localswell

It¹s probably not the best time of year to be singing the praises of
bennies or inlanders. By this point in the summer, we¹ve all had our fair
share of rude, preening a-holes, traffic jams and kook-filled shoulder-to-shoulder lineups. But there¹s one breed of inlander, whom I¹ve always thought deserves a lot more praise, a lot more props. They get no respect, but deserve tons.I’m talking about the inland dwelling surfer.In the hierarchy of hard core  they sit at the top. In the hierarchy of respect, they’re near the bottom. 

I’m not talking about bennies who emerge in May, flop around like broken-winged gulls for a few months and then fly back to Bergen County after Labor Day.

I’m talking about dedicated surfers, who are simply stuck living far from the ocean.  I’m talking about guys and maybe a few gals, who suffer long drives to get to the beach but still have enough stoke to keep doing it year after year. 

At one of my regular breaks, there are a handful of such guys, and their stories are ones of unrivaled dedication. There’s a guy who gets up at 4 am and drives from his home in Somerset County, surfs DP and then heads to work in Middlesex. There are mornings in March and February when I paddle out and he’s the first one there, the locals all still tucked in their beds. There’s another guy who lives in West Orange, drives down the night before he thinks a swell will arrive and sleeps in his van to catch it early. He somehow pulls this off with a wife and baby at home, too. It’s not just the domestic juggling and commute that make this tough. It’s just flat out tougher in the lineup when you¹re not a local. You could surf for 20 years like this and be one of the best rippers around, but when you paddle out, no one knows who you are.  In the xenophobic localized lineups, if you’re not local, you’re assumed to be a kook. Nobody’s gonna give you a break and you’re gonna have to fight strangers for waves – even if you’ve been surfing that same break for longer than they’ve been alive.

 I write about it, I guess, because I lived like this for a long time before I managed to settle in Monmouth County.  I remember what seems like a zillion pre-dawn drives from Middlesex and Hudson Counties in the pre-Internet surf report days, arriving at the beach only to find frigid blown out ankle slappers. Even after I’d been surfing the same break for 15 years, I’d paddle out and get looks like I was a stranger – because I was.

Thankfully, those days are long gone for me. But not for many. You seem them every swell, plying their cars across Route 195, down the Parkway, boards strapped to the roof as they cut through the predawn darkness, driven by a stoke that overcomes geography

So the next time you them pull up at your break, somebody you don’t recognize, don’t assume they’re some kook stranger. Give em a wave.  Give em some respect. They just might be more hard core than the locals.

Peace. BD.

*Note: this was first written in July, when the first sentence was more accurate than it is now, amid a flat spell.

You know,the surf sure has been pretty good around here lately. It’s been so good, in fact, that you might find yourself thinking that New Jersey is actually a good place to be a surfer. These swells we’re having now, like any good run of waves, can lull you into some sense that the Jersey Juice can be as sweet as whatever nectar ol’ Poseiden squeezes out in more exotic locales.  And then, you travel.  

And that is when you realize how much New Jersey surf sucks.

 It happens every time I travel. I get off the plane, sleepless, frenzied, in whatever surf trip destination I’ve chosen, and catch my first wave. And the first thing that always hits me is – wow. This is what it’s REALLY supposed to be like. Big waves. Long waves. Waves that hold up and peel and let you do things to them. Not just beachbreak sandbar waves that you mainly just outrun, but groundswells, waves you can live with for a while, play with, practice on, sit in barrels wide enough to lay out a picnic blanket and stop for lunch.

 I’m not saying that we should not be proud. Au contraire, Jersey surfers. Proud we should be. 

But what we in New Jersey should be proud of is not how good our surf gets. What we should be proud of is ourselves, how good we are despite it, and all how we surf on – despite of how truly bad it is here. It’s not just the finicky waves or our lack of reefs and points. It’s the crowds, the rat race, the soul-sucking lifestyle, the pollution, the beach badge laws, the cold, the flat spells, the all around suckitude of it all.

