yard and peeled off the heavy, wet rubber to reveal a rapidly swelling knee that would no longer bend without agony. I wrapped a towel around myself and climbed into the car, using my hands to gently fold my double-sized leg into position, grateful that I wouldn’t need to move it to work the pedals. I opened the sunroof and wheeled back down the road, worry beginning to creep in. I hope I haven’t done any real damage.
I brushed it off, choosing to bask in the endorphin glow of the waves I’d ridden and focus on figuring out how to make my body more surf-ready. It wasn’t just that I couldn’t paddle fast enough. I couldn’t do anything well enough in this sport that I’d stubbornly latched on to with a conviction born of nothing but conviction. The mind was more than willing, but the flesh—oh, the flesh was going to need a lot of work.
4
In the Shaping Bay
October 2010–May 2011
It was late October and I was lying on a padded table in one of the many small beige treatment rooms of a physical therapy clinic near Columbus Circle in midtown Manhattan while a young woman wearing a white polo shirt and khakis jiggled my kneecap and pressed gently around it with her fingertips. The pop I’d felt as my knee twisted at my last surf lesson in Montauk turned out to be a sprain of the medial collateral ligament, a fibrous rope that connects the bottom of the thighbone to the top of the shinbone and plays a major role in stabilizing the knee. It’s a common enough injury, especially in contact sports, and is usually the result of a blow or a sharp twist that overstretches or even begins to tear the connective bands. The doctor wasn’t overly concerned, but the ligament still hadn’t healed after four boring weeks of using a cane, diligent RICE—rest, ice, compression, elevation—and gentle exer-cises like lying on my back and repeatedly flexing my knee against the floor, so he’d finally sent me to PT.