JON FROM ALEXANDRIA
LAST, JONATHAN V.
Casual JON FROM ALEXANDRIA Midlife crises come early to the perpetual adolescent. Mine began, in a slow, simmering way during the summer of my thirtysecond year. I felt pangs of...
...I felt pangs of mortality and decrepitude...
...But it’s risky enough to provide the occasional thrill and every so often to require some physical courage...
...If possible, without doing any actual surfi ng...
...Or else you’re not really a surfer...
...It’s been a year now, and I’ve reached a minimal level of competence...
...JONATHAN V. LAST...
...I’ve learned to take comfort in the realization that the waves roll in, one after another, whether or not I turn to catch them...
...now I just want to surf...
...he began pointing in my direction as a good-sized wave crested in front of me...
...Whether or not I’m even there...
...Almost every surfer I’ve met says he’s surfed the mammoth—and very dangerous— waves at Mavericks in California or the North Shore on Oahu...
...And instead of viewing the world with laid-back bonhomie, they build up little communities that gossip about each other...
...There were the hip surfer sunglasses and the tragically expensive surf watch...
...So I latched, quite suddenly, onto the idea of becoming a surfer...
...We locked eyes, then he splashed down and swam off...
...Cruise any online surfi ng forum and you’ll see surfers railing against “kooks”—people learning to surf—for somehow destroying the sport...
...For my own part, I have no desire to conquer 25-foot monsters...
...For instance, most surfers aren’t effortlessly cool...
...When this fellow found out that Kreeft lived in New England, he replied, “You’re crazy...
...I was determined to become one of these dudes...
...In addition to time and date, it tells the height of the tide, the moon phase, and the spring/neap cycle...
...Surfi ng promised salvation...
...When someone dies surfing, the board is usually responsible...
...People tend to worry about sharks, but the biggest danger is your surfboard: You’re tethered to a large, rigid device designed to collect, focus, and redirect force...
...You don’t really love to surf...
...When you think of a surfer, you see a tan, lean 20-year-old with wind-blown, devil-maycare hair...
...In his charming book I Surf, Therefore I Am, he recounts meeting another surfer on the water in California...
...As is the claim to have surfed really big and perilous waves...
...Surfers are hardbodied and cool...
...I signed up for lessons and started surfi ng for real...
...Peter Kreeft is a philosophy professor at Boston College who, at 70, has been surfi ng for most of his life...
...I treasure sitting on my board, bobbing in the water just beyond the break...
...Like all sports, surfi ng is physically enjoyable—riding a wave feels good in the same way that hitting a line-drive does...
...He wasn’t more than a yard or two away, almost near enough to touch: For an instant he was suspended in the air, his mouth hanging open in a grin...
...There were other purchases too embarrassing to recount here, but none provided more than passing comfort...
...Surfi ng also provides an element of adventure...
...The waves drown out manmade noises, and when I face the horizon, the only other creatures I see are low-fl ying pelicans and the occasional dolphin...
...As the wave broke, a gray bottlenose dolphin jumped out from the foam...
...Mind you, surfi ng isn’t really dangerous—it’s not like serving in the Marines...
...Because I’ve found that the pleasures of surfi ng do not lie in achievements...
...Dude...
...Worse, I saw the gradual creep of grown-up responsibility leaching into my life...
...In any case, I wasn’t about to ignore a surfing dolphin...
...Then last summer I had a conversion experience...
...Even old surfers are cool...
...Maybe they all have...
...I was swimming in the waters off North Carolina’s Emerald Isle...
...A lone surfer sat on his board, a little way to my left...
...I try to stay apart from other surfers...
...I used to want to be part of the surfer culture...
...I like to think that if I had been present at the apparition at Fatima or Guadalupe or Knock I would not have hesitated to believe...
...But along the way I discovered that surf culture isn’t quite what I had hoped it would be...
...So I started buying surf gear...
...Yet most of the time, surfi ng is radically peaceful...
...I don’t aspire to anything more than surfi ng mediocrity...
...Actually, they put rather a lot of effort into it...
...The offputting provincialism isn’t just online...
...A man can measure time by the shifting of his pretensions...
...There is a proud tradition of middle-aged rebels cruising waves on 10-foot longboards, every ride a rebuke to adulthood and the grave...
...But it strikes me a bit like the number of Frenchmen who, after the war, said they had been active in the Resistance...
...This obsession with what makes a real, versus a fake, surfer is part of surf culture...
...Casual JON FROM ALEXANDRIA Midlife crises come early to the perpetual adolescent...
Vol. 13 • August 2008 • No. 46
