So Long, Shredder

Washed out in that impossibly bright gray of a midmorning along the coast of Central California, a certain wave in Santa Cruz County crumbles then lurches toward shore under the fading pulses of a modest late-winter swell. Conditions are relatively uninspired but slabby enough at moments to be of interest to most keen or desperate wave riders. Fresh from the doctors at Stanford Hospital and, before that, a few long and snowy months on the eastern slopes of Montana’s Rocky Mountains, I am both keen and desperate. My stoke is high as I strip down, unwind the bright-purple pressure bandages from the crook of each arm, and wiggle my ghosty, middle-aged self into a stiff wetsuit and crusted old booties. Most of my life has been spent by the sea—and much of that has involved surfing of all ilk. I like to think this is apparent to any casual observer who might see my bouncy walk to the water’s edge and easy paddle out, connecting with the rip and delivering myself to the outside with dry hair still intact.

I purposely hook my left leg around a tendril of giant kelp as I settle in along the edge of the jump zone in a lightly attended but generally expert-class lineup. I sit up on my board, splash water on my face, and dramatically breathe as I stretch toward the heavens. The sun is warm. A brief of pelicans is trimming north along the cliffs, close enough that I can see the outer edge of their flight feathers tickling the wind. The moment washes over with a bounty of bliss I have not felt in a handful of sleeps. As it turns out, this is also the absolute apex of my session.

By the numbers, my go-out is grim: 84 minutes in the water, three waves caught, two wipeouts on the drop, one heel-side fall on a slow-motion cutback, and two failed attempts at paddling back in through the keyhole in the rocks. The latter is particularly brutal as I flail against a tidal current, my arms and shoulders feeling like wet, heavy, twisted towels pulled too taught as I windmill pointlessly toward a shoreline only a few yards away, ultimately surrendering to the forces of nature and getting recycled back outside for another attempt.

Eventually I make it to my van, cramped up, blown out, and unable to remove my wetsuit without first spending 10 minutes puddled on my back bumper. My ego gnaws on the humble pie. Two tween-age boys zoom by on e-bikes, and in their wake a judgment is delivered.

“Kook!”

I laugh out loud and love them instantly.

*

Almost 20 years ago, I found myself talking story with the legendary Greg Noll. He had just penned a new book with Drew Kampion, and the two, along with Noll’s wife, Laura, and son, Jed, were on a bit of a tour to celebrate. We were all at photographer Dan Merkel’s short-lived art gallery on State Street in Santa Barbara on a notably sublime early spring evening, a weird May west swell adding to the high vibes of the occasion.

Hoping I wasn’t being too much of a fanboy, or too simple-minded of a question asker, I queried Noll about the long-standing lore surrounding his famous last ride at large Makaha. I was a twentysomething, wave-obsessed surf junkie of the highest order and could not fathom how an absolute titan like Noll would or could ever walk away from the act of riding waves with so many good years still ahead of him. Noll obliged with an answer.

“You know,” he said, “if you had asked me when I woke up that morning, I would have told you, ‘I’m going to surf until I’m 80 and my arms fall off.’ But a funny thing happened when I made it into shore after that wave. I felt like I had just taken the biggest shit of my life, and man, was I relieved. That night, back at my house, I was even more relieved. I can’t really explain it more than that. I just never really needed to go back out there.”

If I am being honest now, I had zero idea what he was getting at. I just nodded my head and acted impressed and let the conversation flow in a new direction. I was too young. I had too much ego wrapped up in my relationship with surfing and not nearly enough self-awareness to have any insight into his explanation. I had yet to cross those inevitable bridges in life that bring you to your knees and radically reorder your personal totem pole of priorities. The grand fragility of life itself was still a blind spot for me. Gratitude was just a word. “What the actual fuck is this guy talking about?” I even thought at the time.

Then I got sick.

In the summer of 2013, I was diagnosed with a stage IV, incurable cancer—neuroendocrine cancer, the same type that has claimed the lives of Steve Jobs and Aretha Franklin. I was 34 years old, and there was a baseball-size tumor growing on the head of my pancreas. Even worse, it had slopped into my portal vein and duodenum. It was a clinical clusterfuck, and I was internally bleeding to death even faster than the cancer was trying to kill me. As an added bonus, I was fewer than six months out from a multiple sclerosis diagnosis, a plot twist precipitated by a terrifying bout of transverse myelitis, a rare spinal condition that had rendered me mostly paralyzed from the chest down, unable to urinate and unable to sign my name.

