The Naked Surf

Harvey stood on the cold winter beach in Northern California, white longboard pointing to the sky and bare ass pointing towards the bluff behind him. He watched the waves roll into the bay, breathed the air, noted how the wind passed his ears, absorbed the weak winter sunlight, and shifted the coarse sand between his toes. He also watched the violent vibrations running down the length of the brand new pier that sat in the bay as an ugly insult to the ocean. Large waves slammed into it and rolled onto the beach. Observations finished he entered the frigid water and began paddling out to the break.

Harvey dug his hands into the water and pulled fiercely with each stroke. He could feel the ocean’s anger. With each wave, he pushed through or swam up the face of he felt the ocean trying to spin him and suck him under. The waves hissed menace in his face as the stinging white caps broke over his head. He was numb past his elbows and the parts of his body that still felt any sensation only felt pain from the cold. The sharp wind burned across his flesh and his mouth was always full of saltwater. He’d been in the water seven minutes and hadn’t even made it halfway to the break.

As he made his way further out Harvey could see the vibration moving through the pier. The small cracks in the cement pilings he’d seen before had all widened and in some places become large gouged out holes. The water churned brown and grey in an indistinct soup of swirling malice towards a pier that tried to force its waves into a shape the ocean had never intended.

Harvey continued to fight it even as his own violent memories of the jungle and the war began to churn up, humid death on punji sticks and festering wounds. Again and again the faces of the dead, those he’d killed and those he’d had to watch die, flipped through his memory burying him deeper in guilt until he was unsure if he was paddling through the waves or the violence of his past.

“Paddled out here to escape the war, not re-live it. It’s all coming down,” he mumbled to himself.

He pulled hard to make the last few yards past the break and reached the calmer water just past the reef. He sat on his board resting. The feeling began to return to his fingers as sharp little needles of pain. The lip of the waves that formed just as they crossed the reef dropped right in front of him and into the new channel created by the pier and made their rapid sprint to the beach. He reached his hand out and felt his fingers hiss through the wave top. He marked the potential of its power and decided he could wait a while for the massive waves that he knew were roaring towards him out of the open ocean to appear. Beyond the reef and bay, the only violence was in the wind. It battered his naked back, but he had become a rock.

His set finally rolled in and Harvey closed his eyes. He took deep slow breaths in through his nose and out through his mouth. The rhythms of his heart slowed; the rhythms of the ocean slowed, and then they synchronized and there was no heartbeat or waves. He opened his eyes and felt no violence or fear. He paddled onto the lip of the next wave until he felt the wave’s energy merge with his own, then he stood on his board naked but clothed in nature’s purity and let the ocean take him.

Rushing down the face of the wave he found the blank spot in his head and in his heart where no forces competed or collided. His senses simply drank the energy of the roaring wave; his feet knew their place on the board; the darkness of his past, Vietnam with its horrors, and the constant uncertainty of his future, the lingering doubts and paranoia were wiped clean by the great water’s energetic present; Harvey knew that despite any outside influences that might have been trying to sabotage this wonderful ride that the ocean could see right through the pain and the fear into what was the core of his heart and soul, where the same primal energies that made up the undying current also drove the energies that gave Harvey life.

He made the drop but didn’t bottom turn out. He pointed his board straight for the beach and let his speed carry him. Overhead the massive wave began to collapse. To his left, the ugly pier was collapsing as well. Harvey held his line and disappeared as the wave broke and whitewater exploded around him.

Then he emerged from the fury and rode his board onto the beach. The pier was now a crushed pile of concrete and twisted steel broken in the ocean. But Harvey was intact, alive, and whole.