Missing Out

As I write this, Hurricane Erin is due east of the Outer Banks, causing devastation surely, and rolling north along the perimeter of the East Coast. The surf in New York is already pumping. This is no surprise. Long period swell peaking today has long been on the forecast. The wind, however, is a different story. Today was supposed to be chaos. Huge surf and a horrible mix of side and onshore winds. It was not supposed to be surfable. This was my mindset all week long, at least. 

I made no plans to grind out the two hour commute by train from East Harlem to Rockaways or Long Beach on this brisk Thursday morning. In fact, I even loaded up on meetings in order to free up my calendar for tomorrow – the day I actually planned to spend surfing. My naïveté to hurricane chasing and surf in New York in general may have led me astray here. Of course none of this is certain. The surf may very well be better tomorrow morning. Maybe the jetties up here are better fit for slightly smaller waves. Maybe I am making the right call. 

Either way, it is hard to stomach as I watch every beach break with a Surfline cam light up before my eyes. 

What am I doing here? Why am I not in the water right now? The surf has sucked for two straight months, and yes, it was supposed to suck today as well, but now it is firing. And all I can do is sit at my desk and watch. I know what you’re thinking. You don’t have to sit in your apartment and watch the cams. You could walk to the subway and get to the beach in two hours. And to that, I have nothing to say. You are correct, I could do that. 

And in other points of my life, I may have. I may have called out sick, canceled my remaining calls, pushed out my deliverables until next week, and snuck out to the beach like the desperate surf addict I am. 

Things are different now. Maybe I am different now. What I do know is that I will be surfing tomorrow morning and for most of the day. This is happening. But the idea of doing this – taking this journey – not just two days in a row, but less than 16 hours apart, is too much for me. This is eight hours of train, two days of hooky, one wet wetsuit, and zero hours of time with my wife (she is on night shift) for roughly six hours of surfing. The equation just doesn’t add up.

I just felt one of you roll your eyes. 

I get it. 

Decisions like this make me question myself too. How much do I actually love surfing? By taking the easy route, ie. staying home and working my job, am I turning my back on who I really am? Am I leaving behind someone I once was? 

Or maybe I never really was that guy. For my first twenty-five years of life, surfing was easy. I grew up on O`ahu and all my best friends surfed. I spent weekends at my grandparents’ house on the water at one of the best point breaks in the world (in my very biased opinion). I could surf every single day if I wanted to, and, for the most part, I did. In college I slowed down, sure. But I made the most of my free weekends. If waves and a day off from water polo lined up, I would be tracking surf between Half Moon Bay and Monterey without fail. My time in San Francisco was no different. I had a car and was fifteen minutes from Ocean Beach. If the wind was right, I was in the water. Which meant, essentially, that I was in the water six months out of the year. 

This is all to say that maybe I’m not as tough as I think I am. Maybe I am less core than I want to admit. Perhaps my life of surfing has more to do with proximity than grit. But honestly, who cares?

There is no way to know for certain. We are all human beings and we all prioritize different things at different points of our lives. It’s hard to describe leaving places like O`ahu and San Francisco, where surfing was the center of my universe, to a place like Miami or New York City where you are forced to build an entire new framework about your relationship to waves and the ocean. If I needed to surf over here the same way I needed to surf over there, I wouldn’t last very long. 

Nowadays I pick and choose where and when to surf more obsessively, and while I can’t surf as often, I can at least go when it is best. This, of course, makes it even more painful when it appears that I have made the wrong decision, thus leading me to do crazy things like write an entire essay to justify it. So there you go. I’m surfing ALL DAY tomorrow and the surf is going to be EVEN BETTER than it is right now – god that wave just spit… Focus, focus. 

I’m surfing tomorrow and it’s going to be epic.