1968 - SUMMER
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Somewhere in the mythology of our water culture it was said that a drowning man goes down three times. On the third dunking he doesn't reappear. When we were kids and in a swimming pool, we'd pretend to be drowning by putting our heads underwater, raising our hands above the surface, and holding one finger, then another, and then the third in the air.
In late, 1968, the last of successive waves caught me inside and pounded my conviction.
The first storm was righteous. Its waves were deep and dark and holy. They came from far off and accumulated power over the open ocean. A wave buckles when the upper movement is too great for the main body and then the momentum plunges the crest down. The ensuing collision creates a turbulence of diverging forces. The deeper the swell, the greater the disturbance. The pounding from the first storm drove deep and promised to shake the very foundations of the sea bottom.
The tide rose and the wind pushed the water further inland to integrate the low lying areas with a swirling mixture of seawater and sand. The streets near the beaches were reclaimed by a layer of silt as if they were reminding the hard walks and avenues that it was their natural right to be there.
The riders on these storm waves were fearless, eloquent, and possessed of a vision. They had dreamed about this storm, about how they would ride it. A man had stepped forward to embody this dream and when he was cut down, as he had foretold, it left a pall on their movement.
Numerous structures along the water were inundated with water and put in jeopardy of collapse. Such was the case with a pier that had been erected by one of the coastal towns with a large surfing community. The yellow police tape stretched across the entrance indicated that it had been seriously weakened.
The second storm formed in close. It brewed up its batch of wind and waves not too many miles offshore. The storm was sloppy at times and not always completely formed. The water coursed in contradictory patterns. Surfing is a young man's game, perhaps because there's a thin line between beach boy and beach bum. Youth has no experience, little wisdom, and in truth, few brains. But it can possess inspiration enough to carry into the cheap seats. The rider out front on these waves had an urgency and a feeling of destiny behind him. Some thought he was an opportunist, that he grabbed the best waves because he came from a surfing family. His brother had been a world class surfer. The young man's future was riding on this wave. He shouted as he slipped down the face, shouted out the possibilities. But he too fell before he could lead us over the next set.
That is why so many of us were out in the next storm. The waves from the third squall were riotous and sectioned unevenly. They came down hard on everything in their path. I was out in those breakers.
The swell was pumping sets around the point where the large volumes of water with nowhere else to go headed towards the pier at the end of the bay. The trick was to get as much distance out of your ride as you could and then either head towards the beach or go out the back and paddle like crazy over the next set. The blunder was to get caught inside and be shoved towards the pier. The fatal folly was failing to unhook the leash and getting the cord wrapped around a piling pinning you underwater, a fate that had happened to a young belly boarder the weekend before.
I was moving down the line when the wave broke in front of me. I couldn't sweep down past the white water to make it to the next section of open wave. I straightened out and hung on but the turbulence was too much for me and it bounced me off my board. I came up in no man's land. I was too far inside to beat the pull of the inward moving water and get over the next set; and I was too far outside, near the breaking waves, to turn and belly back towards the shore without being really hammered by the behemoth waves rising up before me. I didn't even have time to consider my predicament. The next wave descended on me and I suffered the full force of the burst. When the subsequent monstrous breaker crested in front of me, I dove for safety.
In the macho world of surfing it was considered bad form to let go of your board with your hands and rely on the leash strapped to your leg, but I did it anyway. I went one better. I used my board as a diving platform and shoved off it, grabbed for extra depth and lunged for the bottom.
The tug on my leg was a hard consistent pull and then it slackened. I came to the surface swearing every foulness and combination of foulness that came to my tongue. The leash had snapped. I'd blundered by not making it to the beach. I floated in the current and took my bearings on the pier and what was coming in off of the point. I saw the pier getting closer, and leash or no leash, the prospect of getting slammed into the pilings wrapped tentacles of fear around my stomach and squeezed. Panic came in on one of the sets and bobbed in the water next to me and showed genuine concern for my safety which was probably why his suggestions became so weighty. I should have known that floating a hundred yards offshore was not the place for added weight. My breath shortened.
Insanity has its eyes wide to the emptiness of choice. But I wasn't there yet, I could still conjure. Over the horizons were the shadows creeping towards me. Drifting with the current I would eventually find the rigid towers of the pier but I could push with my feet against the water and raise my head enough to to view the brown sand extended before me. That one choice was the fence panic had to scale; it was all that kept the howling madness at bay.
Walking on water is as loony an activity as it gets, yet those brief instances were the only moments that were not shrieking in horror. I was bored out of my gourd in class but I was handcuffed there by the 2-A classification. I walked around with a permanent hard-on with plenty of relief in sight but none within reach. The only girl I had dated had become a radical feminist and she had her act together and that meant learning to live without me. She was very good at it. My own politics were impotent next to hers.
