hellwoman
03-06-2007, 06:26 PM
http://www.anchoragepress.com/archives-2007/thisalaskanlifevol16ed9.shtml
THIS ALASKAN LIFE
Surf's up - and freezing
- By Kris Farmen
There are definite advantages to being a surfer in a place where 99 percent of the people think you're a lunatic for paddling out. Crowds in the water aren't a big problem. Plus, you get to experience moments that just don't happen in other parts of the surfing world - for instance, having your hair converted into a mane of ice dreadlocks from the freezing spray. Or maybe having a whole fleet of Coast Guard and State Trooper rigs come screaming down the beach in the middle of a really awesome four-foot day because someone reported a drowning man in need of rescue. Then there's days like the one I had this past October, when I paddled out into Cook Inlet with a gaggle of schoolkids watching me from the beach.
The kids ran in a loose pack through the spruce trees by the parking lot, screaming and hooting at one another as I shut the door of my truck and ambled down to the edge of the grass for a surf check. The conditions were decidedly average. There was a two-foot swell moving through, but a freshening onshore wind was blowing down the backs of the waves, threatening to turn them into unrideable mush.
I sat atop a picnic table, the highest vantage point to be had, and rolled a cigarette while weighing my options. All things considered, it was the best wave I'd seen that day, or the two days previous. I kept watching the swell. I could see Cook Inlet's infamous rip current running north at a good clip as the tide came in. Behind me, one of the kids let out a shriek and started bawling. A chaperone rushed up to comfort her. The crummy surf had put me in a curmudgeonly mood, and I shot a frown at the kids behind me, wishing they'd all just go away and leave me in peace beside my ocean of mediocrity.
There were some makeable faces coming in, but I'd have to pick my waves with care. I stubbed out my cigarette and flicked it into the nearby fire pit. “Hell with it,” I said, and went back to the truck and changed into my wetsuit. A cloud of beach crows flew overhead as I rubbed a fresh layer of wax onto my surfboard. The teacher who'd comforted the injured child happened to walk past as I tucked my stick under my arm and closed the tailgate.
“You're not actually going surfing out there are you?” she said. I watched her brow furrow and her mind wrestle with the data her eyes were transmitting - black wetsuit, surfboard and leash, an unshaven man heading down to the water.
This is another of those surfing moments that only come in Alaska. Virtually every time you go out, there's another person standing there in disbelief, asking if you really are about to go surfing. Because, you know, that water's really cold.
I just smiled, stepped around her and trotted down to the sand.
Alaskan children like those rascals on the beach have it drummed into their heads from an early age to stay out of the water. I know I did. Granted, there's a world of difference between tumbling over the gunwale of a fishing boat and paddling out wearing a quality wetsuit, booties and gloves. But the conventional wisdom is unanimous in Alaska: Cold water kills - so you don't fucking go into the water. Hence my astonishment when I first saw Bruce Brown's The Endless Summer II, with its sequence featuring surfers on Kodiak Island. Surfing in Alaska? No freakin' way, I thought. Those guys are crazy.
It was, as fate would have it, the morning of the day I went surfing for the first time. In just a few hours I was wading out into the Oregon Pacific, only to get spanked and drilled against the headland by a rogue set. That experience scared the crap out of me and I spent the rest of the session on the inside, trying to launch off the bottom into knee-high shorebreak. But when I caught that first wave, I was smitten and my fear forgotten.
Unknowingly, I'd been hooked on the notion of surfing back home in Alaska, but it took me a long time to find my way back to the gray gravel of Cook Inlet's beaches - years of living inland, and more years of surfing far-flung breaks on the other side of the world.
The morning of my first session in Alaska, I stood on a rock on the edge of that same beach parking lot. It was clear and sunny, but there was a 30-knot onshore wind whipping the ocean into boiling, head-high mushburgers.
