It’s funny how things that were the world to us when we were skinnier and had more hair sometimes go by the wayside.  We don’t want it to happen, but life happens and our priorities change.  That doesn’t mean those things no longer hold any import, they’ve just been replaced by things higher up in the pecking order of life. 

I was reminded of this after reading Beth Mann’s post about surfing.  She spoke specifically to what it was like being a woman out in the waves amongst the men and the semi-tribal atmosphere that sometimes takes hold. 

I commented that Beth’s post really took me back a long ways.  It really doesn’t take much to do that to me, my wife thinks I’m the most nostalgic person on the face of the earth.  Guilty as charged, probably explains my graduate degree in history (fat lot of good that did me) and a love of things old.  And again, live’s change, I have to accept that, but it doesn’t prevent me from having a lifelong appreciation of things I’m no longer involved in.  Like surfing.

For as long as I lived in Florida, which was the better part of my life, I’d surfed.  I still remember a family vacation we took to Lauderdale-by-the-Sea on the east coast when I was about 10 or 11 years old.  Unbeknownst to me it was actually a scouting trip of sorts for my parents, as my dad was preparing to retire to the Sunshine State from our home in the Chicago suburbs, and they hadn’t decided where in the state to settle.  

It was crappy weather for the first couple of days, and I wandered down to the beach across the street from our motel, one of those once  ubiquitous places up and down the Florida coasts with the kidney-shaped pools and the sliding glass doors right next to the room doors. I saw the surfers and was entranced, like I’d been hit in the gut, but in a good way, and I knew I wanted to do what those guys were doing out there in the surf.

I trudged through the sand down to the waters edge and got a close look at a board and was just fascinated with it, its shape, the fin, and all the wax on the deck.  I think I asked my dad that night if I could have one (didn’t happen).  When my parents later informed me that we were moving to Sarasota on the west coast, my first reaction was “what’s Sarasota.”  My second reaction was “this sucks” as moving was the last thing I wanted to do.  But I have to say I’ve always been grateful my parents opted for the west coast, especially in the early seventies when towns like Sarasota and Venice were little more than beach towns that rolled out the red carpet every winter for the snowbirds.  They still roll out the red carpet but the towns themselves bear little resemblance to their former selves (hell, I-75 didn’t even go south of Tampa when we first moved to the area in 1973).

Eventually I settled down in my new surroundings, and by the time high school came I wanted to do little else than party and surf.  It became my identity, my own little clique at school where it was just myself and a few other serious, hard-core surfers.  Some kids who didn’t surf would drive to school with boards up on the racks to try to be cool, but we would just laugh at them, felt we had the right to as we were fairly ostracized at school anyway.  I went to Riverview high and always wished I could have gone to cross-town Sarasota high as that was where most (or so it seemed to our young minds) of the surfers in town went.  I knew a lot of them from the beach, and they just seemed pretty cool to me. 

More importantly, Sarasota high was where they would show the latest surf movies, right in the auditorium on Saturday night.  For all you youngsters out there consarnit!  there weren’t always dvds and the internets and ipods and downloads.  They would actually show 16 or 32 mm film movies, and every surfer in town would show up as it was not a common occurrence.  There in the darkened auditorium everyone would hoot and holler when the rock would start rolling and images of mountainous barrels peeling off at Pipeline came on the screen, and we would really go apeshit when Gerry Lopez, the Pipe Master, would smoothly drop in on a twenty-footer, hit a styling bottom turn as the peak kicked out over his head and buried him deep in the barrel until the compressed water of the Pacific would blast him out over the shoulder.  There were a very few times when there would actually be surf day after a movie, but when it happened it was almost magical, and usually in the winter when the big northern fronts would plow southeasterly across the Gulf and the waves that were generated would be smoothed out by the trailing offshore winds the next morning. 

Surfing in the winter in Sarasota is surprisingly good, and surprisingly cold.  With just the right front coming through, I would go with my friend Gene up to Turtle Beach at the southern end of Siesta Key in the pre-dawn hours, the heat of my mom’s Corolla blasting down on our wetsuits that we placed at our feet, coffee or hot chocolate warming our hands.  Soon others would pull up, and because it was dark we couldn’t see the waves, but we could hear them, and if it was really peeling off in long lines you could hear it, a long pppphhhhtttt as it broke, and if it was really clean and glassy and barreling the waves would actually spit at the end of the tube like at Pipe.  We’d hear that beautiful sound and let out whoops of joy and anticipation. Even in the winter we’d be in the water five, six hours straight, sometimes longer, and four to six foot glass was not unheard of at Turtle in December.