Madness and Montara

I sat quietly and wide-eyed on the drive down into Pacifica from South San Francisco. A heavy fog was rolling inward from the sea, and at the top of the skyline ridge, it folded into the low clouds. I momentarily and instinctively rolled down my windows. And the air felt more like water. Salty and wet and overpowering. Through the condensation building on my windshield, I watched the ocean reveal itself along the exposed and jagged coastline. Wind whipped trees, eroding cliffs, grey water, one highway. All brought together like pieces of a dusty, forgotten puzzle. Oh boy, have I missed this place. 

A week of work, moving apartments, and running around had my head spinning in circles. I felt disorganized and forgetful, always one step behind where I needed to be. While the pieces are beginning to come together, I just can’t seem to relax until everything is completely done. 

Sitting at my desk, an excel sheet on my monitor, my emails open on my laptop, a mail-in-only (wtf?) water bill in one hand, and a text conversation with the seller of a hanging houseplant in the other, I finally came to my senses. What was I doing? Short answer: everything that was being asked of me. But why was I letting this chaos get to me? Why was it making me feel angry? No single task at hand was inherently bad, but for some reason the culmination of everything made me feel more than overwhelmed, it was actually dragging me down. 

A quick “me” break turned into a longer “me” break when I opened up a Surfer’s Journal sitting propped up on my dresser. In just a few minutes, I had read enough to text a few buddies and tell them that I was going to go for a quick sunset surf. If my mind couldn’t come up with an answer to my stress, maybe the ocean would (of course the ocean would). That evening, with a half-empty stomach and a teetering headache, I packed up my car with my wetty and a mid-length and hit the road to Montara State Beach. 

I linked up with a coworker-turned-friend, Alex, in a small, perched parking lot overlooking the water. The conditions were far from great, side-shore wind raced across the rapidly changing sandbar peaks. The sky and the water were a deep grey. Even the sand on the beach seemed to lack color. That being said, it didn’t take long to pick out ledgy lefts and rights, formed alongside rip currents that pulled the foamed water back out to see. Needless to say, I was stoked to get in the ocean and reconnect with a friend that I hadn’t seen in months. 

From the water, the idea of manageable conditions completely fell apart. The waves I saw from the cliffs were now closeouts, as the sandbars had all shifted in a matter of minutes. The side-shore wind was tilting, just slightly, onshore. The grey-reflected water turned out to be a deep, slightly stinky, brown. Simply put, it was chaotic, and for the first fifteen minutes of the session I had a difficult time picking waves and finding my spots. 

Maybe it was the paddle power of the bigger board, maybe it was a deeper, familiar knowledge of the spot, but the unpredictability of the waves and ocean started to unravel. I began to find a groove, naturally slipping into patterns of swing sets and inside runners. Wave after wave came rolling through from the horizon and I must have paddled a mile up and down the beach chasing the changing peaks. It was chaos out there. It was wild– windy, overcast, churning. It was raw, Northern California surf and I couldn’t be happier. My board, an extension of my feet and ankles, held tightly to the fast, tight pockets of the beach break, cutting through side chop as it came, cruising into slow floaters as the waves inevitably closed out. 

It really didn’t hit me until my last wave, which happened to be all the way to the beach, just how special this session had turned out to be. The uncontrollable ocean was on full display and I simply danced straight through it. Shallow double ups, pinching sections, standing rip-current waves, all of it. These elements came and past and came and past and I took them in, adjusted, and enjoyed the simple act of riding waves. 

Back in my car (with the heater blazing) and after my goodbyes and promises of a cruise sesh involving a couple beers, I began to fall back into the reality that I had momentarily escaped from. I still had to move my couch, I had an early meeting the next morning, and I had an absolutely massive pile of cardboard boxes sitting in the middle of the kitchen. Things were going to get even harder before they got any easier. 

But if there is one thing that you should have learned about me by now, is that I’m pretty good at finding meaning in the waves (whether this is actually useful or not? The Jury is still out). So on the warm car ride back to Noe Valley, I couldn’t help but think back to that session. With all the chaos and unpredictability. Navigating bumps, scavenging for peaks. This was all part of the fun. All part of the journey. Life gets disorganized and sometimes things don’t look so good on the surface. But the exact same can be said about the surf (especially near San Francisco), but it just makes it that much sweeter to find a good one in the madness.