All of that is what creates the other main thought that pops into my head every time I’m sitting in a lineup in some other exotic locale.  And that’s how downright EASY it is to be a surfer in other places — places like Puerto Rico or California, or Carolina, or, or, you name it.  

Often when I’m there, I look around at the people in the water and wonder to myself: “how many of these people would still be in the water if they lived in Jersey?” 

Not many, I think.  And that’s why we should be proud. We should be proud that we surf through all the crap we surf through. 

 We should be proud every time we hear a California wuss call 55 degree water “cold.” We should be proud when people laugh at our bureaucratic beach badge laws, our lifeguard blackballs, our history of pollution. Our finicky surf, our hit and run swells, our wave-killing geography, our cold winters, our high property taxes and cost of living that keeps us working, working working when we should be surfing, surfing, surfing.  

But we surf through it all. And THAT - that spirit -  is the real Jersey Juice. It’s not in the water. It’s running through our veins, bro. It’s in us. It is us. Be proud of that.

  

What’s the longest layoff you’ve had from surfing? Do you remember what it felt like when you first hit the water again?

 

It had been more than a month – a crazy, sleep deprived, identity questioning new baby new job month – when I finally grabbed the old 9’0’ from under my sister’s house over the July 4^th weekend. The second the lifeguards whistled their 6 o’clock farewell, I was running toward the water.

It was small, summer  afternoon windswell, but glassy enough and fun. The kind of day you watch from the beach and think you’ll get nothing, but when you get out, you are surprised by what a good longboard can do on small waves. Still, it wasn’t waves I caught that still stick with me from that session. It was just being there again, just being in the water, on a board.  

It was like I had been in a sensory deprivation chamber for eight weeks and suddenly was back, feeling and seeing again. I hadn’t thought about this much, but it struck me that minute I hit the water and started paddling out, how surfing so completely involves every sense you have. Is there another sport that does that? Is there another sport in which you are feeling so much – the water on your skin, the temperature, the motion and power of the ocean. Where you are actually tasting – (and yes, I find the ocean tastes varies from season to season and place to place) the medium in which you are performing? Any sport with such unique sounds – from the roar of the ocean to seagulls? Never mind any sport - is there any other activity - any art, any religious ritual, any pricey luxury spa treatment that can do all that?

 

The waves were fun that day. It was a classic midsummer, end of the day silly sesh with lots of groms and kooks and everyone having fun. I took to sitting on the board and finally sitting down during a few rides and doing some coffins. There are times to keep it light like that, and this was one of those times. It felt so good. It sounded good. It tasted good. And man, oh man, was it good.

Here’s a phrase I have heard quite a few people say, but have never, ever understood: “I used to surf.”

“You used to surf?” I think to myself whenever I hear somebody say it. “You mean you stopped?”

See, I simply cannot fathom how anyone could start surfing, then stop. Short of being forced to move inland or becoming too old or injured, I could never understand someone just giving it up. It’s way too addicting, like heroin, only good for you. And I have always scratched my head at the idea of someone just stopping. For me, it always seemed simply impossible, beyond the realm of possiblity.

Until this summer, that is. I find myself, now, for the first time, wracked by a self surf doubt crisis of epic proportions. I am wondering if this life I have built, in a large part with surfing at its core, is sustainable.

It is brought on by a perfect storm of factors, from the economic, to the personal, to the meteorological. Among them:

1. The baby. I mentioned in my previous post, written a few days after my second daughter was born in May, how the second child was going to make it tougher to get in the water. Things haven’t changed. That wasn’t so bad during June’s weeks long flat spell, when I felt like I wasn’t missing much. But this week it got good for five straight days and I was still unable to get out. Painful. Brutally painful. In New Jersey, you simply cannot afford to miss swells. Especially in June. That kind of stuff will kill your soul.

