Drawn In

The surf was pretty phenomenal yesterday.

If your car is covered with salt, the weather has been unseasonably cool, traffic has been unseasonably heavy, and then all the sudden it's ten degrees warmer and all of the tourists are at the beach, you can bet the surf is pumping. At the moment the wind switches to come out of the southwest, the surf spends about an hour getting organized and then it is a race against time. The swell is falling. As the gentle west wind grooms the face of each wave, it begins to equalize the force of the wind driven sea. If it's blown over twenty five miles per hour onshore for more than three days, it should be head high. At low tide, it will be fun, and in most places serious enough.

If you are on vacation and it has been blowing northeast over twenty miles per hour for more than three days, you may be contemplating going home. At least you can cut the grass before you go back to work. You've over payed for several movies, and some t-shirts that you don't need. You haven't been on the beach, because to do so is to risk death by micro-derm abrasion. And then, the clouds part, the wind shifts and the angry sea (and roadways) give way to the pristine beaches you had been hoping for all along. There's just one thing...the waves still look pretty big, even though they look far less threatening in organized lines.

When the wind shifts, surfers will be standing on dune crossovers gazing to the east, as I was yesterday when I saw a familiar sight: lifeguards speeding down the beach on four wheelers. They stopped about two hundred yards north of our beach access, and I commented to some strangers checking the surf that it looked like a rescue. There was someone stumbling out of the water with the kind of surfboard that indicated that he didn't know what he was doing. We figured that was it, but then, there in the impact zone was a head bobbing. The lifeguard was in the water in seconds, and thanks to the rip current that had caught the victim, was within feet of the individual in distress in less than one minute. As the guard offered the float to the swimmer, who's head was still above water, I commented to the strangers that it looked like the show was over.

I surfed literally until I was exhausted. I caught great waves. I watched friends catch great waves--hollow tubes that fully cover a crouching man. I made it out of some, and was crushed by others. The surf was serious enough to demand complete attention but it was familiar. The waves aren't that good that often, so I'd say it was like being with a great friend that you don't see all that much of. I should have gone back to work when the lunch hour ended. But I knew conditions were fleeting. I stayed until I couldn't.

Yesterday afternoon I was in the town office (completely exhausted) picking up a building permit. I overheard a comment about an ocean rescue that was unsuccessful. I asked if it was the one I'd seen and my fears were confirmed. I didn't see that one going that way. I once asked a friend of mine who is an ER nurse if her experience made her see life as extremely fragile or extremely durable. She said working in the ER just made life more mysterious because she would lose people who seemed to have relatively minor injuries and see people with horrific trauma pull through.

Our quaint little town hides a secret. We are on the margin--on the edge of human habitat. Through practice, familiarity, and probably some hubris, some learn to enjoy the ocean. We may survive there, we may revel, but we cannot thrive. Walking the beach, seeing the ocean turn from angry to inviting and back again reminds us of our fortune and our frailty. The sea, is another world, and the beach is the border. But there is a lot of nothing on that horizon. Sometimes in that nothing, we see what we need to. That is why we are drawn in. And sometimes any one of us can be drawn in too far.