Back to the beach
SAN DIEGO — As I approached the coast, the clouds got darker and darker. A few miles from the beach, the raindrops started to sprinkle on my Mini. Then it started to rain harder.
I thought about going to one of the art theaters in San Diego and seeing a movie I could never see in the Imperial Valley, but that was not the purpose of this trip.
No, this trip’s purpose was to get into the ocean one last time before the semester started, one last time before I had too many classes to lead and too many papers to grade, combined with writing deadlines but little time for writing.
I’d been to the beach only once this summer, because of other obligations and geographic complications. For me, for the last 40 years, beach trips have been my catharsis, my way of purging whatever needs release. My days in the ocean are my summer soul-cleansing ritual. Yeah, I have to wear a swim shirt nowadays because of my arch-nemesis, Basal Cell Carcinoma, but that little pain in the epidermis is not going to keep me from my Pacific.
On top of being cathartic, being in the ocean is plain, simple fun. I can surf on a board a little bit, but I haven’t done it in decades and don’t even own a board these days.
What I do is body surf. And I am never happier, never more relaxed, never more at peace as when I’m waiting for sets, then being swept up by waves. I would say it’s the most fun you can have with your pants on if this didn’t happen to be a family newspaper.
I’ve made some converts over the years, created some ocean aficionados and body-surfing lovers. I took my son for his first body-surfing lesson when he was about 9. He had an exhilarating time until he got launched into, as surfers put it, “the washing machine,” meaning the pounding and tumult of your body being battered and flung about by a wave. He came up spitting water and shouting at me for what I’d done to him.
Ten minutes later he was back riding waves. I even made one of his friends into a body surfer a few years later.
I’ve converted some of my students into ocean lovers during study-abroad trips to Spain. Some students expressed concerns about sharks and fish peeing and pooping in the sea, concerns I pooh-poohed as I walked students into the water. (I didn’t, of course, tell them about jellyfish.) Once in, they didn’t want to come out of the Mediterranean.
The Mediterranean is lovely, but, like the Atlantic, it doesn’t have the waves, the perfect feel or the magic of the Pacific.
So last week, knowing my soul needed what it needed, I didn’t let raindrops or unseasonable cold deter me from an extended dip in my ocean. I was one of the few people on the beach or in the water in that stretch of Pacific Beach, but nothing distracted me from my goal.
In wave-riding I escaped from news of innocent people being run over by racists and of the divisive words of the Tangerine Menace. I escaped from syllabi needing finishing and producers anxious to examine unfinished screenplays. Waiting on a set of waves, I could escape thoughts of the deaths over the last few weeks of my first childhood friend and my best canine friend ever.
The waves were small and messy that day, but it didn’t matter. I was in the ocean, the ocean was in me, and for a couple hours, all was well in my world. Bret Kofford teaches writing at San Diego State University-Imperial Valley. His opinions don’t necessarily reflect those of SDSU or its employees. Kofford can be reached at Kofford@roadrunner.com