“Yeah, that place is a great addition to the neighborhood,” Bob said. “There’s nothing else like it around here.”
The couple’s young sons were hanging out inside, and Josh, who had been ferrying their sandals and clothing to a car parked in front of the house, cracked open a can of Bud and joined us.
“How are things going with the website?” I asked him. “You just launched, right?”
“Yeah, two weeks ago,” he said. “It’s a soft launch, so we’re not completely out there yet, but so far, so good. It’s a lot of work, but we’re getting a good response. You should come by the office sometime—I can show you the site and you can meet the team. There are five of us now,” he added, chuckling.
“I’d love to do that. But what brings you here—are you guys living here?”
“No,” Josh said. “We’re in Astoria, but we’re out here with the boys almost every weekend in the summer.”
Iva added, “They love the beach.”
“And what brought you out today?” Bob asked me.
“It’s so funny—I just wanted to get to the beach, but I couldn’t decide between here and Coney. Then I ran into Adrian Benepe at a press conference and he told me that Coney’s very crowded, so I came here.”
“Glad you did!” Bob said.
“Me, too,” I replied.
While I chatted with the three of them and watched the play of light on the ocean as the sun fell somewhere in the distance, I felt a distinct sense of comfort, as if I could just slip right into Bob’s world. Of course I could never live in a place this far from the city, from my office in midtown or my life, such as it was, in Brooklyn. But as I settled into the easy camaraderie and mellow hospitality of the group, I realized that I was finally in a place where I felt good, where the failures of my past no longer weighed so heavily.
* * *
About a month later the summer of 2010 was racing to its unofficial close—Labor Day—and my weeklong vacation at the yellow cottage in Montauk was at last under way. I’d been there three days already but hadn’t yet surfed. Instead I’d been having a lovely time catching up on reading, hiking along the cliffs and the point overlooking the bright-blue waters, and wandering about the town and the wharf with its old-school bait-and-tackle shops, lobster pounds, and mix of private motorboats and fleets of trawlers and long-liners for commercial fishing.
You wouldn’t have known it from the postcard-blue sky and uninterrupted sunlight, but it was hurricane season, the time of year most East Coast surfers live for, when the high winds from storms that originate near the edge of West Africa pump seemingly boundless energy into the seas. Near the beginning that energy creates enormous swaths of sloppy, churning waves, but as it moves through the water over thousands of miles, it arranges itself into smooth, regular lines known as swell. As the swell comes out of deep water and nears a coast, it refracts off the surface of a continental shelf and then runs into obstructions like sandbars and boulders and reefs, which, depending on their shape, configuration, and incline, cause the swell to rear up, or peak, and form the waves surfers seek to ride. Generally speaking, the bigger the storm, the bigger the swell, and the farther it travels without being interrupted before appearing near the shoreline, the bigger and stronger the wave.
Montauk sits about a two-hour drive east from Rockaway. Its location at the very tip of Long Island and its mainly south-facing beaches mean it is well exposed to pick up swell traveling toward it from a wide berth in the Atlantic Ocean, the path of which can be unblocked for thousands of miles. Its coast is lined with coves and bluffs and rocky outcroppings that modulate the way the waves break or shelter them from the wind, which in turn allows them to form the glossy wedges or sinuous tubes that make for quality rides. As a result, Montauk has among the best, most consistent waves on the eastern seaboard, especially in fall and winter. But at the beginning of my stay there, the ocean had been shuddering with the effects of Danielle, the first major hurricane of the season. Rough surf and riptides from the storm had led to two deaths and hundreds of rescues in Florida and Maryland, and even after tracking up the East Coast and out to sea it was still making the waves too big and powerful for a first-timer. With the clock ticking on my vacation, I was worrying that the whole trip was going to end up being a waste on the surfing front, some sort of karmic punishment for my hasty, emotional decision to spend money I shouldn’t have.
Then, late on Tuesday afternoon, I got a voicemail from Kristin at the surf school that my coworker Jim had recommended: the forecast looked good for the next day. If I was willing, she said almost apologetically, I could meet my instructor, Sean, on the beach in front of the parking lot at Ditch Plains at five in the afternoon for a whitewater lesson. I didn’t know what that meant exactly, but I was thrilled, and a little giddy. I was going to get to surf.
So the next afternoon, after some confusion about which parking lot Kristin had meant, I found Sean from CoreysWave Professional Surf Instruction waiting in the sun on a thin spit of dark-yellow sand running between the dune and the rocks lining the water’s edge. He looked to be in his twenties, a stocky guy with thick, sun-streaked brown hair that hung to his chin and a cutoff wetsuit the color of split pea soup.
“Hey,” he said, handing me a plum-colored suit. “Have you ever surfed before?”
“Not at all,” I told him. “And I’ve never done any kind of board or wave sport in my life.”
“Okay,” he said, flinging his hair to the side. “We’ll be on the beach for a half hour or so, going over the pop-up, and then basically I’m going to be pushing you into waves the rest of the time.”
“Okay,” I said, letting the unfamiliar lingo wash over me as I tried unsuccessfully to visualize how it was all going to go. I began getting into the wetsuit, stepping in with the long, zippered opening in front and setting about squeezing my legs through the tubes of unyielding rubber. Since it was near the end of summer, the air was still warm, but Montauk waters rarely make it much past seventy degrees, I’d been told, so I’d need the two to three millimeters of neoprene I was struggling to put on. It was on the lighter end as wetsuits go, but still it felt so heavy and stiff as I tugged it toward my hips it might as well have been a sheet of lead.
Sean eyed my lack of progress. “The zipper,” he said, “goes in the back.”
“Right,” I said, pulling the suit down and beginning the process all over again. Panting and sweaty, I finally got the thing to my waist, at which point Sean told me to stop. I would have an easier time practicing the pop-up—whatever that was—if I wasn’t fully suited up, he said. “Otherwise you’re going to get pretty hot pretty fast. Do you know if you’re regular or goofy?”
I looked at him blankly. He chuckled.
“Regular or goofy—left or right foot in front?”
I’d never known there was such a thing as a natural preference to ride a board with one side or the other in front—a phenomenon, I’d eventually come to learn, that’s shared in other board sports, like snow- and skate-, although some people ride the different boards differently. We performed a simple test. I leaned forward to see which foot came out first to avoid a fall, and we determined I was regular, meaning I would want my left foot forward and my right in back, wearing the leash.