Though I had regained much of my motor function by the time of my cancer diagnosis, I was in a bad way that summer, and my survival was anything but certain. Before embarking on a nearly 11-hour surgery at Stanford Hospital, which would prove to be the first of my many lifesaving interventions over the next 12-plus years, I remember asking one of my doctors about when I might be able to surf again, the question both a feigned sort of bravery and an innocent type of ignorance.

His response was careful, measured from experience. “There is a long road ahead,” he said. “Some big things need to happen before we start talking about surfing or anything like that.”

In the end, how it looks matters little compared to the feel of the ocean underneath you, the lift of a wave, and the quanta of trim.

The truth of it was, surfing as I had known it for most of my life had already left me, and I had become an expert at making excuses about it. Some four years prior, not too long after my hang with Noll, I began noticing a slight but undeniable decay in my skill set. I would drag a front foot on pop-ups. Flub a cutback for no apparent reason. Go over the falls frozen in place as my body momentarily refused to do what I wanted. Transient pains, flattening fatigue, and weird areas of numbness would cut my sessions short or just plain keep me away from the beach altogether.

As my performance in the water faded, a grumpy, jaded mind-set replaced it on land. I started coming away from my surfs feeling worse than I had before, both physically and mentally. I was quick to complain and began hating on all things new, different, or youthful. I was becoming that stereotypical salty old dude way ahead of schedule. In hindsight, I think I knew my health was failing, but fear kept me from being curious enough to seek help. Instead, I chalked it up to simply getting older, blaming a lifestyle that featured long hours of work as a journalist and long hours of chasing thrills as a full-spectrum fun hog. I didn’t have the imagination to see the truth of my situation. Few things blind you to the real score in life like a wounded ego and a jaded mind.

*

To be clear, I was never the best surfer. Not even close. But there was a time, primarily in my middle to late twenties, when I could hold my own with the cool kids. My surfing was forged in the fast-twitch beachbreaks of Cape Cod but was soon pushed in a new direction and polished by a move to Santa Barbara in my late teens. I put the sport of kings at the center of my life for two solid decades, and it provided me with all I needed and then some.

The power factory of a committed bottom turn, the weightless acceleration of a high line, the pressure warble inside of a deep barrel, the torque and release of blowing fins out the back—these were all sensations that I knew and loved. The whole act defined me. Raison d’être and all that. I don’t mean to suggest that this was a particularly unique set of circumstances. Quite the contrary. What I mean to say is I was once a lot like you. And, just like you, when this guiding force in my life was taken away, things got ugly. Real ugly.

At first, before the diagnosis, I mostly got angry because I wasn’t surfing as well as I once had. And then, when my health deteriorated to such a degree that I could no longer paddle or stand on a board, I got angry because I felt as though I had lost both my identity and my primary joy-maker. To paraphrase Melville, I was madness maddened. More to the point, my bitterness was so resolute that I afforded zero grace to anyone on the matter, myself at the top of the list.

Of course, survival is not possible without adaptation. And one does not endure a grave cancer diagnosis without some profound evolution of self. I am no exception. Though it has been far from linear, my journey has seen me go from being an angry surfer in decline to a decidedly not-dead, middle-aged frother who surfs well below what his résumé suggests yet manages to enjoy every inch of the experience in ways he never thought possible. And it began with finally gleaning some insight into what Da Bull was on about all those years ago, talking big Makaha and big bowel movements.

*

While my aha moment didn’t require a historically large ride, it was on a fairly big day at one of the more beloved rock reefs along the Santa Barbara coast. There was a pulsing, shorter-interval, direct-west swell about a week before Christmas. There had been rain, strong south winds, and victory-at-sea conditions for almost two days straight. Now it was mostly offshore and well overhead. I was into my 13th consecutive month without being able to surf in any real way, but my health was on the rise. I was back to work and back to some light exercise and starting to think about pushing my comfort zone. I purposely did not bring any surf gear with me when I went to check the scene.

I could feel the buzz the second I pulled into the parking lot. It was one of those days when you didn’t need to actually see the surf to know that Mother Nature was offering up the goods. I walked down the bougainvillea-lined path toward the beach and almost immediately began encountering surfers.

