All the Time I Had

The story is as old as the world—or at least as old as cell phones. When a fresh swell arrives, so do text messages from hysteric friends. It’s a naturally paired occurrence, like, say, wind and waves. Before cell phones, it must’ve been landlines—waking the entire household: “It’s firing!” And before landlines, I’m sure surfers, those eternal frothers, wrote each other snail mail, musing on distant ocean storms.

One morning last February, I woke up to missed calls and a torrent of updates—pictures, videos, paragraphs, maybe a letter or two, though I didn’t check the mailbox—about my favorite wave, a fickle, cold, world-class left-hand pointbreak I can’t mention by name because a handful of local old-timers believe its location to be a secret. It is not and has, in fact, never been a secret, but those old-timers would readily slash my car tires for mentioning the spot out loud. For mentioning it in print, I dare not think what they’d do. So, I shall at all costs refrain from revealing that the wave in question is Redacted, in Redacted, Redacted.

Anyway, that February morning, I had problems greater than hypothetical flat tires. Those giddy pictures, videos, paragraphs I was receiving had to be wrong—they described 8-foot perfection, swell lines stacked up against the sky, hundred-yard tubes. All that was on the forecast not for today, heaven forbid, but for tomorrow. Today I had a million work meetings, important ones, and not a millisecond to surf.

Horrified, vaguely nauseated, I got out of bed and called a friend whose living room overlooked Redacted. His voice shook with excitement and confirmed, one traitorous word at a time, my worst nightmare: The swell had taken an unexpected eastern dip overnight and arrived early that morning, throwing itself into the arms of a gentle offshore breeze.

With a cry stuck in my throat, I looked at the dawn colors in the eastern sky—hellfire orange.

6:52 a.m.

I check the oven clock, boil water, and grind some java. My day, as I have it planned, starts in eight minutes, full throttle, and does not relent until the evening. On another day, I would do anything in my power to escape my worldly responsibilities. Working from home, my get-out-of-jail options are endless. Faked sickness, “bad internet connection,” an nth dentist appointment—whatever my not-sane mind musters up. Phony excuses come out of my mouth as naturally as platitudes come out of a beauty queen’s.

At that twisted game, the golden rule is to tell none of your work colleagues that you surf. Once you’ve opened your big mouth, the cat is forever out of the bag. Every minute absence from work will be interpreted as yet another escapade to the sea. At least that’s what most surfers believe. That’s what I believed for a long time.

But most colleagues are less suspicious than you’d think. At least the ones who don’t surf. How could they guess that your sad scheming to surf is as pathetic, as full of hollow lies, as a crack addict’s? I’ve faked enough dentist appointments to have every tooth pulled out and replaced 10 times. Enough urgent doctor visits to make any sensible person pity my poor health. But the best excuses, I’ve discovered through dedicated practice, are the ones that possess the double merit of being bulletproof and altruistic.

Once, on a lovely south swell, I pretended I’d found a lost, traumatized puppy in my backyard. I had to drive the poor darling to the local SPCA. Another time, I told my boss that my lonely elderly neighbor had taken a bad fall and needed help before the ambulance arrived. My neighbor, a sturdy firefighter, is 40 and fitter than me. We traded perfect peaks that day.

But not, alas, today. I’ve dug my own grave, to be sure. Months earlier, I had the then-brilliant idea to suggest we pitch to a prospective client, a real estate giant that had long been on the hunt for a new advertising agency. My boss loved the idea. I was more or less put in charge of assembling the pitch. Weeks of grueling work ensued. I hadn’t realized, at the start, how much toiling the whole thing represented. Neither had I realized how huge a deal acquiring that client would be. It meant doubling in size for the agency, bonuses, new hires. It meant champagne, pats on the back, pay raises. It also meant, I hoped, that all my inexcusable surfing forays would be exonerated.

