Hannah Croshaw

Your First Times Surfing

I.

April carefully places the fins of the beginner friendly board into a hole she digs in the dry sand. She’s going to ask you some questions before showing you how to place and move your body on the board before heading out to the water. She asks you, ​what’s your surfing experience?​ You answer that you’ve never been on a surfboard, but last summer you got to try standing on a balance board, because the kids you were babysitting were so enthusiastic about beating their record balancing time at surf camp. As she packs sand around the sides of her board to help stabilize it, and to protect the fins, April asks you ​why do you want to try surfing?​ You pause for several moments, thinking. Is it because surfing looks cool? Probably not, although that’s definitely a factor, but it’s difficult to look good at something when you’re just learning. And you know you learn best when you’re not preoccupied with how you appear to others. For exercise? That’s an easy yes. All the gyms are closed, and you’re itching for steady exercise. For the chance to try dancing on waves? Most definitely. Also because so many of your friends enjoy it, and you’ve been craving social bonding. Yes​.​ April smiles with you when you share all this with her; this pleases you because her face has been rather neutral prepping the board while you’ve been pondering. April wipes the sand off the top of the board, now snuggly tucked in, and lies down on the board. She’s wearing her wetsuit from the waste down, wearing a maroon bikini on her torso. You get distracted thinking how great she looks in that moment, and you tell yourself to pay more attention to how she’s positioning herself relative to the board so you can copy her later. Her head lifts up and she looks towards the ocean, her hands hold the sides of the board, the board’s love handles, you think, with her toes tucked underneath her feet so that there’s a gentle slope from her knees on the board up her shins towards her ankles. She moves her hands from holding the sides of the board, to placing them underneath her shoulders, her elbows close to her body. She first shows you and tells you that if you keep your hands and knees on the board, underneath your shoulders and hips, you can ride waves in from a table-top position. She resets herself on the board, torso and legs so that her toes run off the end again. Then, again with her hands under her shoulders, and keeping her back straight, she pushes her whole body, save her hands and toes, off the board. Then, quickly, she jumps! She pushes off her toes and draws her feet up underneath her, slightly angled towards the right of the board, and pauses. There’s humor in her voice when she says she can’t show that part slowly. She explains that you want to try and position your feet a bit farther forward and backward from your hips, and then she slowly moves upwards, taking her hands off the board as the backs of her thighs no longer touch her calves, her stomach and the tops of her thighs slowly unfolding. Her knees stay bent, she shows you how you can take a quick step up the board, explaining that if your weight is too far back you’ll fall backwards, while if you’re two far forward and the nose of your board is submerged, you could be tossed face first into the water. ​This is particularly dangerous if you’re surfing in a rocky area​, she says. That startles you, to think about those consequences. You ask her to show you once more, it’s a lot to see, and remember, and think about copying. After you see the transition again, you approach the board and try to copy her initial positioning. The board’s surface is rather squeaky when your skin rubs against it. It’s a dense foam, but one that you can press into with a single finger. You can feel, in particular, your hip bones pressing into the surface. In this moment, close to the ground, the waves ahead appear smaller, and crash quieter. As you face the ocean, you run through everything in your mind that you just saw, and try to replicate that thought throughout your body. You do so slowly and methodically, recalling the specific placements of hands, and feet, and you feel joyful in receiving praise from April after. She says that that was an excellent first go, and that, ​you should try it again​. You agree and you repeat the motion a few times to try to familiarize your body more, laughing at yourself and how happy you feel from her praise. You think back to your conversations about how much she loves kids and wants some of her own, and can see her teaching a young daughter with a mess of curly brown hair. You feel like you’re her daughter in this moment. You ask her if she’s taught surfing before, she responds that she has taught many kids through surfcamp. This surprises you; probably because you’re jealous of her devotion to other kids instead of you, her friend. But this doesn’t surprise you, because already in those ten minutes she was a really good instructor. She then asks, ​what are you hoping to accomplish today?​ This one surprises you, and you take a few moments to think again as she finishes putting on her wetsuit. Realistically you won’t last long in the water because you don’t have a wetsuit, just a thin rashguard, and the sun has been setting between 7-7:30pm this week. You’ll want daylight to change out of wet suits and into dry clothes. So in the time you realistically have, you think a good goal would be to familiarize yourself with the board, and remember the feeling of catching a wave and riding it in like you did so often when you were younger on boogie boards. Maybe try to ride in a wave from the table-top position she just showed you. She says that’s a pretty realistic answer for today. Before you know it, April has finished putting on her wetsuit and has wrapped the leash around your right ankle and you’re walking towards the water with her, giddy, with a healthy dose of nervous hitchhiking in your gut.

II.

