Surfers

One summer when I was about 14, my uncle and aunt went off on a freighter to parts unremembered by me.  They offered their new beach house to my mother who scooped up the offer of a free vacation locale with relish. 

My family moved in for a week, maybe three, watching the waves and the surfers of Manhattan Beach.  I spent the time riding the waves on an inflatable canvas raft and reading SURFER magazine.  The raft had a blue side and a red side and I always rode it red side up so sharks wouldn’t think it was blood. I envied the wet suited boys with sun-bleached hair who walked passed our house to the beach carrying their boards and their egos with confidence.

In those days women didn’t surf…. especially if they were a 14 year old from Silverlake who only had the Pendleton and the St. Christopher medal to prove her worth.

In a moment of great patience, my mother drove me to a surf shop in town to look at the goods.  I coveted the Gordon Smith and Dewey Weber boards and wished more than anything that I could own one.  I think a came away with a decal.

When I wasn’t fishing off the pier or riding the raft, I wiled away those days reading SURFER magazine. I taught myself about the sport.  I learned about far off places called Sunset Beach, Makaha and Pipeline.  I knew what “ hanging ten” was and became familiar with the names of great surfers and their feats.

Little did I know that one-day, by the oddest of confluences I would live in Hawaii and see these places. And odder still, I would end up teaching school with the daughter of one of the most famous surfers I had read about many years earlier. 

My husband wore my Pendleton until it got holes in the elbows. And as for the St. Christopher medal, who is to know what long ago drawer it got lost in. But, to this day, I’ve never been on a surfboard.