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| THE SUMMER DAY |
| I think, somewhere long ago, I wrote about how hard it is to take the kind of photos you see even in surf magazines. Part of it is to be there, certainly. That only takes you so far though. As with shaping or glassing surfboards, there is nothing like trying it yourself for a truly humbling experience. That's true for a lot of things in life, however. You may have the equipment and the desire and the manpower, but if what you see day after day is small, windy, foggy slop surf, then that's what your photos will show. That kind of spell, one of which to this day we refer to as "The Summer of 2001", can drive a person mad. Couple that with just the everyday stresses and strangeness of living, and then throw in some actual physical injury, and you can easily find yourself watching entire years go by in totally unmemorable surfing fashion. I've been having a bit of that myself, and described it in an email to a friend as "Seeing calendars and clocks in the foggy sky." Calendars appear in the form of rapidly approaching milestone dates, one of which here in June is the end of the school year in North America. This means crowds double, surf schools spring up like mushrooms from cow flop, and the roads and highways get crazy. Resolutions and bedrock promises to force more water time have long since expired, and the drizzle makes little lakes of dirt on the car, filling them in with fine white ash from local wildfires. So today popped up, foggy as usual. I finished reading "Captain Zero", one of the better surf books, and felt like doing anything other than what I was supposed to. So I loaded up the boards and hit it for the beach, figuring I'd either get wet or take a walk before Prime Time begins for the summer. And do you know what? The sun came out, defying all weather forecasts, and the surf wasn't too challenging for my semi-rehabbed shoulder and pinched nerve. It wasn't even that nasty, stinging cold that it has been...must have been a good 60 degrees. When you get a nice day like today, even if you only actually get a little bit of it, amazing how you can forget the days and weeks, sometimes even months, of agony or waste or unease. The brain doesn't really subconsciously know about passing of time. In it you are a schoolchild forever, and summer is here. |
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