Not My Friend

Wind. Tide. Swell. Storm.

And a tube of gunk to block the sun out. Surfers have a selfish relationship to nature, paying attention to only the parts that serve us, that might help our odds of harvesting our coveted and unpredictable fruit: rideable waves. Bummer I used my weekend “surf pass” yesterday, because today is phenom. I read the reports when I was on the toilet and now I’m half-ignoring my children so that I can hang on the webcam’s every swivel and brew a pot of coffee. Offshore wind. Ample swell, rising tide. Cleaner than yesterday, with one storm parked off the coast, churning out waves. Another one’s inland doing something favorable to the wind, for now. But I went yesterday, cashing in a once-per-weekend surf coupon that’s not an actual coupon but more of an off-the-books type of accounting between Isabel and me, a near-sighted kind of Justice weighing our personal time against our parenting time over the weekends. These three children are our world; free time is oxygen. 

An establishing shot might be helpful here, panning around the globe from El Salvador to Boston then zooming in on Wilmington, North Carolina, where bumper stickers on beach-bound cars say FILM=JOBS, and suggesting the kind of creative gravity I’d hoped to find in the place where I attend grad school for creative writing. It is Sunday morning of a long holiday weekend, but to the kids it’s all a big weekend, isn’t it. Their June enthusiasm has turned into July’s restlessness, and lately it seems they need fun thrown at them every few minutes, like caged lions appeased with chunks of minor purpose. Isabel gets her turn to exercise before it turns boiling outside, between the daily benchmarks of breakfast and first snack. With her gone jogging, I can check my phone without judgment. The bright sun streaming in means that I must turn the screen all the way up. Which I do, then put it away, then reach for. The kids are ignoring the TV, laughing and playing “zoo animals,” and I want to be laughing and pretending I’m an otter with them. And I will be, in just one sec. I want to see what the waves look like, now that a quarter hour has passed since I last checked and yep. Fuck. They’re good. The little surfer dots on the webcam are catching waves, shimmering light bouncing off the curling face, offshore wind feathering white mist out the back. The surfer kicks out, swims back again for another one. I’m connected to the dot because I know what it’s feeling. Put the phone down put the phone down. Fight the urge to grab it. My precious. Check it again. I put the phone down and try my best to pivot, to hype them up for outside. They don’t want to go. I strip to my underwear, and they follow me outside, run around the yard getting wet and hosing each other and jumping in the pool and swimming around and I’m raising my voice and then calming us down and drying bodies and mopping the puddles in the kitchen and making snack and it’s time to check the camera again. Sliced turkey bag is open and flies are circling and I’m sure the wind’s come up and started to crush it… Nope. Barely a breath. Beach is filling up. Shade structures wave like goodbye handkerchiefs in the light puffs of wind. Yesterday it was gloriously uncrowded and raining sideways. That storm bonded our tribe of bobbing surfers, which is a tribe only insofar as one imagines it. How long until I’m one of them, these dots that I stakeout online and then surf among? Strangers who I’m starting to recognize in the water, people who also don’t mind sideways rain — we relish it — if it’s in service of waves.

The kids are wrapped in towels and chomping fistfuls of sliced turkey when Isabel returns. In a second they shrug off their terry coils and swarm her. But she is woozy and dripping and wants to make a smoothie. Her eyes implore me to distract the kids so she can move around the kitchen without speedbumps, but all they want to do is “help”: stuff fruit into the blender, turn it on without the lid, see what happens.

Something magic happens after lunch. The kids are calm. Like a mouse poking its nose out of a hole, I test the air. Tell Isabel, in casual, unrelated conversation — first time today I’ve brought it up, actually — that the waves are good. She looks at me. Can’t read it. To shake out a more legible expression I double down and say they’re really good. Do I want to go, she asks, but I look down, say it’s impossible, what with children and parking and all and I sense a glimmer…. of ambition in my downplaying. She says go ahead. I look over.  She says go. Once the yard gets mowed. Forgot I said I wanted to mow today. Disappointment pounces on hope. The mowing is doable if I’m efficient, but there’s no way to find afternoon parking on this, the only sunny day of Fourth of July weekend. 