2. The job: I have a new position at work and my boss wants me to start earlier. So far, I have resisted. It would mean the end of dawn patrol. And weekday dawn patrols are the bread and butter of my surf schedule.

3. The commute: I work in Newark. I live in Red Bank. It’s a fairly long commute. I have a tiny fuel sipping Hyundai, but gas prices of four bucks a gallon are starting to take a toll on the family budget, which has gone from two incomes/two people to one income/four people in just two years. Also, the 8-10 hours I spend driving to work each week is essentially another day at the office, another full day away from the family. The long hours behind the wheel are also causing lots of back pain. I live where I do largely so I can surf, although there are also a ton other reasons (including cheaper home prices and ties we’ve made to our community). But if I’m not surfing anyway, what the hell am I doing?

So the push to move North, to become a benny, is strong, and growing. It would mean, essentially the end of surfing for me. I would become one of those pale kooks you see blowing drops for rusty timing weekend mornings in the summer.

And that’s if I’m lucky.

I’m hoping all this is just a phase. That the family will settle into a routine, the baby will sleep, my new work schedule will allow me to hit it at dusk, if not dawn.

And I’m thinking that maybe, maybe all this doubt is fueled by the fact that I haven’t surfed in so long. (it’s my longest no surf stint for me since 1998, when I was landlocked in the Andes). I’m clinging to the faith that all this doubt will be cured by the next wave I ride, that when it comes and I catch it, it will wipe all this clean and restore my resolve to keep surfing, no matter what life, or work, or greedy oil speculators can throw at me. Because if I ever hear myself say those words, “I used to surf”, well, it must might be the saddest words to ever come out of my mouth.

ps

Has anyone else been through this kind of thing? I’d love to hear some comments. I could use em..

Peace, BD.

I love the Localswell forum, including all the trash talking that goes on between various sectors of the surfing community. It’s not my bag these days, but it reminds of when I was younger and more inclined to be dogmatic about things – longboarders vs. shortboarders, surfers vs. boogie boarders.

It’s not what I want this blog to be however. I’m trying not to make this just a trail of invectives against this group or that. But recent news has highlighted one group of people on the water who absolutely deserve my utter disdain and will continue to get it no matter how gray and equanimous I become: jet skiers.

To put it simply, they suck. How bad? Well, there’s more proof here this week, with news about the dolphin pod in the Shrewsbury River. Animal activists are worried about the dolphins partly because boaters, and yes, jet skiers, continue to get so close, endangering the dolphins.

I was not surprised at all to read it. There are tons of things I hate about personal water craft. They’re noisy. They’re annoying. But also because of all the craft on the water – from fishing boats to boogie boards to inflatable rafts, they’re simply the most oafish and least fun craft on the water. It takes no skill whatsoever to drive one. And, I am convinced, it takes a true cretin to enjoy doing so.

I have tried them periodically over the years, most recently a couple of years ago when my buddy was housesitting in Oceanport and told me to take the one in his aunt’s yard for a spin. I had surfed that whole morning in Bay Head. It was one of those June days, hot air, cold water, foggy, the Jersey ocean still shaking off its winter greyness. But the drops were fun, the walls glassy and head high and I surfed until my arms turned spaghetti.

So it was striking hours later when I sat on the PWC and took it for a ride. First I went fast straight. Then I went fast on a turn. And then, well, I realized, that’s about all the thing does. It goes fast. It goes straight. It turns. Oh yeah, and it spews smoke in my face.

Compared to the surfboard I had been on, trimming and carving along the waves, the thing felt like I had hopped off a graceful thoroughbred and saddled up on a hippo. It was bulky, loud and dopey. There was no skill required. After ten minutes of this inanity, I was bored and thinking about lunch.

Here’s the difference: When you surf, you are harnessing, literally, a wave of energy born hundreds or thousands of miles away. Using your years of experience and practice and conditioning, you work to put yourself in precisely that spot where that long traveled wave will release its energy, it’s most kinetic point before it disperses back into oblivion. If done right, it is graceful beyond words.

