Outrigger Canoe Club, Waikiki Beach, Oahu

I promised to retrace all of my past attempts at surfing. The third one kept me out of the water for nearly a year. It also happened to be set in paradise, off Oahu’s Waikiki Beach, the motherland of the sport and the same island that spawned the North Shore and Makaha and Waimea Bay, all legendary surf breaks. As is apparent by now, I am no legend and am not setting out to be.

I was in over my head before we even paddled out, clutching a shorter, slicker board that soon proved easy enough to slip off of, even in flat water. The reef was so vast and the break so shallow, we had to paddle wide and around to get into position. Cheering outrigger canoe teams roared over the waves around us. On the downward slope of each wave, I could make out their colorful oars, hoisted into lines perpendicular to the horizon like a laser sight on the move. Experienced surfers rode right alongside. The waves were louder than I’d ever heard, gaining speed and decibels from a seemingly timeless place as I let one after the next pass.

Then, panic. What the hell was I doing taking on the ocean? Who did I think I was to venture a quarter mile offshore in little more than a rash guard while who knew how much reef stretched beneath us? How easy it would be for to drift with the current, miss a wave, and introduce the sharp live limbs of the reef to my bare skin. I realized how much safer I felt in a wetsuit—a rubbery body armor of protection against the surface areas hidden below.

Ryan reassured, telling me that this was the place, that I owed it to myself to get up and go and enjoy it. I looked back to shore, gauged our distance, and wondered what else might be out there with us. In other words, there was little yielding to the present. Ryan held back to bob in the water with me, and just then a sea turtle crested, a symbol of luck to this island, on the day between our respective thirtieth birthdays as we waded out on borrowed boards. Who doesn’t try for a wave after that?

So, I thought about the turtle and tried. I caught the next wave on my belly and went giddy from the rush, the roar. Okay, turtle, I could do this; I paddled back into a good spot to expect another wave. When I went for it again, I paddled hard, focused on getting my legs from behind to under me until they slipped and missed altogether. They went under water with me, twisting in a warm churning tunnel of bubbles and gray blue. I had no sense of direction until my board popped up and, my ankle leashed, I did too. I broke the surface coughing, but I hadn’t felt any reef, I hadn’t had to hold my breath for too long, and Ryan was there when I looked for him. It was the worst that would likely happen, he said. And I had made it.

But it was enough for me to know the answer to my earlier question. I didn’t have the right to take on the ocean like this, not until I did know what the hell I was doing. I paddled in, felt the energy deficit, looked out to see where I had just been, and realized that had been a lucky turtle after all. I was back on the hot sand, Ryan was somewhere out there in the lineup, both of us happy for the moment and the medium at hand.

This project is a continued attempt to figure out what the hell I am doing when I wade into the ocean, such a vast body that only becomes daunting because of my relationship to it and my attempt to enter its own lineup of life and power. It exists in its natural state—always. It doesn’t panic or hem or haw or consciously commit. So when I don’t panic or hem or haw, no wonder things feel more natural. It seems to be a lesson I can use out of the water as much as in.