Now, with 8-foot miracles peeling at my doorstep, it all means less than nothing. Sitting at my desk, I rue my vain ambitions. Acquiring a new client—when did such hogwash start appealing to me? I can’t recall exactly what I’d wanted to prove. Was I, me, the surf vagabond, trying to climb the proverbial corporate ladder? I recoil at the idea, knowing already what awaits on top: more money, less freedom. And yet, as far back as I can remember, I’ve pursued only enough of the former to make large amounts of the latter possible. Lately, I’ve grudgingly noticed my priorities shifting. I worry about myself sometimes.

11:15 a.m.

I suffer through morning video calls—rehearsing for the afternoon’s pitch and fine-tuning the presentation. Colleagues are wearing blazers and dress shirts, ready to conquer the world. Clad in a sweatshirt, I twitch at my desk and make absentminded comments, one eye glued to the online forecast. Pictures and videos of Redacted keep flooding my phone like swords stabbed into an already gaping wound.

Suddenly, someone directs a question at me: Do I think we should end the presentation by showing off that wicked recent campaign of ours?

“Sure, why not?” I say weakly.

Feeling a leaden silence, I repeat, “Why not?”

12:26 p.m.

The day drifts away, wasted. I am dwindling, hardly functioning, wilted like a starving houseplant. From my office window I see a piece of sky, painfully blue, a piece of open road, tantalizingly accessible, a piece of ocean, agonizingly close.

2:37 p.m.

On a call with my creative director to discuss minor changes in the presentation, her tone of voice changes abruptly, becoming motherly. Almost whispering, she asks if everything is alright.

“I’m exhausted,” I offer unimaginatively.

She nods and seems to think. Then, softly, she announces she can handle the remaining changes. Why don’t I take some time before the presentation—to rest?

I tell her I’ll do that, yes, lie down and rest.

2:40 p.m.

I rise from my chair like you escape from jail. I check my wristwatch: 80 minutes of grace until the four o’clock presentation. God bless my savage luck. I hurry downstairs and grab, in a blind frenzy, all the surfing gear I need. I stop at the doorstep for a split-second mental inventory. A lethal mistake, on a day like today, would be to forget an essential item.

Wetsuitbootsmittensboardleashwax, check.

2:41 p.m.

Respecting the speed limit is physically impossible when the surf is this good. But an unforgivable faux pas, when the surf is this good, is to get pulled over by the police. And the ultimate mistake, on a day like today, is to end up dead before you get to surf. It’s a dangerous tightrope you are driving on. I drive 10 over the limit. Okay, I drive 25 over. Thirty over. At any rate, I get there alive.

2:47 p.m.

It is possible, when possessed by a surfing rage potent enough, to get into a 6/5 wetsuit in under one minute. Your body language, in that minute, resembles that of a person who is engulfed in flames. You jump around frantically, moving with an acuity, a precision, a resolve witnessed only in life-or-death scenarios. And when every square inch of your skin is finally covered in a thick film of neoprene, you do feel like you’ve single-handedly extinguished the fires of hell. Now, run like that fire is hounding you.

2:47 p.m.

Run. Do not slip on an ice-covered boulder—but run. Run like you’ve never run. See these waves in the distance, reeling down the point, tall and sumptuous? Run for them. But please, please keep an eye out for the ice. No one’s ever surfed successfully with a fractured femur.

It normally takes about 15 minutes to walk up to the top of Redacted. Running, it takes probably five. If you sprint like you’re desperately trying to rescue a child from drowning, it’s more like three.

2:50 p.m.

Nearing the water, I find the conditions aren’t as good as I’d imagined. They’re better. Extending to the horizon, the ocean resembles a Ruffles potato chip. Approaching the point, the lines stand up, 10 feet top to bottom, then darken ominously and explode in a muffled roar, rifling down the point, walls of ocean the length of two football fields marching on the sea, savagely unfurling one hollow, perfect section after another. I want to scream and stay silent all at once.

3:12 p.m.

