Free

Wild. That’s the only word to describe it because it’s untamed, free, without boundaries or restraints. The Pacific Ocean.

The name is ironic because it is the opposite of peaceful. But perhaps the name comes from how a person feels when in its company. I went to college at UC Santa Cruz, and before every big school event—midterms, finals, presentations—I would drive over to the beach, find a rock or a bench to sit on, and stare out at the waves. The air would taste of salt and carried the tang of tangled and rotting seaweed, and the breeze would slap my face with its cold, damp palm.

But my love affair with the ocean began long before then. There is a legend that the original inhabitants of Santa Cruz, the Ohlone, put a curse on the place once Europeans arrived, a curse that the bay would haunt those who lived there for the rest of their lives.

Whether the story is true or fiction, the intent is real. Though I live in a landlocked place now, the ocean still crashes into my thoughts and dreams with the force of a winter storm. I left California many years ago, but it will always be a part of me even if it’s no longer my home.

I knew the ocean growing up: I grew up not too far from it. Occasional family trips when I was in single digits, a picnic lunch that included sand-crunchy tuna fish sandwiches and ice-cold lemonade from a big green tub thermos, doled out through its metal spout. The well-earned exhaustion after all day under the sun, cheeks glowing red. The salty fish and seaweed smell clinging to my skin and hair, like I’d become a mermaid from constant contact with the pounding waves.

These were always supervised visits, though—a friendly meeting with the ocean, artificial in its overseen protection from my parental wardens. My mother smearing more sunscreen on my arms and face, my dad telling me not to go out too far—there were riptides lurking somewhere out there, apparently. I didn’t know what riptides were at the time—perhaps similar to sharks? I’d heard of Jaws—but I kept an eye out for them, regardless.

Time passed then from child to teen. High school roared up like a wave and swept me away: new friendships, new motivations, and brand-new crushes. My circle expanded, and it included my old love, and now people to share it with. My three friends and I were scofflaws, and when summer days beckoned but spring classes were still in bloom, we hopped into my friend’s borrowed, beat-up truck and headed toward the horizon.

The ocean was an addiction that wouldn’t be shaken or broken. At first, we would go when the heat was scorching—September and May days, when the California heat lingered like summer. Then our days of cutting class crept toward the rainy months—October, April, November, March.

One overcast day when we were all huddled in sweatshirts and jeans, we couldn’t handle one more period of conjugating French verbs: “J’aime, tu aimes, elle aime”—and we piled all four of us into the beat-up truck and headed over the Santa Cruz Mountains to arrive at our favorite beach, Natural Bridges.

Because the chilled air was barely above fifty degrees and a light drizzle had begun to fall, the beach was deserted except for us. It was near the northern tip of the city, far from the more popular Boardwalk where the tourists lingered. This was a beach for locals. The eucalyptus trees in the spring and fall hemming in the beach would fill with migrating monarch butterflies, the olive-green leaves flushing orange and black with movement like breathing as the butterflies gently opened and closed their wings.

But there were no butterflies that day, just us. We’d brought shorts and t-shirts to swim in—we almost never wore bathing suits—and we ran, whooping, down into the ocean.

The first touch was also always the worst. As our bare feet splashed water up our legs, we shrieked—it was water flowing straight down the coast from Alaska, and it felt more like an iceberg than what should be found off the coast of a California beach.

But the trick was to dive right in. To keep moving and swimming. We called it wave diving—you’d stand on the edge of the moving waves, the water reaching your chest, and wait for the next plume to almost crash. As soon as the water started to curl, the white foam forming at the edge, you would throw yourself forward like an arrow aiming for a target. If you timed it right, the wave would wash over your feet in the air, you would touch bottom with your hands, and you would come out the other side unscathed.

If you timed your dive wrong, the wave would crash into you as you bobbed there, unbalanced, and it would knock you backwards onto the sandy floor. If that happened, you wouldn’t know which way was up or which way was down as you half-drowned with the unbridled force of the ocean pounding on you. The pain of failure made the successes all the more sweet, and the brackish swallows of water when you bailed, and the hint of powerlessness against the force of the ocean’s strength, would make you more determined to win the next time.

There have been many ups and downs to my life, and I don’t know the next time I’ll return to the beach of my childhood. But tasting drowning in small sips while living the immortality of my teenage years was probably the most alive I’ve ever felt. Having no cares beyond the school’s phone call to my parents, warning them that I’d skipped class. We had no worries about the danger of what we did. We would live forever, of course—all teens think so. So did I.

My friends and I are now decades beyond that moment, scattered across North America. I look back at our time diving waves almost like a kind of dream. Free and wild in my memory, just like the ocean, the first love of my life.