When you ride a jet ski, you press a button, make a loud noise and go “Weeeee!”

So I’m not surprised the jet skiers are bothering the dolphins. It’s a frustrating experience driving a PWC, and a boring one, too. It does so little, and requires even less. Nothing, really, than a mind small enough to delight in the inanity of such pursuits.

 My two-year old-daughter Blaizy recently pointed to my wife’s astonishingly bulbous pregnant belly and said, “Surfer in mommy’s belly?” 

Holy crap. It was so cute my head nearly exploded. And after I caught my breath, I turned to her and said, “Well, let’s hope so. Maybe you can help teach your little sister to surf.” 

Then quietly, I thought to myself, “Please, please, please let it be true!”

Look, I know that hoping your kid is going to be one specific type of person is just setting yourself up for disappointment. Push your kid to be a jock, and he’ll take up ballet. Try and make your daughter a math whiz, and she’ll start writing poetry. I’ve heard the stories. And I don’t care if my kids become stock brokers, lawyers, bricklayers, janitors, astronauts, religious freaks or homosexuals. They can be what they’ll be. But I just really, really want them to surf - to know that feeling that only we know.

But Blaizy’s a girl. And unless the sonogram missed something, (or I have a son with a bad case of the curse of the Irish) the one due to arrive in a few weeks is going to be girl too. And based on what I see in the water, I think that might make the road a bit more difficult.

A few years back, teenage girls seemed to be taking to the water in droves. Seriously, I remember a year or two stretch where there was to be a huge obvious increase in the number of wahines out there.  There were young girls everywhere out trying to learn. It was inspiring. It looked as though some huge corner had been turned. To me, female surfers are a great influence in the lineup, somehow toning down the knucklehead factor. And is there anything more beautiful than the sight of a woman gracefully sliding across the face of a wave? Talk about taking your breath away… 

Anyway, I theorize that two things contributed to that spike in girls surfing in the 90’s. One, I think the women’s champion World Cup soccer team (Mia Hamm, etc.) instilled a real can-do attitude in a lot of girls and encouraged a lot more to go into sports. And secondly, there was the far more shallow and vapid inspiration, the movie Blue Crush, which upped the cool factor for teenage girls.  

Whatever happened, the wahine wave seems to have subsided. Their numbers seem to have dwindled in recent years. And in New Jersey, I’ve noticed, female surfers seem to be even more rare. 

On a recent trip to Puerto Rico, I was struck by how many more women were in the water. I see the same thing in California, Costa Rica, almost anywhere I go surfing. Here in New Jersey there seems to be far fewer girls and women surfing. Over in the Localswell forum, Bob a SG diehard local  shares a similar observation in the otherwise antithetical (but fun and readable) thread about hot chick surfers.  I have no idea why this is.

 At 37, with a mortgage, a job and other anchors, my days of transcontinental surf adventures are nearly over, or at least on hiatus. The biggest surf adventure I have coming (and probably the most thrilling of them all) is, hopefully, going to be watching my kids take it up.

I really hope my daughter was right – that there is a surfer in mommy’s belly. But it bums me out when I see girls out there in such tiny, miniscule numbers. What’s discouraging girls from surfing? And are those factors more intense here in NJ? I’ll find out soon enough, I suppose, and try to tackle them head on, the best I can, like any parent would. But in the meantime, if anybody has any theories, I’d love to hear em.

Peace. BD.

Uh oh, here come the grownups.

 They’ve already ruined baseball. They’ve sucked the fun out of soccer. And now they’re after our boardsports.

The Star-Ledger reports today on a Point Pleasant dad who is launching the Action Sports Association, described as a non-profit that will organize skateboarding, BMX and in-line skating, creating a “federation of school and community X-treme sports programs.” The Rutgers business school is involved.

