I thought I knew what she meant. With my marriage over, I was still wrestling with the lingering feeling that I was waiting for my real life to start. I’d rented out the elegant townhouse I’d shared with my ex-husband, Eric, in Brooklyn and moved to a small apartment in a tenement on an unloved stretch of Bedford-Stuyvesant and, emerging from the slag heap of the divorce, was trying to sally forth on a path of my own, wherever it might lead. Maybe someday I’d again get to feel like that couple on the deck. Back in my twenties, when I started dating Eric—tall and broad-shouldered, with dazzling green eyes—we, too, couldn’t keep our hands off each other in public, and made out all over downtown Manhattan. But those days were long gone, and for the moment, getting used to being single for the first time in almost twenty years and not feeling miserable was enough.
I woke up the next morning in my room at the Beachcomber, a complex of shingled Sea Ranch–style efficiencies separated from the Atlantic by Old Montauk Highway. I felt good about how the reporting had gone: I’d covered all the bases I needed to and thought I had a firm handle on the character of the town and the Montauket’s place in it. But I felt a nagging itch as I made my usual morning brew of espresso with a splash of cream and filled a bowl with yogurt and granola. I hadn’t gotten the perspective of any surfers. I was a little nervous about what kind of reception I might get at the main surfing beach, given the reputation surfers have for territoriality and a kind of antiestablishment worldview, but I decided to head over anyway to a stretch of the coast called Ditch Plains before making the drive back to Brooklyn.
Shit! I thought as I sped along the sunbaked highway, seeing too late the small white pole marking the road to Ditch. That was it! Why do I always have to be this way? I was irritated with myself for yet again screwing up a straightforward trip. I had learned to drive late—at thirty—and some fifteen years later still couldn’t navigate very well on my own. I was always missing a turnoff or heading the wrong way and having to double back to get on the right path. Luckily, within a few minutes I came to another intersection, so I returned and wound down the street, buoyed by how pretty and familiar it seemed, like the back roads of Cape Cod, where I’d spent summers as a child. My parents, Depression-era strivers, hadn’t been well off, but my father, a midlevel executive at a small savings bank, had an uncle who lived in Hyannis, near the mouth of the Cape. My mother was a public school teacher, so as soon as classes let out she would whisk me and my older sister up there for the summer.
As I made my way toward Ditch, the weathered cottages and shingled houses that peeked from behind stands of scrubby pink or white rugosa roses reminded me of the ones we’d seen every day on our way to the beach. I rounded bend after bend with warm sunlight streaming through the trees onto my bare shoulders under the open sunroof until I finally saw the East Deck Motel, a collection of attached spartan rooms where I’d been told the surf spot was, and found a place to park.
It was my first visit ever to a surf beach, or break, and I had no idea what to expect. I walked back to the motel and through its parking lot to the dune above the beach, where a tan camper selling food stood at the entrance. Just beyond, a couple of people in wetsuits were sitting on a bench, with surfboards lying next to them.
When I finally made it to the sand, what I saw in the glittering indigo waters below stopped me cold. Surfers, dozens of them, were propelling themselves before mellow knee-high waves, hopping easily to their feet, and then rolling lazily along, skipping and cross-stepping up and down the length of their boards. One woman, her skintight black wetsuit shiny with water and her long dark hair glistening in the sun, looked like some sort of enchantress of the break as she moved toward the shore, incanting a spell as she waved her arms up and down and swung her hips to the same rhythm.
Dumbstruck, I felt as though I’d stumbled upon a secret tribe of magical creatures—fairies and nymphs frolicking in a hidden bay. I couldn’t believe this was surfing, a sport to which I’d never given much more than a glancing thought. Growing up, I figured you had to be insane to want to ride those heaving walls of water they showed on Wide World of Sports, the competitors’ bodies mere specks sliding down (and down and under) the giant turquoise seas. Then, too, the popular image of surf culture—those laid-back stoners and tattooed dudes—wasn’t so appealing to me. I’d grown up inside Manhattan’s pressure cooker of ambition and possibility and, as I traversed my young adulthood, preferred to blow off steam with a night at the disco rather than a day at the beach.
But far from the skyscraper-high monsters I’d long seen on TV, here were waves small and inviting, nudging their way slowly out of a sequined sea and ushering the riders along. I stood there for what must have been an hour, transfixed. My eyes would steal away from time to time to rest on the rainbow of surfboards, a few of which looked like something Frankie and Annette might have ridden in Beach Party, stretched across the dune; or on the guy strumming a guitar under a makeshift tent fashioned from driftwood logs and fluttering cloths; or on the packs of lithe young women in bikinis sunbathing amid a scattering of bonfire remains.
But my attention was repeatedly drawn back to the wizards of the waves. This is surfing? Then another, quieter voice rumbled up from deep inside: Maybe I could do that. I almost chuckled at the thought of myself, a once timid and not-so-athletic girl from Manhattan, surfing, but I could feel it taking hold.
A tingling in the skin across my cheekbones broke me out of my trance, signaling the beginnings of a sunburn. I’d stayed longer than I meant to, and I hadn’t even talked to anyone yet. But since I had a tight deadline, I figured I should skip interviewing the surfers and get going so I could beat the afternoon traffic back to my sweltering apartment in Brooklyn. As I walked through the parking lot and to the street, I noticed a yellow cottage with a handwritten FOR RENT sign in the window, which jumped out at me as if it were flashing red neon.
Kismet, I thought as I stared at it, my heart beginning to race and my brain suddenly feverish. I wondered what it was like inside, imagining myself walking over to the beach with coffee in the mornings, spending my days in the waves, boiling lobster at night. I’d visited Montauk only once before, years ago, when I had come out for a cold early-spring weekend with Eric to see the seals that had been returning to a rock outcropping near the lighthouse after a long absence. I fell for the place then—the dark-blue waters and comfortable, worn-around-the-edges aura felt familiar to me, more nautical and rusty, like Cape Cod, than the manicured Hamptons.
God, I’d love to spend time here, I thought. And then I walked on.
It’s probably too expensive, I told myself, or available when you aren’t.
What will you do out here all by yourself?
How will you learn to surf? You don’t have a board or a wetsuit and you don’t know anything about how to get them.
What if you spend all that money and then it rains?
I was almost to my car when I stopped and turned around, shutting out all those negative voices. How many times have I done this very thing, I wondered, talked myself out of trying something because it’s unfamiliar or scary or might push me outside the box where I’ve convinced myself I belong? Over the years at work I’d shied away from pursuing foreign correspondent postings, believing that I lacked the gumption needed to excel. In my social life, I’d avoided industry mixers and gallery openings and even cocktail parties where I might not know many people, telling myself that I was awkward and lousy at making small talk. But I was itching to break those habits, be different in the world, get over those insecurities—or at least stop letting them get in the way.