It takes some hustling and jostling—the 20-person crowd is hungry—but I manage to catch a wave. Coming in from a strange direction, somehow angled away from the point, it rolls anonymously past the snarling pack, failing to find a taker. Sitting a bit farther inside, I paddle for it and feel a monumental surge of energy somewhere under me. Initially, the wave hadn’t looked massive—maybe 6 feet. But just before heaving over, it finds a renewed sense of grandeur, doubling on itself at the last second before pitching violently. The day’s anxieties dissolve as I speed through the first section, then the second and the third, until I feel myself meld into the wave, into that essential ensemble we call the ocean.

3:37 p.m.

I’ve found a rhythm. Wherever I sit, an empty wave finds me. It’s no small feat amid a pack of two dozen famished surfers. There is no rational explanation for such occurrences, none that I am aware of. Yet, on rare and exquisite occasions, it happens.

3:45 p.m.

At the end of a gorgeous ride, I glance at the shore. Is it possible that, in mere minutes, I will have to paddle back there and meet my terrestrial duties? Sitting comfortably in the frigid Atlantic, it feels like a faraway farce, connected to me only tenuously by numbers on my wristwatch.

3:49 p.m.

Well, shit. To make it back to my desk on time, I need to catch a wave in the next minute or so. Sure, that won’t grant me any time to shower. To hell with showers. I just need one wave, preferably a spectacular one, to end this too-short outing on a high note. Emboldened, I paddle up the point and sit with my fingers crossed inside my mittens.

3:52 p.m.

On an approaching set, I paddle hard to get into position. Jostling with me is a menacing middle-aged man with a nasty reputation. (He, of all people, would happily slash my tires for divulging our current location.) Just as I am about to throw in the towel on this doomed paddle battle—he would happily slash my tires for winning it—he yells, “You go!”

Barely have I begun the descent down the 12-foot face when I realize I’ve been tricked. Instead of peeling down the point, the wave shuts down all at once, giving me nowhere to go but straight into the boulders lining the shore.

3:53 p.m.

I surface, gasping for air. I can’t recall many beatings more violent than the one I’ve just endured. Light-headed from oxygen deprivation, my limbs bruised from the bashing on underwater boulders, I clamber back on my board and scuffle out of the impact zone. To make matters worse, I see the tire slasher coming down the line on a jewel of a wave. In a stiff-legged stance—I can almost hear him blurt out some stupidity like “Stretching is for girls!”—he surfs conservatively, drawing wide turns on easy sections of the wave.

In an exaggerated attempt at style, he flails his arms about with no direct correlation to his board’s or the wave’s rhythm. He looks, I realize, like someone furiously breakdancing to a classical concerto. Then, overextending, he falls flat on his ass.

I sprint-paddle a few yards and hop on the wave he left empty. Thanks, Raygun.

3:55 p.m.

It’s a pure speed affair. Up and down a wall of water the height of a bungalow. I look for speed and speed only, the curl pursuing me frantically. Intoxicating velocity, the surface of the water an impenetrable sapphire. Although this wave could bury me alive, I somehow feel it sheltering me, its high wall like a rampart against dry-land woes. Then I kick out the back and remember, in a painful pinch, about that god-awful presentation.

3:56 p.m.

The wave has taken me close to shore. Back on dry land, I will have to reenact the whole rigmarole that took me here, home to my dreaded desk. I will be late, but not beyond repair. Already my mind spins for an irrefutable excuse.

With the boulders in reach, I am in the grips of doubt. I would give everything I own to freeze time, to halt the frenzied race forward, just long enough to soak in this moment to its marrow before it’s gone. I know I shouldn’t look up the point—one glance at a crystal-blue wave tumbling down will, irremediably, lure me back. I lie on my board, motionless, the cross-shore current dragging me slowly west like flotsam.

I need to climb ashore. It should be easy. 

It seems impossible.

[Illustrations by Olga Prader]