I HATE SURFING (Sri Lanka)

I jumped out of a plane once.

A tiny thing with roughly 10 seats. But before I did, I watched my friend stand by the open doorway, and her body, along with that of the person attached to her, disappeared below within milliseconds. The instructor yelled in my ear that it was my turn, gave me a thumbs up to ask if I'm ready. I shook my head. I wasn't. I had never seen someone fall so fast. Knowing that was going to be me very soon, my stomach did somersaults and It was hard to swallow. I didn't even try. I watched the fields below me. Holy hell. That's far.

I'm not afraid of heights. But jumping out of a plane will make your guts piss themselves.

If you've done it before, you know. Now multiply that feeling by about 5.

Then you’ll understand why I hate surfing.

The tide is up. I'm standing at the edge of the water, the sounds of the few early surfers talking to each other out in the waves, and birds in the trees. The thunderous boom of the water hitting the rocks that create the point breaks that make Arugam Bay, Sri Lanka, a surfer's dream. I feel like I'm about to jump out of a plane without a skydiving instructor, without a parachute, from 13,000 ft, a million times over the next few hours. I'll never reach maxim velocity, I'll never "banana" and level out, I'll not get to the part where I float calmly through the air, examining the view below. I will be in a constant state of standing at the open door with the wind blowing in my face, and the following 5 second free fall. Over and over.

I take one step into the water. It's cool, but not cold. And then another. My board is raised over it in my right arm. The water swirls between the stones in either side of me. Another towering wave builds before me and erupts on the various boulders. The shoreline is dotted with rocks and outcroppings. The ones closest to me are at varied heights no taller than my thighs. The outlying rocks on either side are between 2-5 meters high. The water hits my legs and I stumble momentarily as it drags the sand beneath my feet. Even at knee depth, the ocean's power is enough to make me stagger. The water recedes.

Now! I take two more steps and throw my board ahead of me and jump on. I'm not very good at paddling. But the water streaming passed makes it feel like I am. I have a few seconds to get out behind the waves. I look to my left, I’m only about a two meters from the largest protruding rock. If a set were to come now, I’d be smashed.

It hardly occurs to me that I’m the only one entering from behind the rocks with a longboard.

Nor, perhaps, that I shouldn’t be.

Within a few second I’m in the open water behind the impact zone. All things considered, minus the risk of being crushed into tiny bits on boulders and left to die, it's the easiest and fastest paddle out I've ever had. I take a deep breath, about to sit up on my board. But I can't. I'm stuck. I realize my legs are shaking.

Fear.

I absolutely hate it. I’ve made an obsessively bad habit of fighting it. It seems almost masochistic, but I can't stand the idea of something external controlling the way I live my life. Most people would say fear is internal. And I suppose, in some ways, it might be. But I treat it like a virus. A foreign body that infects your mind and slowly, through mutation and regeneration, it travels through you until it seizes control of your internal organs. Your heart, your brain, your mind, your thoughts, until everything that you do and and everything you allow to happen to you is controlled by fear. Perhaps that's why I'm so obsessed with it. It's often said that it's all in your head. So if you can't change your mind, who can?

I take a deep breath and hold a short conversation with myself. I can’t pull myself up on the board, my legs won’t move. I look ahead. The ocean is relatively flat. Small waves roll beneath me and the few other surfers out. I've got this. I'm ok. Everything is fine. The next wave is mine. I always do well on the first wave. I keep reassuring myself, watching the sunrise begin to color the grey skies. I point and flex my toes, hope it will calm the nerves in my legs, until they stop shaking and twitching. There it is. A dark blue ripple on the horizon. A few deep breaths and the adrenaline rush subsides. I don't have time for involuntary bodily functions right now, the me in my thoughts mutters. Yalla, let's go.

I let the first wave slide and go for the second.

I paddle hard. Not so much to catch the wave, as to avoid it breaking on me, sending me plummeting into what feels like an eternal washing machine. There are few things that terrify me more than the moment you realize you were too fast, or too slow, and oh god, is it happening? You hear the break, and you know. Yes, yes it is. You feel the rush and prepare yourself for the nose dive. So many things happen under the water, probably more than above it, I had joked with a friend. Cover your head, stay calm, dive down if you can, watch and wait for the wave to pass, try to make sure your board is far away, grab your leash, bring it back when its safe, don't flail. It feels like years. At least the sets here are consistent. It could be worse. It could be messy. There could be sharks. There are no sharks here, my host assured me. I had learned not to flail under the water, courtesy of said sharks. I suppose there's always a lesson to learn. I shudder at the thought of some previous wipe outs. I muffle the images and their accompanying feelings. That's not happening today.

