An Old Journal (and Surfline) Sends Me Somewhere

This morning was one of those sun-soaked mornings that lifts you out of bed with two giant hands and places you upright on your feet. We moved through the apartment like lively ghosts, quietly performing early-day tasks like splashing our faces with cold tap water and drinking hot coffee next to the cracked open window. When mornings like this arise, you simply float along with it, and ride this renewing wave as deep into the day as you can, until the tedious finally becomes tedious again, and we slip back, and lock into, the slow, churning gears that we are all too familiar with. 

Throughout the shuffle of this surprisingly energized morning, I found myself drifting towards my old notebook, stashed in an unused backpack inside of my bedside chest. I’m not sure what exactly drew me to it in the first place, but I find it’s best not to question these sorts of feelings. Similar to that pull down the coast, to a wave you haven’t thought of in months, and haven’t surfed in even longer. There is something nourishing about following these desires as they bubble to the surface in front of you and understanding that the reason “why” isn’t as important as people make it out to be. 

Hunched over at my desk, I flipped through page after page, navigating the poor penmanship and small writing that littered the faded lines. Much of what I read was nonsensical, like paragraphs of a story in no particular order– little vignettes of a confused boy tip-toeing towards adulthood. Albeit highly dramatic (as if you haven’t learned that about me yet), the sentences lodged themselves easily into the cracks of skin. It was a pleasant surprise to be so welcoming to old words from a time past. 

As the pages flipped faster and faster I felt myself begin to move through time. Not like they do in the movies, in some sort of trippy montage back to the beginning, but rather a string of memories, like a barefoot walk down a long beach, pointing out the places (and people) that I’ve been along the way. Sketches, poems, stories, even flat out gibberish, all tracing my life like a topographical map, perhaps not the most useful on a day to day basis, but admittedly pretty to look at now and again. 

A meeting alarm chimed and, like that, I was snapped out of my nostalgia-induced coma. In a bath of blue light, I moved from one world to the next, and began another work day in a long line of many. A dozen emails were sent, a few meetings attended, and the sun still climbed higher in the sky. But as is the case with many– okay every– other work day, all it takes is an idea, as simple as checking the surf, to send productivity straight down. And, as most west coast surfers know, there is swell touching down on the California coast as I write this, and will continue to grow throughout today and tomorrow. 

Naturally, my day was given new meaning. I had to track the surf everywhere up through Bolinas and down to Watsonville. Okay, I also checked San Luis Obisbo once (or twice) too. Flipping back and forth through Surfline pages, I watched as a tame morning evolved into a bombing afternoon. A fairly consistent wind direction took on countless faces along the jagged California coast, grooming some waves into magazine-esc perfection, and others into a raging and boiling bowl of soup. Fog gripped certain cliffs, and left others bare. The rising tide (from noon onward) made a few waves unsurfable while making other, slabby closeouts, now makeable. 

The countless variables, changing on the quickest of scales, across the long and exposed coastline created a million different waves today, and surely more tomorrow. Like little vignettes, or the mixed up paragraphs of an unknown story, California coast was everything. Each spot, a timestamp to a place (and a person) that I had once been. From a tentative journey to Manressa with two new friends, to a scary evening alone on Waddell Creek cliffs, to my first surf at Ocean Beach. I flipped through the pages– the screens– and watched from afar as these waves moved across the monitor in front of my face, sending me backwards through time just as I had in the hours before.