The beach crows rode the wind high above me like kites on strings. Gnarled Sitka spruce shimmied in the chilly sunshine. Across the water, Iliamna and Redoubt stood white with snow above the blue haze of the distance. I hunched my shoulders against the wind that pushed through my Carhartt coat, trying to talk myself into paddling out. I'd had to beg for a week off work in Fairbanks, had driven something like 700 miles, all to go surfing. But Goddamn it looked cold out there. Dangerously cold. The kind of cold I'd been warned against my entire life.
Finally, I turned around and got back in my truck. I could envision the headline: Fairbanks Man Dies In Foolhardy Surfing Attempt.
I had to take a leak, so I rolled into an adjacent parking lot where some taller trees grew. Of all things, I found two surfers, a guy and a girl, suiting up and waxing their boards in the shelter of the trees. Karl and Heather were their names.
“You guys heading out?” I asked, though the answer was obvious enough.
They looked up. “Yep,” said Karl. “Looks pretty awful, though.”
That did it. I'd been shamed into facing the wall of cold. Let the newspapers print whatever they liked - those guys don't paddle out. I suited up, waxed my board and followed my new compadres into the water.
That first step into the Inlet brought me across a threshold in my life, both as a surfer and an Alaskan. When I was a teenager, the cold water claimed a close friend of mine in Frazer Lake on Kodiak. It was November and the waves came up on his overloaded skiff and swamped it. They never found his body. For years afterward I was terrified of cold water, and it was only the thrill of riding waves that got me past that. Now here I was with the cold salt creeping up my legs, washing onto my crotch and belly with an incoming line of whitewater.
It was cold, no doubt, but manageable. Jumping over the shorebreak with my board, I felt the tide current pushing me northward. I got down and started paddling. Ten minutes later, I hadn't made it outside, but I'd been washed several hundred yards down the beach. I went in, trotted over the sand to where I'd started, and tried again. Still couldn't get outside. Back in I went, then up the beach and back out. Same result. Karl and Heather were long since out in the lineup and charging waves.
I sat on the sand, panting like a first-timer. I was embarrassed and pissed off. I was a well-seasoned surfer, and had made it out in conditions far heavier than what lay before me. My first surf in Alaska, a moment I'd dreamed of for years, and the ocean had spat me back out. I stood up to go, tucking my board under a rubbery arm.
Then it dawned on me. It wasn't the cold that had beaten me. I was perfectly warm in my wetsuit. A smile spread over my face. Onshore winds don't last forever.
A year later, back on the beach with the kids, I'd left Fairbanks, my frustration from living inland, and my fear of cold water long behind to become a regular if not exactly a local along the Cook Inlet coast. I struck out paddling and made it easily to the lineup. I pushed my board beneath me and sat there, pinwheeling my arms against the tide current and watching Mount St. Augustine in the distance. I looked to shore to find the kids and their teachers watching me, standing in a phalanx along the edge of the beach grass.
I rolled my eyes. The ocean's caress had soothed my sour mood to the point that I no longer bore them any ill will, but if there's one thing I hate, it's surfing in front of an audience. I always have my most amazing sessions when nobody's watching, but when there's a crowd staring at me, I can't ride a wave to save my life.
I ignored them as best I could and watched a set roll in. The first wave was too small, but the second stacked up into a decent peak. I paddled hard, kicked my legs, and made the drop. It was chest-high with acceptable shape. I trimmed my board and managed a few seconds of face time before the lip closed out in front of me. I did my trademark dismount, flopping spread-eagled into the whitewater.
I glanced over my shoulder as I paddled back to the lineup. The kids were going bananas, jumping up and down, yelling and screeching. The teachers, I'm sure, were scowling, worried their charges would be tempted to start down the surfer's path and defy the wisdom of ages by paddling out into the cold ocean.
Me, I felt the old familiar smile spreading across my face. It was the same rush I'd felt all those years ago in Oregon - the lift at the tail of my board, the nose skimming over the water, the face taking shape ahead of me. It's the same rush that sent me on my overseas travels, and it's what eventually brought me back to Alaska to face the cold that I was so afraid of as a youth.
