The Shock

 
There had been a cyclone somewhere far away, roaring ferociously over the wide expanse of the ocean, and it had whipped the water into a wild frenzy. The long-range groundswell had brought it over to us, and now all around us the water was boiling and churning, roiling and rolling to and fro between the open gap of the bay, and the claustrophobically close cliffs of our take-off zone. The water swirled and bubbled in dirty streaks of brown, and a case could well be made that, really, we shouldn’t be out here at all.

   But that was never going to happen. Surfing is a pursuit of an opportunistic nature. When the swell is there, you’ve got to seize the opportunity and jump on it as hard and fast as you can, because there is no way of telling how long it will last, or when it will be turned on again by the Great Big Wind In The Sky, patron saint of surfers and people who like to eat a lot of baked beans.

   So we bent our backs into the howling wind, put our heads down and our arses up, and paddled into the sweep with all we had, while the surf boomed hard against the cliffs to our side, sending showers of spray flying high.

   Sometimes, however, all you have might just fall that little bit short of what is actually required.

   There is a particular style of American cartoon, from the era when cartoons were drawn by hand and animated by impenetrable magic, that involves characters, often but not always animals, chasing each other, most usually with the sharply focussed intent of visiting as much grievous bodily harm upon the pursued quarry as can possibly be fitted into the available time slot. Sooner or later, with fatalistic inevitability, this will involve the chased character running out over the top of a cliff. When this happens, it is standard narrative convention that this character will run out fast and hard over the edge of the cliff, and will, for the space of a few seconds, keep running madly through thin air, feet touching nothing. Their feet and hands, or paws and claws, will rotate at high speed in a circular blur, accompanied by sounds of revving Formula One cars, or similar. After the initial few seconds of running on nothing, realisation of the situation will slowly steal over the character’s facial features, they will look down into the void, come to terms with the hard and fast reality that they have run out of solid ground, and, to the sound of a whistling noise, will plunge into the unfathomable depths of a ravine and towards a certain but humourous death.

   And sometimes reality is stranger than fiction.

   As I paddled headlong into the sweep and the wind, one of our mates, The Shredder, found himself in prime position for the set that was coming through. Being, as he is, Lord Of The Toothpick, one of very few shortboard riders in our group of longboarders, he likes to sit as deep as he can, for the twin reasons of taking advantage of as much drop and momentum as he can to get himself going, and also, potentially more to the point, to make sure he’s not going to be bloody well outpaddled by some dickhead on a longboard. Like, by way of random example, me. Now it just so happened that from where I was busy battling the sweep I got a perfectly clear profile view of The Shredder and what he was about to attempt.

   I saw him glance over his shoulder, very quickly, size up the situation, and, with a look of single-minded determination, bordering on acute constipation, strike out with his arms as hard and fast as he could.

   The wave rose up behind him. His arms accelerated to a speed normally considered to be beyond the limits of human achievement. They blurred into a very cartoon-like circle. I blinked in surprise, impressed at this super-human feat.

   And, as I watched, the wave underneath him held him up perfectly in place, frozen in time and space, not making an inch worth of headway. The slope opened up below him, reinforcing the notion of him hanging suspended in mid-air, like a cartoon character, still flailing like mad without getting anywhere.

   Until the wave finally cranked itself up to its full momentum, and, very, very slowly, still teetering on top of the crest in see-saw position, started sucking him backwards out to sea, a look of stunned disbelief on his face.

   I rolled off my board in hysterical fits of laughter, gulped a huge mouthful of brown cyclone water down, and started drowning.

   When I re-emerged, spitting out seaweed, oysters and sand, he was still sitting in the water, looking around him in a passable imitation of The Stunned Mullet, and staring after the set wave peeling away without him in heartbroken shock.

   You can’t win them all.

   Nevertheless, this wasn’t his first rodeo. The next set was well and truly his, and he vanished into the middle distance. Better late than never.

   That left me now manoeuvring into position to take my turn, to try my luck. The Shredder’s wave had been the first of the set, and it had looked like a cracker. However, as happens so often, the second one was shaping up to be a freak rogue from out of the deep blue, or, more accurately on this day, the deep brown, and started announcing its intentions to smash my head in. So I looked at it once, gauged its speed, size and potential for eating people, twisted myself just a little bit to the side, and, fixing my eyes on the wall rising up underneath me and next to me, I took a deep breath and paddled for my life.

   The fangs of hell opened up underneath me, and, putting all my faith into my deeply flawed instincts and comprehensive lack of understanding, experience, or, for that matter, skill or talent, I jumped to my feet.

   I watched myself slide down into a massive hole in slow motion. I looked at my board, always the worst possible thing to do in mid-jump, and had just enough time to think ‘shit, it’s gonna nose-dive, I’m buggered’, when, as I was bracing myself for the impact of three tons of water, debris and confused baitfish to the back of the head that would be my reward for a fumbled take-off, the board, as if of its own account, smoothly and supplely skidded into a beautiful bottom turn.

   My jaw dropped.

   I stared at the wall rising up next to me. It seemed at least one and a half times overhead. I risked a quick glance at the water below me. I wasn’t at all convinced that the suspiciously brown colour was purely due to the sand and debris caught in it, and didn’t include a modest and involuntary contribution from myself.

   I veered up to the lip, raced back down again, again and again, cut back when I felt it was called for, and generally carved that face into the tiniest fragments possible, trying to make the most of this unique opportunity. I had never had a wave this size that I had actually managed to land and not get smashed to pieces by, and I wasn’t going to waste any time wondering about anything else other than enjoying it to the absolute maximum. The monster grew and grew, the gift that kept on giving, and I flew away, ecstatic and mesmerized by the living entity towering over me. Transfixed and held in thrall.

   When the water below me started to spit up sand and gravel, I had just enough sense left to pull myself up out of my delirium, look beyond the brown-green paradise of the unfolding wall next to me, and spot the dreaded end-of-the-line rocks not far away enough in front of me. I threw myself backwards over the lip, landed with all the grace of a boneless chicken, and reeled my board in just in time to keep it from making an up-close-and-personal acquaintance with those rocks. The rocks looked disappointed. They scowled, shook their fists at me and gnashed their teeth, bereft, they felt, of a hearty and well-deserved breakfast.

   I gave them the finger and paddled away back into the sweep, dizzy, giddy and whooping with delight. Bring on another one of those.