It had been a long time since I had experienced an atmosphere like the one that so often surrounds high-quality waves at well-known spots in Southern California. In my diminished and un-callused state, the vibe nearly buckled me. There was a palpable amount of seriousness on offer—peacocking and alpha posturing, game faces and hurried paces. There was also a weird eddy of disappointment swirling around most of the people walking away from the surf. It was the best day of the season so far, and yet outward joy was nearly nonexistent.

It occurred to me as I first got eyes on the lineup and the roughly three dozen surfers jockeying for position that, thanks to my ill health and the 18-inch, chevron-shaped incision still healing on my stomach, I was freed from any sort of expectation to participate in this mixed-up display of excitement and ego, glory and disappointment. The awareness arrived like the first cool morning of fall, foretold yet also shocking to the system. I was relieved to not have surfing on my menu.

“Goddamn,” I said to myself. “Is this what Noll was talking about?”

But before I could think much further on it, I watched as a young Conner Coffin, on the cusp of qualifying for the WSL Championship Tour, bent a ferocious cutback across the face of a solid wave. Any notions of relief vanished, and I was very much a surfer again. My body zinged with muscle memory. I could feel the driving precision of his inside rail as if it were my own. My pulse quickened at the thought, and I was briefly transported to a different timeline. A different body. A different future. And then, just as he climbed nearly vertical into the steamrolling tumble of whitewash, I was undone by an impossible grief.

I would likely never feel such physical sensations again—or anything close. Tears ran behind my sunglasses, and I staggered for a place to sit. The landscape of emotion that opened was beyond any reasonable scale of measurement. I was being stretched—forced, even—to a new place of understanding and relationship. It is a wildly important thing to be able to grieve your own self. It is equally important to know that growth is always an inside job, one that requires permission from yourself to change.

*

Aging gracefully with your surfing is not something that gets many headlines in our Peter Pan culture. Most of us work overtime in pursuit of an undying youthfulness rather than strategize how exactly to best grow old with our passions. It is a big blind spot for everyone from former world champions and gray-bearded style icons with household names to that brooding, aging ripper at your local and the legions of recreational surf sliders nearing AARP age.

But, whether we admit it or not, Father Time eventually catches up with all of us. Our pop-ups get harder. Our neck and back hurt more. Our eyesight fades. Our circulation slows. Loss of balance, coordination, and strength is unavoidable. Your performance deteriorates. You don’t need a serious medical diagnosis to understand that your march toward the eternal dirt nap is life’s ultimate nonnegotiable.

Most of us likely will have no awareness as to when we are riding our last wave until the moment has long since passed.

Despite this, growing old is a privilege— perhaps the greatest privilege, at least from my vantage point as a relatively young dude with two small children and a disease that most doctors consider terminal. And yet we regularly agonize over the various side effects of its gradual arrival. Too often we deny the finite nature of things, ourselves included.

Most of us likely will have no awareness as to when we are riding our last wave until the moment has long since passed. As much as we might think we are savoring our delights, I suspect more of our energy is spent craving our next meal. This is an irony that goes well beyond the borders of a surfing life. Dare I say it might be part of our human nature, a critical cog in the wheel of both individual and collective survival.

However, when the light is finally low on the horizon, you begin to realize that this “I want more” mind-set is also a great thief of joy. Indeed, if the dance truly matters, there comes a time for all of us when it gets reduced to little more than the experience of its core elements, not some presentation of a perceived performance.

In the end, how it looks matters little compared to the feel of the ocean underneath you, the lift of a wave, and the quanta of trim. Make no mistake, the reason you first fell in love with surfing is, without exception, the reason why you still love it today. The trick, as they say, is coming to terms with this truth and eventually letting go of everything else. Manage to pull this off, and you will realize quickly that surfing remains just as rapturous and cathartic as ever. Perhaps even more so.

Obviously, the sense of relief that I felt during that first big swell that I watched from the sidelines was nothing like Noll’s. After all, he was a mountain of a surfer, healthy, and in the prime of his life. What exactly he felt relief from that day is a world or two away from anything I might be able to access.

Nonetheless, my relief was just as life altering. It showed me how far I had gotten from my favorite thing in the world. How complicated I had made the relationship. Even while fighting for my life, I was so twisted up about the importance of “surfing well” that I felt a profound sense of relief in knowing I no longer had to partake in something I loved deeply. In that moment, I made a sacred vow to myself to get back in the lineup by any means necessary. Not because I wanted to surf well, but because I wanted, more than anything, to once again live well.