On Surfing
Oh, easy: Sticking my first full rotation air. But also I think forcing my body to look even 5% like my mind wants it to look. I love surfing. I love the feeling it gives. I love that rush of electric love when I paddle, paddle, paddle, pop up, look down the line and see a gorgeous shoulder starting to stack up. That canvas is the most enticing thing in the whole world save the female form. The possibilities, the potential, it’s all there and endless. I want to paint a masterpiece but am only able to scribble. That dissonance is challenging.
Scribbling! And…ummm…being a surfer.
Walking around the streets of New York, Paris, Zurich, Djibouti, knowing that I do one of the greatest things on earth. Sure. I don’t do it as grandly as some, but I do it and on a proper surfboard too. On a proper Matt Biolos Puddle Jumper. Is that a proper surfboard? It totally is. I surf, and I get the feeling of being a surfer. Is there anything greater?
Almost everything: Books. A bizarre career. A wife. A child. The everlasting friendship of Derek Rielly. The ability to read Matt Warshaw’s History of Surfing and know why it matters.
One month probably.
At eight years old in Oregon, I grew up in a depressed, cloudy logging town on the coast, but the logging industry had long fled, and it was only depressed. I wanted to be in California. I would see pictures of California in magazines and movies featuring California in the theater. That was what and who I wanted to be. Surfing let me touch it even though the water was freezing and the sun never shone, and the rednecks were depressed about the logging jobs they wouldn’t have.
Pre: Get done posting a piece of worthless gossip on Beach Grit. Post: Get started posting a piece of worthless gossip on Beach Grit.
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Michael is a writer and photographer born in Florida as a first-generation American to Austrian and South African parents. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Bitter Southerner, and The Surfer’s Journal among other magazines.
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