I text Ryan. He has a boat. He wants to go. I pitch a 1:30 rendezvous and then realize it’s already 12:40. I put my feet in socks for the first time since the last time I mowed, stuff them into green-tinged Chuck Taylors, and proceed to jog behind the shitty push mower for forty-five minutes. I’m soaked, but the yard is mowed. Inside the air-conditioning I mop my face and fill a water bottle. I change out of my soaked t-shirt and cargo pants and put on a tight t-shirt to surf in, and some board shorts. I smear sunblock on my face. In the mirror it looks like I have a mayonnaise problem. The kids are watching TV when I tell them I love them, and they stare at the TV. It’s 1:30 and once I’m on the road I send him a voice message that I’ll be seven minutes late.

When I pull into his driveway he’s standing in the open garage, surrounded by his garden and yard and enough beach bags and stuff that I realize his family is coming, too. It takes a while for everyone to get in the cars. I mention, like a nervous little rodent, that I have to be back by three-thirty, four at the latest, and he says no problem. Looks at the clear sky. Says if he needs to he can run me back from Masonboro to my car and then go back to his family. This seems like a lot, but I’m in the hopeful stage of my pre-surf angst, so this sounds great. His kids come out. His wife comes out with her friend. We take two cars to the marina because my board’s inside his Sedona. His foam board’s on the top, wedged straplessly under the front rack and over the rear. Halfway there I realize his eight-year-old has been crouched in the backseat, under my surfboard. I rewind the last two minutes of conversation, scan for profanity, and feel relief that I didn’t drop any f-bombs or drug references.

At the marina we unload stuff from the car while Ryan jogs to the boat. He’s going to bring it around. By the time I’ve brought the boards down to the dock he has pulled the boat up. I always wish I was more helpful at this part. I like wrapping the rope around the cleat and tying it off in that certain way that keeps it from slipping, but that’s my only move. I’m not sure whether I should hold onto the boat and pull it in or loop the rope around the cleat on the dock and do like a … Ryan hops off and does the securing. The kids hop on, the mom and her friend hop on. I hand the boards over. Away we go.

I ask where to stand, for the weight, and he says, “Back here, with me.” We motor into deeper water and weave between a pair of jet skis. The girl on the back of one has a thong peeking out from under her life vest, but I’m old enough that pounding of her ass against the seat has lost any vestige of sexiness — all I can think about is her poor lumbar discs. A flag on a dock is pointing Northwest, a perfect, taut rectangle straining at the rope that I have to stare at to process. Fuck, the wind. All day it has been still and now it’s threatening to kill the surf. Dead onshore. I know the answer, but I double-check with the captain. Ryan takes a look and says, yep, pointing Northwest. Computations seemed gunked up in my mind. Flag pointing northwest means wind out of the southeast, I offer meekly. Yeah, he confirms. It’ll be ruined at Masonboro. Everyone on the boat is smiling and happy and I swallow the very personal and mounting dread that my window for surf today has slammed shut. 

Tide. 

When we round a corner I see that there are still some boats anchored in the cove at Masonboro Island. There’s a faint pulse of hope in my chest that manifests as a tiny confession. “I know I’m late to the party, but I cannot stop listening to Imagine Dragons.” It’s windy, so maybe no one heard. I raise my voice over the wind and go deeper. “I’m sure they’re old hat to you kids by now, but I cannot get, ‘Thunder’ out of my head.” His eldest looks up and does the high-pitched chorus, “thun-der!” It sounds like it does in the song, like a squeaky toy or a sped-up robot, and Ryan chuckles. He says it too. Then I say it. “Thun-thun-thun-der.” Then I make a conscious effort to keep myself from killing it by saying it too much. One time a girl broke up with me because I over-sang a Macy Gray song at her sorority party and that lesson is keeping me from burning a bridge today with “Thunder.”

