Summer Wishes, Winter Dreams
I love looking at the ocean at all times, especially when it takes its great Cosmic Breaths of Tidal Change. Under a million stars I loved fishing for Blues on a full and luminous Summer Moon. It is sublime in the early Fall when you cruise it by Sail on an old Oyster Sloop. There is nothing like it for a bonding experience with your children at a tender age. It is the same when several generations of a family tumble and jump into it together. It’s a kind of Summer Baptism. It is likewise when a bunch of old friends run into it, throw a football around or just laugh out loud at the sheer joy of it all. When I’m in it at the end of a long August day and the sun is starting to melt I refer to it as…Zen Ocean Frolic. But there is one thing I will never do in the Ocean under any circumstances—let alone Winter— and that is get on a Surf Board and attempt to ride its waves.

Three seagulls perch on the snow-covered beach while they watch a winter warrior attempt to catch a wave.

I am a longtime die-hard Armchair Surfer. I have close friends who have been Surfing since 1965. I hang out with them on the Beach every Summer. I read Novels about Surfing (Kem Nunn’s excellent “surf-noir” Dogs of Winter)
and the magazines as well. Several times a summer I watch an Extreme Surf Documentary with the likes of Laird Hamilton and company. And I love the jargon/dialect: sets, heats, swells, barrels, etc. — this and the obsessive/spiritual side of it all. In the end, everything is cool as long as I don’t have to Surf. In addition to all of this I am from South Philadelphia where there are no waves to be found except in the Delaware River when a Tug Boat or Freighter goes plowing by.

The view from Sea to Land from behind an endless set of rising and falling Swells has always been unique for me. Whenever I’m on a boat that’s close to shore I take time to meditate on this POV and I like to think that some of our more enlightened Surfers do it as well. For me it is very soothing and a bit ominous at once. And more so in Winter when the dry part of Mother Earth seems that much further away. I do not recall the Beach Boys, Avatars of
Surf Music and Culture, singing about how the tiny razors of sleet felt on your face or in your eyes. Nor do they coo about the extra weight of slush rolling over you while lying stiff on your Popsicle board. And I have never heard anyone sing about how a snow-covered Beach or Boardwalk must look as it comes rushing toward you from the peak of a big December Wave. Or when you’re wiping out as well. But I imagine these are just some of the rewards of the Surfers who do not desert the Ocean like so many of its Summer Disciples do at the end of Labor Day Week-End.

Finally, I have a recurring Tableau of Winter Surfing that never ceases to give me pleasure and solace. I’m walking close to the Beach but not on it. The low sky is thick with roiling ashgrey clouds over an ocean of slate and winddriven Waves trailing long white manes. I am gently rocked by the powerful sense of desolation found in this late November day. Then something stops me in my tracks: three lonesome figures in the midst of his Maelstrom. They are not hanging close to shore but sitting and bucking on their boards in full wet-suit regalia aiting for the Wave-Gate to open. They seem so natural and adapted that they might as well be Seals or Minke Whales. On the other hand they make me think of the terror expressed in Stephen Crane’s novella The Open Boat. I watch them for the better part of an hour.

Wetsuit design and technological development makes it almost effortless to surf in the cold winter months. Some surfers even claim that they get “too warm” in their suits!

Winter Surfing tells us several things. One is how much Surfers love and are obsessed with Surfing. Another is how they are always finding ways to go out on any new tangent of weather, wave size and location to Surf again and to make it new. Just like those three Salt Water Cowboys in the above mentioned Tableau. It felt like an Oceanic Nirvana to me that day…As well as my worst Nightmare. But from my toasty and comfortable Armchair, I will never really know one way or the other.