When I was 11, my friend played a little prank on me. The prank resulted in me nearly drowning in the middle of the Atlantic ocean. I washed up on the shore, my whole body feeling like jello, thoroughly exhausted, coughing up heavily polluted salt water.

Before then, I had no fear of water. My parents had to drag me away from a pool, or a beach, or a lake by my hair when it was long passed dark. I would describe the feeling of being terrified of water similar to having a freak accident and going deaf or blind. Of course, that's a bit extreme. But the point is, you know what you're missing. And you cant do anything about it.

Autumn 2016

I sat on my favourite hill and watched the surfers in the waves below. The sea was full of boards. From above, I could judge them silently. Sometimes I would sit with a friend. We'd talk about whatever was going on in our lives, and watch surfers catching waves. Oh! that was a good one! She said.

"OOooof! That looked like it hurt!" we'd comment intermittently.

I always wanted to surf.

You want to surf. but you're scared of the ocean? She looked at me like I had announced I was going to go on expedition to Mars.

I shrugged. I didn't really understand if it was possible either, but I knew I wanted to try.

When he first took me out to surf, I struggled to lay on the board. Stand, he said. But didn't explain how. So I clumsily stood as anyone stands from a lying position. Naturally, I flopped like a dying fish and landed in the waist-deep water. When we were done, our eyes bloodshot, we sat on the rocks overlooking the coast and shared a beer. I felt like an utter failure, and I was sure he thought I would never try to surf again. I felt the distance between us had grown. It only made me want to try harder.

He disappeared from my life around the same time that I booked my first surf trip. At the time, all I wanted was to be able to stand up and ride a wave by myself. It turns out, the better you get at something, the more you realize how much more there is to learn.

I wanted to say that he was the only one, the truth is that it's most often the men that doubted my ability and dedication. Doubted that I prefer not to talk much when I'm surfing.

Doubted that I could catch a wave without their help.

Doubted that I wouldn't drop in on them, or fail to stand at all.

Doubted that I could be terrified of the ocean and somehow get myself through it.

Doubted that I surfed the same spots that they did, and came out just fine.

Doubted that often times, in the most unlikely circumstances, I didn't come out fine, and that I still went back the next day.

And I used to have something to prove to them, quite fortunately, their words fueled my determination for a long time. If it weren't for them, perhaps, I wouldn't have practiced as fiercely.

I wouldn't have bought a surf skateboard to practice even when the sea was flat.

I wouldn't have been as dedicated to yoga, to build the right muscles and balance.

I wouldn't have seized nearly every chance to surf, and traveled the world doing so.

Eventually, I came to realize, I was advancing far faster than they had. I no longer cared if I ever had a great photo of me on a wave. I had nothing to prove to anyone but myself. I was always my fiercest competition. Those around me knew that at the mention of surfing, my eyes would light up, and it would be a challenge to get me off the subject. I talked as though I'd been at it since youth, when in fact I had begun at age 30.

Solid proof that it's never to late to fall in love with something you didn't think you were capable of.

The wave that comes up behind me like a wall scares the living shit out of me. So much so that in the past, I would never look back. Harsh lessons taught me that I have to, and with that, I came to accept the drowning sound of the water rushing towards my feet as part of the process. I couldn't care less if it was half a meter or three. I learned that it was the type of wave, not the size, that determined it's difficulty. With that, the giant wall about to engross me became less intimidating. Within seconds it is my best friend as well as opponent. We're playing a little game. And for better or worse, I'm not thinking about much. Maybe nothing at all.

For whatever reason, the moments gliding along the surface of the water are intuitive. I'm not nervous, and I'm not worried about technicalities. I don't have to remind myself to shift my weight, or to look left or right. I feel as though I’ve done it in my head 100 times.

It’s more like 1,000.

I'm daring.

Far, far more daring than I am in any other board sport. Liberated from the injury inducing bindings of snowboard or the unfriendly asphalt that accompanies skateboarding, my comfort is that a wave is usually far more welcoming.

My feet go where they need to, without me really thinking about it. My eyes are shifting, up, right, left, without conscious control. And I feel the way I never felt doing anything else other than perhaps dancing. Free and intuitive motion. A rhythm that’s inside my head. A song only I’m listening to. And for these 3, 5, 10, 15, 20 seconds, I'm willing to stand at the door of a million airplanes. It’s a meditation session set up by one of the most powerful forces of nature. And all the noise within and without subsides. I forget that there is anything else in the world other than what's right in front of me. There are no doubts, no fears, no hesitations, no one and nothing, other than me and the ocean, the skyline, the horizon, and we're all moving together, closer.

If anyone says surfing is just a sport... they're doing it wrong.

I hate surfing.

And I can't live without it.

#surfing #srilanka #arugambay #surfergirl #travel #backpacking #asia