To show me the pop-up, Sean lay down on his belly in the sand with his legs straight behind him and then, in slow motion, demonstrated what I would try to do in the water: a kind of push-up followed by tucking the left leg up under my chest and between my arms while rotating toward the right into a low sideways lunge and sliding the right foot in to stand about hips’-width apart in a crouch. When he put it all together, it seemed, in yoga terms, a little like springing from a baby cobra through a plank into a modified warrior position. I told him as much, and he chuckled again.
“Kind of,” he said. “Now you try.”
I lay down, put my hands next to my rib cage with my arms like chicken wings, and strove to replicate what he’d done, but I kept getting tangled in myself. No matter how hard I thought or talked or tried my way through the various steps, I couldn’t seem to make enough room under my midsection to bring my leg forward, or to pivot at the right time or angle. After five or six attempts, I started getting closer, but I was still coming up off-center.
“You twist like that,” he said, showing me what I’d done wrong, “and you’re off the board.”
Huffing—and huffy—with frustration, sweating under the late-afternoon sun, I tried again and again and again, to little avail. Eventually I landed one right. “Give me two more like that, and we’ll head in.”
“One,” I countered, gasping and spitting sand. “If we keep this up, I won’t have anything left for the water.”
I hit the next one and he agreed to let me try for real. I pulled the wetsuit up and over my sticky body, fighting to push my arms into sleeves that seemed to stretch forever, like taffy. I finally got the suit on and zipped up the back, feeling rivulets of sweat trickling down my spine. Sean grabbed the board, a long, spongy expanse of blue foam, and headed into the water, pointing out a few of the larger rocks peeking through the swirling current that we’d need to avoid. I followed, slipping and tottering over the slick, rocky bottom, seeing peril wherever I looked. I was barely in up to my shins when a knot of dread developed in my stomach at the prospect of slamming into the stones. What have I gotten myself into?
Finally I caught up to Sean and the board. “Hop owhown!” he said with a toss of the hair.
“What?”
“Hop owhown,” he repeated, gesturing to the board as it dodged and weaved in the ocean chop.
Oh, I thought, the knot of impending doom pulling tighter. “Hop on.” He’s just being playful with the accent—he must think I’m an idiot.
I felt unsteady even just standing there with the waves and current pushing and pulling at my legs and midsection, but with something more like a heave and a grappling shimmy than a hop, I climbed onto the board as Sean held it. “When you get up,” he said as he towed me out just to where the waves were breaking and turned the board around to face the shore, “if you feel like you’re going to fall, try to fall back and flat. No diving headfirst.”
Before I could work up a panic over the possibility of braining myself on the bottom, he was telling me to get ready. My heart started pounding. This was it: my first wave. I lay there as I’d practiced in the sand, with my feet back and together and my chest up, looking out at the dune that rose between the narrow beach and the dirt parking lot beyond it. “Here you go,” Sean said as the board began to slide forward and suddenly accelerated. “Get up!” he yelled. I did, and just as he’d predicted, I was promptly off the board and in the foam—but, miraculously, not on the rocks.
I felt vaguely victorious. I hadn’t gotten to my feet, but at least now I wasn’t afraid to fall—which was good, since that’s what I proceeded to do, over and over as Sean pushed me into wave after wave and I scrambled to get up, only to roll off one side of the board or the other. There was nothing unpleasant about it, though I was beginning to think I’d have nothing to show for my efforts at the end of the lesson but a head and belly full of seawater along with an aching lower back and blazing shoulder muscles.
It went on like that for maybe twenty minutes until finally Sean pushed me and I felt the board charge forward. I took a deep breath, pushed up with my arms, coiled my body, snapped my feet under me, and stood up and rode. It was fantastic. For an instant I jacked into a mysterious engine whose thrust allowed me to glide on the ocean itself, as if the board no longer existed and I was a waterborne Hermes with sea spray instead of wings at my heels, channeling all that energy from the depths to fly toward the shore. And then, just as suddenly, my weight shifted and there I was again, falling back into the water.
It hardly mattered. My body was flooded with adrenaline and my heart was trying to break free of my chest. It was a powerful high—cosmic, euphoric, liberating, addictive. And, yes—oh, yes—I wanted some more.
I got a tiny bit more that day, and then again the next afternoon when I returned for a second lesson, but it soon dawned on me just how far I was from being like the wave dancers I’d seen earlier that summer. Not only did I lack the flexibility to fold my five-foot-ten frame quickly into a surfing stance, but also I had little of the upper-body strength needed for paddling and launching all of my 170 pounds onto my feet. I felt lumbering and spastic, too exhausted and throbbing with pain to get through much more than an hour of the lesson—and that was with Sean doing most of the work.
I had little reason to hope I would ever be able to master the sport, and yet I was smitten, a sorry combination I confessed to Kristin, a small blonde in a skimpy bikini who came by the beach at the end of my second lesson. “It takes a long time to build up those muscles,” she said, the brim of a baseball cap shading her ocean-blue eyes, “but you’ll do fine. We’ve had people out here for lessons who showed no ability to surf—and I mean no ability—but they stuck with it and they’re surfing now. It will come.”
I stared at her, the fading sun turning her trim figure to gold, and decided to believe her, if for no other reason than I desperately wanted what she was saying to be true.
* * *
Weeks later I was obsessed with trying surfing again. It didn’t matter that I’d sucked at it; I just couldn’t wait to get back in the water and have that feeling of glide all over again. Surfing, I wondered, where have you been all my life?
I wasn’t entirely unathletic growing up, but I wasn’t sporty either. As a kid I hated the zero-sum-game aspect of competition, so I avoided it and opted for dance as my phys ed as soon as I could. My mother nurtured that avocation, even though it was to my father’s eternal disappointment that I never pursued track and field, swimming, basketball, golf, or tennis as he’d wanted. It was a shame, in his eyes, that I’d wasted what he felt was a genetic prize of height, passed down, apparently, from his father and uncles but skipping him along the way. Call it a lack of discipline, but things I couldn’t pick up quickly I abandoned.
Achievement was the reigning narrative in my house. “When you put your name on something,” my mother told me in elementary school, “it means you’ve done the best you can do,” and that narrative represented both oppression and liberty. There was never even a question whether I’d go to college, following in the footsteps of three generations on my father’s side, beginning with my great-grandfather, who was born a slave in Virginia but graduated from Hampton in 1874, later attending Oberlin and becoming a teacher. The ties to education and the belief that it was the best way to punch our way through the limits imposed by racial discrimination were tight. My mother hadn’t gone to college by the time she married—she’d gone to work straight out of high school to help support her mother, a widow—so my father, a 1950s traditionalist in many ways, took over caring for my infant sister at night so that my mother could get her bachelor’s degree at City College. I accepted the importance of education as a given, but my parents scrimped and saved so that my sister and I could attend fancy private schools with the help of financial aid. The expectations for success felt like a lot to live up to.