There is that one day, usually in the second half of August, when you know that fall is coming. The overnight temperature begins to drop below sixty, in the evenings it is no longer uncomfortable to wear long pants or even a sweatshirt, you begin to wear a wetsuit in the morning surf again, and the shape of the waves begins to change. This latter event is open to considerable speculation; it is considered a myth by those of a scientific mind and even by some surfers. But watermen know that something different begins to occur with the delivery of energy through water, and they adjust their sails, the trim tabs on their hulls, the nuance and knots of their surfcasting tackle, and their technique accordingly.
Metaphorically, this is especially noted by the early morning surfers, all of whom are over the age 45. The younger set doesn’t go to bed until 3 or 4 in the morning; they don’t wake until noon or so. Those of us who are parents and grandparents are up and in the water in time to see the sun rise from a gray/mauve/red horizon [well, at least on the eastern seaboard] and all of us know the familiar challenges of being middle-aged and older.
After a week of so or mornings such as this, I’m feeling a little weakness in my right knee. My shoulder has been making a popping sound whenever I reach behind me, and I have to warm up a little before I can turn my head all the way to the left. Although we don’t catalog our signs of maturity with one another, the “dawn patrol” knows from its mild grimaces of discomfort or slight limps that we are feeling the effects of having graced creation for a half century or more. Sometimes the simple chore of putting on a wetsuit seems a reenactment of Leighton’s “Hercules wrestling with death for the body of Alcestis”.
On this particular morning, the waves, even with their altered shape, are not quite ready for us. They are low, slow, and weak. When younger, we would sit on the beach and wait it out or, more likely, enter the water and wait and wait. We had all day, after all. However the cold water and the colder air are a little uncomfortable in our maturity, so we do the better thing and walk about the beach collecting the detritus left from the day before. To paraphrase William Carlos Williams, we pick up the pure products of America Go Sloppy.
“My grandkids learn about the environment in school,” says an older waterman with whom I am picking up an assortment of soda cups, cheese steak wrappers, and, interestingly, a stained “Obama ‘08” t-shirt. “When they visit me, they turn off my lights, unplug my coffee maker and toaster, and generally hector me about being a better re-cycler. Then they come to the beach and forget all that. It was never this messy back in the day.”
“You know what I find weird?", he continued. "Back then there were hardly any trash cans on the beach, yet people took their refuse with them at the end of the day. Now we’ve got cans for trash, cans for bottles, cans for newspapers or [stuff], cans for I don’t know what. They’re all over the beach; like every 25 feet or so. Yet, look at all the [stuff] people leave.”
“They don’t know what they’ve got. They don’t care, I guess. As long as they use the right words their actions don’t have to match. They must of have learned that from celebrities. Maybe politicians.”
Another dawn patroller arrives, looks at the sad state of the surf, smiles at us and speaks the cliché that has been ironic since the 1960’s: “You should have been here yesterday.” We laugh, but my elder companion looks at the surf, then the trash, then the surf again. “I think I’m going to start saying, ‘You should be here tomorrow.’”
[Excerpt from Reading Water, all rights reserved ©2011]