What’s In a Wave

I shamelessly ask if he had a board I could borrow and he led me back to his bodega. Typically, I wouldn’t ask to borrow someone else’s surfboard but because he was a retired surfer who operated a beachfront hotel where boards are commonly left behind, I figured there likely was a board lying around somewhere that would be better off getting used than collecting dust in a shed. My first glance inside the bodega sent my eyes wide. I shifted my gaze through the space as he filed through the old surfboards that stood so nicely on each side of the bodega, all different sizes, shapes, and colors, searching for the perfect board. He pulls out two and with thought, he picks the one that has the point shaved off the front.

“I think this will do.”

He limps towards the stairs, his right foot leading up each step as he guides me inside to find three fins to match the board. “Now how are you doing out there?” he asks. “Are you able to stand up? How is your paddling? Do you know how to read the wave?”

I was honest with all of it. I could “catch” white water, aside from that, I had no idea what I was doing out there. We shuffle through the bag of fins then he leads me back down the steps. One. Step. At a time.

“I’ll have to give you a lesson sometime,” then he pauses and glances over to me, “do you have to go somewhere now?”

I didn’t.

“We can start now. Have a seat on the stairs.” He shuffles through his kitchen and comes back holding a bottle of Lizano.  He reaches for the floor and shifts one hip at a time onto the rug beneath him. He sat carefully; one leg folded in and the other stretched to the side, right at the corner of the rug.

“Salsa?” I wonder.

He says, “Yea I just need something to simulate a wave. Now I just need a pencil.”

He presses his palms back onto the earth and shifts his hips to get back up. I stand up quickly to stop him, “I’ll get one.”

“There should be one on the table right there.”

And sure enough, there was. Between the desk lamp and the stacks of papers, folders and booking binders, was a short, nubby pencil on the sleek wooden table. I grabbed a pen too, just in case, having no idea what he needed it for.

“Now everyone thinks that a wave is moving water forward, but it is not,” he begins.

He lifts the corner of the carpet and lays down the Lizano bottle beneath. He plays around a bit, rolling the salsa bottle beneath the surface of the rug, letting the rug swell up over the bottle. He grabs the pencil and says, “this will do,” without even looking up. “Now…” he pauses, “wait… let me ask you something. In a wave, which direction is the water moving?”

My eyes looked at him with confusion. He had just told me they were not moving forward, so I made a silly guess, “backwards?”

“No, the water is actually not moving at all. A wave is not actually pushing any water forwards. It is just a compression of the water molecules. The water is not going anywhere,” he shakes his head in a convincing manner, his blue eyes were wide with passion. Life, history, and sea came through his glassy white stare beyond the soft pink corner of his inner eye, expressing his passion for the sport well past his sun-spotted skin.

“Out in the ocean, there are currents and winds and earthquakes and all kinds of natural factors that are always moving the water around out there. Now when the water is pushed towards a shoreline, there is nowhere for it to go, so it begins to compress. And it compresses and it compresses and it compresses. And the sand gets more shallow until eventually the water cannot compress anymore and the only place for it to go, is up.” He pauses and begins to roll the salsa bottle underneath the carpet, simulating the wave. “This is the wave that we see…”

He continues to roll the bottle.

“…Eventually the compression gets too much and it breaks at the top, this is when the wave folds over,” he pulls the corner of the carpet over the bottle to reveal a breaking wave.

“You are never relying on the wave to push you forward.” He reaches for the pencil, “this is you on the board.” He lies the pencil down, point towards the center of the rug. “Your head is the point, you are facing the shore here.”

“So,” he takes the pencil and places it in front of the salsa-bottle-carpet wave, “this compression is simply making a ramp for you to ride. If you are in the right spot, you will ride the wave.”

“This is where you want to be,” he glides the pencil along the carpet. I see myself out in the water, paddling in front of a building wave. He rolls the salsa bottle beneath the carpet, I imagine the peak forming. And as he folds the carpet corner over to simulate the break of the compression, he angles me out on my pencil-board and lets the ramp of the wave slide me and my pencil board right down the carpet. I feel the ride within me, just like skating down a never-ending ramp that keeps building beneath me as I glide along.

“That, is riding a wave,” he claims. “White water has no push; there is no wave to ride in white water. We can’t call that surfing.”

Within the hour I find myself sitting on the shoreline, hot sand poured over the top of the board to melt the old wax, watching the water compress, compress, and compress until it breaks. Surfers paddling through the carpet-rug ocean on their pen and pencil boards catching their salsa-bottle waves.