More than riding the waves

A while back I was about ready to quit, but now that I'm into my fourth year, I think I'm going to stick around a while. Yeah, I still can only barely and occasionally ride a wave. Yeah, I still feel like a fake. Yeah, "surfing" without riding waves is a lot like having sex without orgasms: extremely frustrating and depressing. But looked at more holistically, surfing really is a whole culture, and it's that culture I have come to love, even though I often feel confused and out of place. It's time to admit that this is what I would miss if I quit, more than my "surfing".

Some of what I identify as the culture may be unique to our particular community. I don't know because I haven't ever been part of any other surf community. I love ours because it really is like a small town in the middle of NYC. I love our crowded grungy beach and boardwalk and it's both exhilirating and exhausting the way it often feels like a big stage where endless soap operas play out. I love the people, even the ones I don't like. I love the aloha spirit in which near total strangers offer you a greeting or a burger in their backyard (a spirit marred only by a few bitches and jerks). I love hanging out with the same general group of people, wet and dry, morning noon and middle of the night.

If I quit, most of all, I would miss the people. And it's not just because I would have few friends left. It's because (and here I go wearing my participant observer sociologist hat, er, hood) surf culture is one of the few bastions of real time face to face personal interaction in an increasingly fragmented and disconnected world.

OK, I am sure a bona fide sociologist would have a better way of saying this. What I mean is, most people (at least in NYC) are so busy and stressed that we rarely have time to do anything that doesn't involve making money or other necessities of survival. Before I started trying to surf, I could go months and even years without ever seeing the people I considered my best friends. All our contact took place over the phone or the internet. There were (and still are) people I consider good friends, whom I've "known" for years, who I've never even met. It seems like I've met them because we've talked and corresponded and shared so much, but I don't even know what they look like! It doesn't even seem to matter that we've never met, but it does, you know?

My best friends in the world, indeed virtually all of my friends,live in other states, and though we talk and email we see each other once a year or less. But even with those who live in the same city, it's just too difficult trying to coordinate our schedules so that we can sit down in the same room.

Human beings were meant to look each other in the eye, even occasionally to touch each other. But purposeful face to face contact is increasingly rare and perhaps becoming extinct. It's becoming limited to those people you have no choice but to look at (such as co workers) and those you have to live with (your family).

Surfing (or even "surfing") by definition puts you in face to face, live action, real time contact with other human beings---whether it's forging friendships or dropping in and cursing them out. And even when we don't know each other's names, that feels more real than the disembodied contacts we have in the rest of our lives.