We set anchor and hop out into knee-deep water. His kids and the mom and her friend splash around and stand on the sand, waiting for us. I want to help Ryan set the second anchor but I’m just watching like a lump. The tide’s not dead low yet, but it’s dropping fast. I’ve seen boats stuck on the sand here and they have to call a Sea Tow to get pulled out. Ryan’s got two anchors working now to keep his boat off the jetty, but the rocks seem close. They look huge and pocked, like meteorites. He wades my way with his board and says he might have to come back in forty-five minutes to adjust the anchor. I say that works for me because that’s about the time I’ll have to be going. I think of my kids sitting on the couch, pulling on the dog’s tail and watching TV; I wonder whether Isabel is on her phone or folding laundry or defending the dog.

We walk together across the quiet width of uninhabited Masonboro, and my heart shears in two when we finally crest the hill and see the ocean. It’s a gorgeous, intense day, blue-blue skies in front of us, wispy clouds up high, wind right in our faces. An intense gray front is moving in behind us, curved on the leading edge like a miles-long airplane wing with a black wall of storm behind it. Whitecaps pop up like prairie dogs while churning, roiling waves roll underneath, exploding like sea-sick mortars on the sand. Everyone else sets up beach chairs and the two of us step into the salty mosh pit. There’s swell. There’s only one other person out. We catch a few dumpy waves for a half an hour. Some flashes behind us make me pity the poor fools further north on Wrightsville Beach. One-one thousa—BOOM. The thunder travels five miles a second. Ryan rides one in and walks back on the beach. I sit on the board and see him talking to the women in their chairs. He’s over the dunes and gone to adjust the anchors. 

Swell. 

My watchband — my faithful watchband securing this twenty year-old Citizen Eco-Drive watch that will keep ticking long after I die — has started to break. It has suffered the equivalent of a torn perineum and, at the worst moments, slips to the next-loosest hole. I catch it falling into my lap. Carefully, carefully, I completely undo it. Lightning cracks behind me and I realize I was wrong. I thought the onshore wind was going to — had to — push the front further away from us. Or at least hold it at bay. But with my watch cupped in one hand, the other hand undoing the pocket zipper on my boardshorts, and my thighs working overtime gripping the board to save my ass from sliding off in this turbulent chop, lightning begins to crackle around me. Booms following right after flashes. I flinch despite the pointlessness. When the watch is in my pocket I zip it back up and feel safer. I try for a few more waves. Two young men and their dad show up. We raise eyebrows and exchange looks with each other when the lightning hits nearby. I see Ryan emerge from over the dune. A bolt hits somewhere out at sea in front of me and — fuck counting — I realize the storm’s right on top of me. Thunder growls. I look back and see the kids and Ryan and his wife and her friend stuffing things into beach bags. I don’t need to be told, but maybe I look like I need to be told, because they jump up together and wave at me to come in. I ride the next one in on my belly.

Storm.

The underside of the gray airplane wing looms directly over us. I think about the onshore wind hitting that front coming the other way and can picture the Titans clashing overhead. We drag our stuff back across the narrow island and make an effort to joke because his kids are scared. He mumbles to me that this thing is probably going to blow over but, yeah, we should leave anyway just to be safe. Like armless walruses we body over the gunwales and flop into the boat. He pulls up one anchor and, while he fiddles with the controls, his wife pulls up the other. She doesn’t bother to knock the mud and seaweed off — it gets tossed into the compartment in the front, dripping goop onto extra life jackets and the door stays splayed on the ground. The wind is coming hard now. We’re moving slowly. Ryan presses a button, and the motor raises up. He gives it some gas and slides us along a little further. “Sand bar?” his daughter asks. He nods. In what I assume is a playful move he raises the motor a bit out of the water and hits the throttle. Water sprays out the back, like a rooster tail. Ryan’s not smiling and I realize he’s cleaning the gunk off the prop. Lightning again. Now rain.