“I’m trying to create an awakening in the citizenry of New Jersey to the upside of the industry of action sports,” the creator, a father of two from of Point Pleasant told the paper.

There you have it: Little League for skateboarders. Oh, brother. The entire premise is entirely anathema to the true essence of skateboarding, a sport which thrives without structure, without rules, without a field or boundaries or coaches.

In fact, one of the reasons so many kids have flocked to skateboarding, surfing and other sports like them over the past decade is to get AWAY from their parents, from coaches, from adults. They cling to something adults can’t understand, or better yet, something they decry and shun. To organize it, to set rules, to form leagues, to have parents hovering over young groms and putting on the pressure, is to suck the marrow out of the sport.

The ASA founder says kids need a proper place and organization that allows them to practice and compete.

But even that runs counter to all that makes skateboarding, BMX, and other extreme sports great. The greatest force pushing skateboarders’ performance has been its dismissal by the mainstream.

Pushed into  the most unwanted crevices of the landscape – empty swimming pools, sewer drains, parking lots -skateboarders got creative, reinventing the landscape and the sport itself. Imagine if the Dogtown crew had parents who built them a playing field, drew up a set of rules and hired coaches to teach them what skateboarding was supposed to be back in the 70’s. The sport would be ten years behind where it is now.

Why can’t the grown ups just stay out of it?

We’ve already seen this in other sports. I have long held the start of  Little League baseball in the 50’s marked the beginning of the end of US dominance in our national pastime. If it weren’t for imported talent from Latin America, the Major Leagues wouldn’t be nearly what it is today. The United States simply doesn’t produce the baseball talent it once did. And one of the main reasons is that kids simply don’t play baseball on their own any more. They only play in leagues, with games played in front of screaming coaches and hovering parents.

I spent a summer in Cuba, where, like the Dominican Republic, there’s a baseball game on every corner. Kids grow up loving the game, unpressured by hovering parents. And that love fuels their work ethic and their drive later when they enter organized competition.

Before the parents took over, baseball in the US used to be like skateboarding.  Kids invented their own games, playing stickball with a broomstick and a Spaldeen or wall ball or halfball. It’s how Wiffleball was invented.

 It was still that way in the 70’s, when I spent my summers playing stickball on a schoolyard so packed you had to wait for a game. When I go back to the playground where I used to play stickball, there’s no one there. They’re all at practice, getting yelled at by coaches and parents.  

Soccer proponents wonder why so many kids play soccer at a young age, then drop the sport. It’s because the entire sport in the US is organized, from age 3 on up. Soccer never went through a stage when kids just played, on their own, without their parents. So kids never learned to love the game. And as soon as they’re old enough, they quit.

Today, in the US, the only kids I see playing on their own, doing their own thing are the skaters, the surfers, the BMX kids.  Man, how my heart leaps those days when I see a group of kids skating in a supermarket parking lot, taking turns, trying to outdo one another, trying to hone new tricks.

And those afternoon days in the fall when I paddle out in Bay Head and see groups of young groms who rode their bikes over from Brick, talking trash, dropping in on one another, pushing themselves without even knowing it.

I fear for the day when I pull up to the beach and that scene is replaced by “surfing practice” led by a middle aged coach leading kids in wavecatching drills or some other parent-concocted nonsense, practicing for the big match.

 I fear for that day. But I think it’s coming soon.

 Peace, BD.

Why ragdolling? I feel compelled to explain the name of this blog.

Riptionary, the online surf dictionary, defines the term as “to get drilled, rolled and tumbled by a breaking wave.” It’s a bit more than that - it’s that time when you’re bouncing around underwater, hitting the bottom, unsure which direction is up or down, literally tossed like a helpless pile of rags. 

I want this blog to be about surfing, and life, and the intersection of the two. More often than not, it’s not the perfect rides that are really analogous to anything we experience outside the water. It’s ragdolling. It’s being tossed around by some force a million times greater than yourself, unsure where you’ll end up.
Life is not a long, glassy wall. More often than not, it’s the soup.

