Learning to Surf

The place we park to surf at Mangas—Mangamaunu, NZ

One of my friends once said to me, “You are a great surfer, Kara, you just haven’t discovered it yet.” This made my heart balloon with excitement—there is hope for me yet. It is a lifelong dream of mine to learn how to surf. I watch people on the shore and wish that I could look that cool in a wetsuit, riding up and down the waves before nonchalantly falling sideways into the crashing surf. And a few weeks ago, I tried on a wetsuit—a real life RipCurl wetsuit, which is pretty exciting, if you ask me. I stood in that surf shop thinking, maybe my Beach Boys surfer dream could finally come true.

Well, I didn’t buy it, in case you were wondering. That’s a later-in-the-week purchase, although the owner did offer me an additional 10% off. Maybe next time. That’s something my parents, have instilled in me, to think carefully about purchases, especially big ones. A coworker asked me about this a couple days ago when I was describing my hesitancy to buy something. She said, “Do you always do that? Take awhile to decide to buy something?” Yes. Yes, I do. I’d like to say it is because it due to my savvy money skills, but it could also be because of my indecisiveness. I often leave the store (or online tab) for a couple days, and if I am still thinking about it and have decided that it fits a gap or ironically fits really well, I will buy it. Or I will leave it alone. There you go, Dad. I talked about money of my own accord.

And so after I started the job and realized that I probably would start making back some money soon, I returned to the store and tried on an O’Niell wetsuit. It took an embarrassingly long time to put on, I must admit. I was struggling in that changing room. The suit has a chest enclosure which means you have to fit your whole body into a small opening at the top of the wetsuit, rather than having a simple zip up the back. The attendant mistakenly must have thought I was a pro at getting wetsuits on, because after a mere five minutes he called out to ask how I was doing. I was barely past my knees.

Thankfully, after nearly dislocating my shoulder and definitely bruising my arm, I got it all on and even zipped. And then I had the audacity to buy it, wondering if the difficulty of getting it on would hinder me from surfing as often. And yet, I did not have many other options. Somehow, the second time donning that wetsuit took a scant seven minutes, and now I can throw it on in relative ease in just two minutes. This is the progress we look for in our gap years, folks.

You may or may not know how much of a dream of mine it is to surf. I remember listening to the Beach Boys on a CD player as a kid, skipping through the boring songs to get to Surfin’ USA or Surfer Girl. I would read books—ones that my younger sister is now reading—about girls who lived on California beaches, wishing I could be there too. On the couple of trips we took to California to visit family, I would jump in the waves, as tall as I could find, getting a thrill for each washing machine of a wave that swept past me. And now, I am one step closer to becoming that Surfer Girl.

It has been a couple weeks since that wetsuit purchase, and now on my days off, my friend Jackie and I do our best to imitate the surfers we’ve spent hours watching on the shore. We head to the Surf Shop, where Wayne, the owner, generously suggests good spots to surf for the day and gives us the local discount for the foamies, telling us we can return them whenever.

The first time we went out on the rocky beach, we came back in with bruised feet and electric smiles. We had managed to get our knees up on the board, and since then, we have even stood, if only for a few seconds. But we are improving, and being out in the water is a magnificent feeling. The wetsuits make all the difference. Jackie and I quickly found that sitting on the board looking out at the horizon or at the sun-coated mountains was just as enjoyable as paddling hard to try to catch a wave only to end up getting scrambled by the whitewash. It is an exhausting, endorphin exploding sport, this one. And we love it. By no means are pros, like the ones in that show I was addicted to in my senior year of college (my roommates would tell you), but we are out there, putting in the work, getting our shoulders more worn and weary each time.

I am supremely grateful for this dream that is becoming a bruised but thrilling reality. And running prepared me well for it. The excitement of finding out that I can actually run more than four, five, or six miles—which I discovered on a coastal gravel road in Alaska this summer—is its own unique high. Running taught me to respect my body. It taught me to be proud of it, to appreciate what it can do. It is hard work, it takes discipline, and sometimes it can be thankless. Surfing is a celebration of life, again of what your body can do (or what it is learning to do), and also of the beauty of the other parts of the created world.

Surfing brings you right up against the distinct realities of the ocean. The waves will take you whether you want them to or not. That seal will come up and swim next to you, despite you asking it to swim somewhere else. The rocks will not move, your toes will. And when you find that harmony of moving out past the whitewash on creation’s roller-coaster atop a bright blue floating board, it can be wonderful. But a lot of the time, your shoulders are pumping hard against the breaking waves, and one of the board’s fins might cut into your shoulder, and it seems like an insurmountable distance to make it past the break.

This is a good place to say that surfing is a metaphor to life…how you have to get past the bad to really enjoy the good, etc, etc. This is stuff that would make good devotional material. But I just want to say as an echo to Dani Rojas, “Football is life” (Ted Lasso), that surfing is life. I was trying to think of a way to make this profound, you know, to say that somehow this ordinary thing is stacked with meaning. And it is. It is meaningful. It is life. It doesn’t need to be infused with what we might call '“spectacular” to be itself very good. I am celebrating the good fulfillment of being out in the water in a suit that keeps me warm, on a board given to me by a local surfer who I’ve chatted skincare with (last time I went out with zinc all over my face—there is photo evidence, but please don’t ask for it), the freedom of a car to get to my favorite beach in the world, alongside a good friend who cheers me on when I stand for a split second on the board, and the calm of enjoying the waves that Creator called good.

So that’s where I am headed. Out to those waves that might give me a new bruise today, with Surfer Girl blasted on my phone’s speakers, and the window down to Mangamaunu Beach. To enjoy the goodness out there in this wild and created world.