I could handle these petty personal incidentals. It was the major crisis that threatened to hold me down for the count. In this, I was not alone which only served to underscore the urgency. Many of us felt on the edge of despair. We were betrayed and then they called us traitors. In 1964 Johnson promised that no American boys would fight where Asian boys should. In 1965 he was sending American boys to fight in Asia. In 1968 Nixon promised he had a secret way to end the war. He was elected with the expectation that he would divulge the secret. He kept it to himself. If he ever had the intention of ending the war, it was secondary, secondary to his primary intention of being elected president. Nixon ran as the peace candidate all the while appealing to every hawk who bothered to register to vote. And the war proceeded. The country went about their pissy little lives and the war proceeded and they were killing us and then they wondered why we were upset. We voted for McGovern but few of us had any illusions. It was an excuse for some. An excuse not to participate in more radical forms of change. For most of us, the change they were offering was too incremental in the face of impending doom. We were drowning and they were throwing feathers as life preservers.
I had been offered a job with Raytheon's missile division as a late night computer operator. All I had to do was go schizoid; spend my days at college protesting the killing intent of the military industrial complex and spend my nights at work in a defense industry thereby driving a stake through my own soul. Delirium knew the hollowness in working within the system. It was the system that was busy poking out our eyes.
I dove beneath another wave. Since I was without my board as a diving platform, the extra depth wasn't there. But Panic still was and he was about to assert his presence. He casually noted that I wasn't diving deep enough to avoid the impact of the wave. A wave's fury dissipates as it burrows into the water but that doesn't mean you won't get the stuffing shaken out of you digging for the bottom. Under a full wall of water the turbulence sends you rocking till you don't know which way is up while the compression makes your ears blow out of your head. At the mercy of the wave, you take the thrashing and go limp, limp because that's the best way to float and you don't dare swim when your sense of up and down has been hit with a bad case of vertigo.
Panic also casually noted I was coming up for air much too quick and suffering the last blows of the wave. Panic had an answer for my condition, a rational explanation, although somewhat befuddled. It seemed my wetsuit was adding too much buoyancy to my body mass. I pointed out, between increasingly desperate gasps of air, that this problem should have come up before because the suit was well-worn. Panic suggested that I was choking on air because the suit was too tight and not allowing my lungs to expand. Panic successfully diverted my attention away from him. He was dunking my head and pushing on my shoulders and all the time saying he was saving me. He was putting rocks in my shorts which under other conditions might have been humorous, but not to a drowning man.
If you ever want to question the existence of God, get caught by a natural force. Fighting the devil is much more reassuring, at least he's keeping score. Nature doesn't need us. It doesn't even acknowledge our presence. It doesn't care if we live or die, it just keeps pushing. The surf wasn't trying to kill me, it didn't care if I lived or died. It didn't care that it was bashing me towards the shore while holding me down. Each time I rose from underwater into the turmoil of the breaking wave I was knocked closer to shore. Finally, I was thrust into the shore break. The shore break slammed me into the sand, sucked me back up into its grip and repeated the process. I was within reach of the dry sand and asylum, the very place where most drownings occur because it is there that the pull out to sea is in equilibrium with the push towards shore. I was exhausted and desperate, conditions which cloud the mind. A failed lunge towards shore might well sap the remainder of my strength and yet I was not willing to risk any other course of action. I grabbed a foothold into the bottom and struggled against the backwash racing back down the slope of the beach. Several times the water almost broke my grasp and then I was out of it. I dragged myself onto the potmarked strand.
I had been branded, infected with panic, exposed to the dementia. Like a disease with no cure, like a cancer in remission, panic would always be in my system, mostly dormant, but always ready to flare.
The series of storms battered the wooden pier. The yellow tape could keep tourists and rubber-neckers out but not the next onslaught of surf. The pride of the coastal town was splintered, its dead pilings washed up for hundreds of yards onto the beach, a testament to the immense forces contained in waves of water. The town had staked considerable resources on the construction of the pier. The new administration had been elected in large part due to the cost overruns of the pier project. They had stated that they had a strategy that they would reveal after their mandate. The strategy when implemented would free the town from the debt. They had no political ties to the shattered pier. They could abandon the project, withdraw the construction crews and declare it a folly. They were now in office. They chose to neither build out the pier to completion nor dismantle the blunder. They even expanded its dimensions all the while saying they were in fact not continuing construction but stabilizing the situation. It was a cynical use of the political system. The administration had calculated that they could write off that part of the electorate that was adamantly opposed to any development of the pier. And by continuing the construction they could maintain their hold on those who were adamantly in favor of building the pier out to the specified length. They then pandered to those wanting an honorable end to the torment of the project by alternately escalating the hours spent on construction and pulling back on the number of crew members working. Their plan was to continue this cycle until they could proclaim they had reached a state where their efforts had brought the project to the best conclusion, no matter what that was. Ironically, when internal corruption finally removed them from office the pier was in no better state than when they had first been sworn in. If anything, the debt was greater, the town more divided. The next storm splintered the mess they had left behind.
The pier lay in ruin.