Looking out to sea for the next set, I wondered if Alaska's next generation of surfers was among those kids on the beach.
THIS ALASKAN LIFE
Surf's up - and freezing
- By Kris Farmen
There are definite advantages to being a surfer in a place where 99 percent of the people think you're a lunatic for paddling out. Crowds in the water aren't a big problem. Plus, you get to experience moments that just don't happen in other parts of the surfing world - for instance, having your hair converted into a mane of ice dreadlocks from the freezing spray. Or maybe having a whole fleet of Coast Guard and State Trooper rigs come screaming down the beach in the middle of a really awesome four-foot day because someone reported a drowning man in need of rescue. Then there's days like the one I had this past October, when I paddled out into Cook Inlet with a gaggle of schoolkids watching me from the beach.
The kids ran in a loose pack through the spruce trees by the parking lot, screaming and hooting at one another as I shut the door of my truck and ambled down to the edge of the grass for a surf check. The conditions were decidedly average. There was a two-foot swell moving through, but a freshening onshore wind was blowing down the backs of the waves, threatening to turn them into unrideable mush.
I sat atop a picnic table, the highest vantage point to be had, and rolled a cigarette while weighing my options. All things considered, it was the best wave I'd seen that day, or the two days previous. I kept watching the swell. I could see Cook Inlet's infamous rip current running north at a good clip as the tide came in. Behind me, one of the kids let out a shriek and started bawling. A chaperone rushed up to comfort her. The crummy surf had put me in a curmudgeonly mood, and I shot a frown at the kids behind me, wishing they'd all just go away and leave me in peace beside my ocean of mediocrity.
There were some makeable faces coming in, but I'd have to pick my waves with care. I stubbed out my cigarette and flicked it into the nearby fire pit. “Hell with it,” I said, and went back to the truck and changed into my wetsuit. A cloud of beach crows flew overhead as I rubbed a fresh layer of wax onto my surfboard. The teacher who'd comforted the injured child happened to walk past as I tucked my stick under my arm and closed the tailgate.
“You're not actually going surfing out there are you?” she said. I watched her brow furrow and her mind wrestle with the data her eyes were transmitting - black wetsuit, surfboard and leash, an unshaven man heading down to the water.
This is another of those surfing moments that only come in Alaska. Virtually every time you go out, there's another person standing there in disbelief, asking if you really are about to go surfing. Because, you know, that water's really cold.
I just smiled, stepped around her and trotted down to the sand.
Alaskan children like those rascals on the beach have it drummed into their heads from an early age to stay out of the water. I know I did. Granted, there's a world of difference between tumbling over the gunwale of a fishing boat and paddling out wearing a quality wetsuit, booties and gloves. But the conventional wisdom is unanimous in Alaska: Cold water kills - so you don't fucking go into the water. Hence my astonishment when I first saw Bruce Brown's The Endless Summer II, with its sequence featuring surfers on Kodiak Island. Surfing in Alaska? No freakin' way, I thought. Those guys are crazy.
It was, as fate would have it, the morning of the day I went surfing for the first time. In just a few hours I was wading out into the Oregon Pacific, only to get spanked and drilled against the headland by a rogue set. That experience scared the crap out of me and I spent the rest of the session on the inside, trying to launch off the bottom into knee-high shorebreak. But when I caught that first wave, I was smitten and my fear forgotten.
Unknowingly, I'd been hooked on the notion of surfing back home in Alaska, but it took me a long time to find my way back to the gray gravel of Cook Inlet's beaches - years of living inland, and more years of surfing far-flung breaks on the other side of the world.
The morning of my first session in Alaska, I stood on a rock on the edge of that same beach parking lot. It was clear and sunny, but there was a 30-knot onshore wind whipping the ocean into boiling, head-high mushburgers.