I remember a crucial point in the process of learning to surf. It was the point at which I started actually finding pleasure in ragdolling. I would simply marvel at what the ocean was doing to me, and grew to like it.

And it came after I learned that the secret to getting through it, to saving your oxygen and making it to the surface, is in becoming a true ragdoll - going limp, not fighting, not swimming, not trying to get to the surface. Just relax, let the wave go on and roll past and expend its energy.

The lesson tranfers well to real life - one of a zillion lessons surfing has taught me about life. The older I get, the more I find there’s lots of things you can’t fight.  Lots of things bigger than you than can toss you around and make you feel small, like a ragdoll. You need to know when to let go, relax, and wait til you float to the surface. You will, eventually, float back to the surface, but only if you know how to ragdoll.

   

I consider myself an honest guy. I don’t cheat on my taxes. I don’t cheat on my wife. My career as a journalist, my very livelihood, depends on sources and people being able to trust me. But when it comes to surfing, I’m a lyin,’ cheatin’ cad.

People will read this, obviously, so I can’t recount all the fibs I’ve told to bosses to sneak in a few waves when I should have been at work. All the little lines I’ve used to skirt out of some stuffy inland social event that would keep me out of the water. Heck, sometimes I tell stories, not even sure it’ll allow me to surf, but just because I know the waves MIGHT be good that day.

Recently, though, I had one event that may have been my low point. If surfing were drinking, or drugs, or some other unhealthy addiction, it would have been intervention time. It was, you see, the day of my father-in-law’s wake.

We had spent the year shuttling back and forth to my wife’s parents’ house in Pennsylvania while her dad battled brain cancer. He passed away one Saturday in late January and I returned solo to NJ for two days of work with plans to return  for the wake Wednesday evening. But there was surf that day. Good surf. Good, empty, offshore New Jersey winter south swell surf. So I had to sneak in a session before heading to PA. I needed it – I craved the peace and quiet, the energy I get from surfing. Some people pray. I surf.

But still there’s no way in hell I should have gone. But I did. And of course, time kind of got away from me. It was one of those great, late morning, mid winter, mid week sessions. One other guy out, he and I trading wave after wave, barrel after barrel. All ours. And of course, time got away from me.

Hours later, there I was, hurtling in my Hyundai down the Pennsy Turnpike, late for my father-in-law’s wake. “You’re late for your wife’s dad’s wake because you went surfing?’ I said to myself. “You need some f-in help.” When I finally arrived at the house, my wife was there, in tears of course. “My god,’’ she said. “I was waiting to see you and thought you’d be earlier.” I said nothing, just hugged her, ashamed. 

What is it about surfing that makes me put so much at risk? There are sick days I’ve taken where, at that moment when I’m calling work from my cell phone on the boardwalk, I really, truly couldn’t care less if I got caught and lost my job, my home, whatever. So long as I didn’t miss that day in the water.  That session the day of my father in law’s wake was probably the only time I’ve ever gone surfing and not told a soul where I was, or that I had gone surfing at all. An utterly secret session, until now. I’m coming clean.  

Later, that night at the funeral home, we were standing in a group; my wife and I, a few friends, family, laughing and crying and remembering mi suegro (father in law). I was carrying a tissue to keep the post-surf nose drain from soiling my black suit or gushing out as I shook hands of the guests arriving to pay their respects. My buddy JG, a surfer, walked up beside me and asked, “Did you get out this morning?”“No, way,” I said, loud enough for the group to hear. “I couldn’t. Had to get up and come here.”

 Aaaay. Forgive me, Suegro, for telling lies at your wake. Forgive me, D-bomb, my beautiful wife, for being late in your greatest hour of need. I am, after all, a liar. A cad. A cheat. A surfer. 

(there’s a comment function here – would love to hear some other stories of scams people have pulled in the name of surfing) 

 Peace, BD.