A police boat speeds up the Intracoastal from that direction now, with its lights on, and I wonder aloud if they actually ever catch anyone for DUI out here. On the way over, Ryan mentioned that a few years ago the boats were so thick on Fourth of July weekend that they tied them together, a kind of pontoon bridge between Masonboro and a sand bar that united the community of boat owners until it didn’t, and one drunk guy revved up without untying and smashed all the boats together and a few people drowned. No one responds, everyone’s hunched over cold, with towels. We’re pointed home now. I’m sitting in the front but I’m not really sitting. After my own back surgery years ago, I don’t need another ruptured disc, and we’re getting major air on some of these wakes. The kids are scared but I ask them if they’ve seen Neverending Story. They have, and the daughter starts singing the theme song. I point up the Intracoastal, which disappears into an impenetrable black cloud, and ask them if they think it looks like “The Nothing” from that movie. They agree, but the rain picks up and the singing stops and with the rain coming in sideways pellets, the stinging starts. I try to block the mom’s friend’s face from getting pelted. Maybe she gives me a thank you look, maybe she’s just squinting; everyone has their heads down against the elements except Ryan, whose head’s on a swivel behind the wheel. 

By the time we pull into the no wake zone the flag is doing weird things. All over the place, erratic things. Ryan pulls up to the same dock to unload us and the gear. The mom and her friend get off. I hand them stuff. Ryan must adjust because the wind is pushing us against the dock. He reverses and pulls up alongside it again. I hand the boards over. His daughter goes to step across the gap, but he realizes he’s being pushed into the stern of a really nice boat. Ryan guns the engine to avoid catastrophe. For a second his daughter is suspended in midair, but I reach behind myself and catch her like a backpack falling off, pull her into the boat and she asks her dad what the hell happened. He says that’s why you gotta wait to hop off the boat and then they both thank me for saving her. Behind a sheet of rain back in his garage we open the beers we were supposed to drink on the beach. I jog to where my truck’s parked and roll up the windows and run back the garage to finish my beer. Inside the towel where I kept it dry, my phone has a message from Isabel. Says Max was worried about me when he heard the storm. I text back that I’ll be home in ten minutes. I finish my beer and wave bye. 

Gunk to Block the Sun Out.

When I get home the five of us, plus dog, look out the window and ooh and ahh at the remains of the storm, wondering how the people directly under it are faring. Three days later I open a website to see what’s new with the destruction of America and see the headline: “Lightning Strike Kills ‘One Tree Hill’ Star’s Husband in North Carolina.” His name was Friend and his wife’s name was Prince. Friend was struck by lightning around 3:15 while on a boat near a beach at Masonboro Island. My eye snags again and again on the place name. On Sunday, the third. The third person to die from a lightning strike this year, according to the lightning safety council. My mind snags: on the odds of it, my brush with it, my distance from it, on the point in time and space when life and death were equals and equally likely.

I text Ryan when I find this out and can’t think of anything to say at the end except, “Damn.” That word’s a joke. It doesn’t describe the jackknife-glitch in my comprehension that cannot compute its way around the fact: it could have been me. To process tragic news, I usually distance myself from the departed’s fate with a slick computation of our differences — if it’s a car wreck, were they texting? If it’s cancer, did they smoke a lot? But what if it’s lightning? Tell me he was taller, that he was flying a kite, or waving around a graphite fishing rod. Just don’t tell me the truth: that it was random, and that nature doesn’t care. I remember the bolt that did it. Right afterward, I chuckled with the bobbing dad and his sons next to me — close enough for ya? — and decided to pack it in for the day. Turns out, the police boat had him in it. They were doing CPR and we rocked a little bit in their wake. On a map of any scale, at that moment, the world of difference between us shrank to a single, tiny dot. Ryan texts back, “I know.”