The beach crows rode the wind high above me like kites on strings. Gnarled Sitka spruce shimmied in the chilly sunshine. Across the water, Iliamna and Redoubt stood white with snow above the blue haze of the distance. I hunched my shoulders against the wind that pushed through my Carhartt coat, trying to talk myself into paddling out. I'd had to beg for a week off work in Fairbanks, had driven something like 700 miles, all to go surfing. But Goddamn it looked cold out there. Dangerously cold. The kind of cold I'd been warned against my entire life.
Finally, I turned around and got back in my truck. I could envision the headline: Fairbanks Man Dies In Foolhardy Surfing Attempt.
I had to take a leak, so I rolled into an adjacent parking lot where some taller trees grew. Of all things, I found two surfers, a guy and a girl, suiting up and waxing their boards in the shelter of the trees. Karl and Heather were their names.
“You guys heading out?” I asked, though the answer was obvious enough.
They looked up. “Yep,” said Karl. “Looks pretty awful, though.”
That did it. I'd been shamed into facing the wall of cold. Let the newspapers print whatever they liked - those guys don't paddle out. I suited up, waxed my board and followed my new compadres into the water.
That first step into the Inlet brought me across a threshold in my life, both as a surfer and an Alaskan. When I was a teenager, the cold water claimed a close friend of mine in Frazer Lake on Kodiak. It was November and the waves came up on his overloaded skiff and swamped it. They never found his body. For years afterward I was terrified of cold water, and it was only the thrill of riding waves that got me past that. Now here I was with the cold salt creeping up my legs, washing onto my crotch and belly with an incoming line of whitewater.
It was cold, no doubt, but manageable. Jumping over the shorebreak with my board, I felt the tide current pushing me northward. I got down and started paddling. Ten minutes later, I hadn't made it outside, but I'd been washed several hundred yards down the beach. I went in, trotted over the sand to where I'd started, and tried again. Still couldn't get outside. Back in I went, then up the beach and back out. Same result. Karl and Heather were long since out in the lineup and charging waves.
I sat on the sand, panting like a first-timer. I was embarrassed and pissed off. I was a well-seasoned surfer, and had made it out in conditions far heavier than what lay before me. My first surf in Alaska, a moment I'd dreamed of for years, and the ocean had spat me back out. I stood up to go, tucking my board under a rubbery arm.
Then it dawned on me. It wasn't the cold that had beaten me. I was perfectly warm in my wetsuit. A smile spread over my face. Onshore winds don't last forever.
A year later, back on the beach with the kids, I'd left Fairbanks, my frustration from living inland, and my fear of cold water long behind to become a regular if not exactly a local along the Cook Inlet coast. I struck out paddling and made it easily to the lineup. I pushed my board beneath me and sat there, pinwheeling my arms against the tide current and watching Mount St. Augustine in the distance. I looked to shore to find the kids and their teachers watching me, standing in a phalanx along the edge of the beach grass.
I rolled my eyes. The ocean's caress had soothed my sour mood to the point that I no longer bore them any ill will, but if there's one thing I hate, it's surfing in front of an audience. I always have my most amazing sessions when nobody's watching, but when there's a crowd staring at me, I can't ride a wave to save my life.
I ignored them as best I could and watched a set roll in. The first wave was too small, but the second stacked up into a decent peak. I paddled hard, kicked my legs, and made the drop. It was chest-high with acceptable shape. I trimmed my board and managed a few seconds of face time before the lip closed out in front of me. I did my trademark dismount, flopping spread-eagled into the whitewater.
I glanced over my shoulder as I paddled back to the lineup. The kids were going bananas, jumping up and down, yelling and screeching. The teachers, I'm sure, were scowling, worried their charges would be tempted to start down the surfer's path and defy the wisdom of ages by paddling out into the cold ocean.
Me, I felt the old familiar smile spreading across my face. It was the same rush I'd felt all those years ago in Oregon - the lift at the tail of my board, the nose skimming over the water, the face taking shape ahead of me. It's the same rush that sent me on my overseas travels, and it's what eventually brought me back to Alaska to face the cold that I was so afraid of as a youth.
Looking out to sea for the next set, I wondered if Alaska's next generation of surfers was among those kids on the beach.