Putting on the wetsuit is an experience in itself. You had seen April struggle with them before when she was practicing ocean swimming for her lifeguard certification. Watching her, you copy her actions. She lays her towel on the slightly wetter, harder sand, steps onto it and rids her feet and ankles of sand. She slides and then pushes her leg through the first pant, pointing her toes through and pulling the material over the heel of her foot, like you would a tight pair of boots. A niche experience of claustrophobia, trying to free yourself from the embrace of a snug cowboy boot. When you have gotten both of your legs snuggly gloved, you begin pulling the glove up your legs, in sections. You feel like Dick Van Dyke in his dance with the animated penguins as he performed for Mary Poppins; there seems to be a significant gap between your crotch and the wetsuit’s crotch. You ask April if that’s normal, she says ​yes, that’s normal.​ You share your penguin likeness with her and dance on your toes a bit, making her laugh. The crashing of waves is before you and behind you as it bounces off the cliff and back towards the beach. The crotch gap worrying reminds you of your dad assuring you that you’re not supposed to have wiggle room for your feet in a set of hockey skates. He would tie your skates so tight you swore you weren’t going to be able to feel your toes in ten minutes time. Turns out you don’t think about your toes very much when you’re trying to stand on your own two legs on ice. You notice once again the smell of the deep sea that’s been exposed to air on land next to you as you change. Every time you wobble and catch yourself by stomping down a foot close to the piles of partially dried seaweed that dot the sand, a swarm of flies lifts up, disturbed, and makes their way to a quieter location. Or onto your towel. They’re much preferred to wasps, or sandcrabs, or bloodworms that you find when you start digging into the sand. You’ve seen the dreaded kind that look like small angry earthworms, as well as the feathered kind, flying its way through quiet tidal pools. Once you shove both of your pointed hands through the arms of the wetsuit, you spread your arms and curl your shoulders into the suit, then arching up to pull the material over your chest. You begin to feel like a sandwich sealed in a plastic bag beneath the sun; condensation to soon form along the inside of the bag. An experience cousin to changing room claustrophobia: dresses and shirts of complex construction catch over your shoulders, neck, and head. Your shoulders are usually too broad in comparison to your torso to fit into industry size dresses. That’s partially why you prefer men’s t-shirts to womens, and appreciate tank tops. But your shoulders feel great in this wetsuit you’ve borrowed. You reach your right hand across your left shoulder, searching for the long tie with your left, and pass it to your right. You pull up and to the right, finishing your self-sealing by pressing the velcro together over the zipperhead. You take in what it feels to be suited up, and remark to April the slight feeling of being choked as the wetsuit applies pressure across your trachea. April smiles and agrees and says ​you’ll get used to it​. You joke that all surfers must like getting choked in bed.

III.

You realize that it’s hard to catch waves on your own. You’ve greatly overestimated your own strength in paddling hard enough to catch waves in. It’s also an issue of recognizing a good wave for you to catch; before, when April was pushing you into waves, and you saw one approaching you’d ask, this one? She’d sometimes musingly say, no, this is a pseudo wave, which she explained is a wave that won’t end up crashing, and won’t be able to carry you to shore. You floated next to April in the water, the two of you adjusting to the ocean’s ebb and flow, waiting for a suitable wave. They flowed underneath you both as you waited and watched, the board perpendicular to the waves. After you’d asked about catching a few more waves, which you failed to see were also pseudo waves, you remarked that you must have a thing for these pseudo waves, which you hope doesn’t translate into your taste in men. You noticed your voice hinted at bodily adrenaline and giddiness from your wet hair tied up in a bun, wet from cresting waves splashing into the nose of your board and into your face that you paddled over, your fingers and toes numbing, your teeth clattering against each other, and a slight breeze brushing your ears and neck. But you’ve been smiling so much that your cheeks are starting to strain. Floating alone, giving your cheeks a break; there are quite a lot of steps to keep in mind, as the positions are still foreign to your body. Sitting on the board so that your nose sticks up just enough, perpendicular to waves so that you can scan around you for persistent groms, the dad-surfer, the young age-unknown surfer, the women surfers, the old surfers, the dog catching a ball that was thrown into the pack of surfers, the dad on his paddleboard with his young daughter, the old man on the white and turquoise outrigger canoe, and the white and turquoise inflatable boat farther out. You hear a dad talking to his two young sons nearby in the water, you hear calls coming from the shore, people shouting excitedly and encouragingly to a group of kids playing in the water. It sounds like they could be directing the calls towards you. Recognizing a good wave to go for, trying to angle yourself to face the shore, and laying down so that your toes are slightly off the end of the board; don’t go too far forward otherwise the nose will sink into the wave and you’ll be flung off and over the board, but don’t sit too far back on the board, otherwise you’ll have more difficulties standing up to ride the wave in. The first wave April pushed you into today was the best one yet. It felt like several moments of a completely unclouded consciousness. Falling into the ocean’s arms afterwards, you were beaming. You repositioned your board to point back out, pushed yourself off the seafloor and onto the board, propelled yourself into and over waves that nearly crashed on you. You’re buoyant and sometimes get a face full of ocean foam. The salt and brine are in your mouth and eyes. It’s more encouragement than deterrent. Intuition telling you how to avoid the occasional oncoming surfer. You lick the salt around your mouth again as you sit on the board, watching, waiting, trying to catch a wave.