My Mentor

Published by Noserider in the blog Neoprene 'Zine. Views: 772

Tom Ryan taught me to surf in the summer of 1993.

He ran a surf camp out of Rye Beach in the summers. Every day. Rain or shine.

I literally bumped into the place. His office was nestled in the back of a store called the Beachcomber which sold everything from bathing suits and life jackets to coolers and inflatable rafts to beach pails and shovels and, to my surprise and delight, surfboards.

I'd been in the place many times before, but the surfboards were a new addition. So, there I was, a lanky 13-year-old, yet to master the use of my still-growing limbs, and instead of watching where I was walking, I was looking up at the various boards hanging from the wall, when,BAM! I walked right into a desk covered in brochures advertising a surf camp.

See? Literally bumped into it.

Tom was an immense mountain of a man for whom the simple act finding clothes to fit him must have been a challenge. He stood well over six-feet tall, a thick layer of fat concealing his muscular build. His fat was firm,not the build of an overweight couch potato, but rather, that of an athlete who still loves his pizza and ice cream. A bushy beard wrapped around his face and he reached out his catcher's mitt-sized paw to shake my hand.

I quickly introduced myself and asked him for the guy who ran the surf camp. He laughed and said he was the guy who ran the surf camp.

That was the first lesson about surfing I learned,the first myth, if you will, to have debunked: Not all surfers were young, toned, beautiful people.

The camp ran for one week in June and then another week in August. Five half days. So, essentially, two-and-half days unless I did both weeks. But that was four hundred dollars and I didn't have anywhere near that amount of money. I thanked Tom for his time, took a brochure and a registration form, and went off knowing that I was going to have to beg, borrow, or steal, but come hell or high water,whatever that meant,I was going to be present on the first day of camp.

Fortunately, my mom pulled some strings with some friends of hers from the equestrian circle, and got me a summer job feeding horses, cleaning out stalls, and whatever else was needed. I was tolerated, the way someone tolerates a stray dog that keeps showing up. I wasn't a real employee and, despite my mother's best efforts, I was not,nor had any interest in,riding any of the horses. I was just there to make surf money.

I was paid in cash,no set amount, no regular pay schedule,and eventually acquired the much-needed four hundred bucks.

The next time I walked into the Beachcomber, I marched right up to Tom's desk and handed him the registration form,complete with my mother's signature,and the four hundred dollars in cash.

"So, I'm good? I'm all signed up?"

Tom chuckled. "Yes, except that you over paid. Camp's only two hundred."

"Oh, no, I'm signing up for both weeks"

Tom nodded and scratched at his beard. "You know, it's not an advanced class or anything. That second week is the same as the first. You won't be learning anything new. No sense in,"

"Yeah, but I don't have a board. I won't be able surf outside of your camp."

He slid the extra two hundred dollars across the desk. "For two hundred bucks, we can find you your own board, kid."

My own board? The thought hadn't even occurred to me. But first things first, here. I had to learn to use one.

Surf camp turned out to be me and about ten other kids between the ages of nine and sixteen in ill-fitting wetsuits freezing on the beach on a cloudy morning in June. Tom's van sat in the parking lot overlooking the beach. It was overloaded with surfboards. Racks on the roof and sides contained multiple boards. As we showed up, one by one, he pulled a board from his van and handed it to us. We were instructed to go down to the beach but not in the water.

Walking down to the sand with that board under my arm, I felt like a surfer. And I hadn't even been on the damn thing yet. When the last student arrived, and Tom passed out the last board, he carried a large plastic bin down to the beach. He set the bin down in the cold sand and yanked off the lid. He dug into the bin and pulled out wetsuits that he tossed in our general directions after appraising our size based on little more than a glance.

When I was all suited up,a process in and of itself which required me to turn the neoprene wetsuit inside out, putting one foot at a time through the bottom, and literally unrolling the suit over my legs, arms, and torso,I was ready to sprint into the greenish gloom of the ocean. I wiggled my toes. I was antsy. Let's go! Let's do this!

Tom walked among us, looking at how our suits were fitting. "Good," he bellowed. "I wanted to you to get a feel for the wetsuit and learn how to put it on. But you're not going to need it today. We won't be getting
into the water until tomorrow.

Say what?

Tom gestured at the water, the incoming waves representing missed opportunities in my mind. "Are these waves beach breaks? Point breaks? Are they breaking to the left, or right? Are they closing out? Is the breeze onshore or off?"

I understood the individual words, but had no idea what Tom was saying. For most of that morning, he taught us to read the ocean. He taught us the terminology. He taught us what to look for,which conditions were optimal, which would leave us bored, and which would leave us pounded into the sand beneath the water. He reminded me of my dad, and I drew on some of those early lessons he taught me.

But surely, he was joking about the not going in the water part"¦

Finally, we got to get on our boards,not in the water though. Tom had us spread out and lay our boards down in the sand. We attached out ankle leashes and laid on our boards while miming the paddling techniques necessary to propel the board beyond the breaking waves,or, the outside as it was called in surfspeak.

Tom walked amongst us, correcting issues here and there with each student,reminding us that the board was not a bed: don't lie on it. Chin up! Chest up! You're not swimming, you're paddling! (Admittedly, mimicking paddling on dry land is next to impossible)

After a half-an-hour or so of this, Tom announced that we were now ready to learn how to "pop up",that is, to go from paddling in the prone, to standing on the board. He asked us which foot should be front and which should be to the rear.

One student, a teenage boy with curly red hair and a stubborn case of acne, spoke up. "Right should be in front." Tom told him he was wrong. Since there was only one other answer, I happily offered, "Left!"

"No."

Damn it! This is a trick question.

After a few less-than-scientific methods to determine which is my instinctive foot,that is, the foot that anchors you, that balances you,I learned I was a goofy rider. Only about 30% of surfers are goofy. That means our left foot is back, holding our weight, acting as a kind of rudder, while our right foot is to the front. The term goofy,and I've only recently learned of this,comes from an old Disney cartoon in which Goofy was surfing, left foot back, right foot forward. So there's some useless trivia for you.

Now came the pop up. We practiced popping up into our stance,in my case, left foot back, right foot forward. He had us on these boards, down on the sand, paddling imaginary water and then he'd yell, "Pop up!"

We were far from synchronized in doing this as each student's athletic abilities were different, but we'd all grip the rails of our board, put chest and chin skyward, and leap up, scrambling our feet into position below us and, hopefully, landing in our proper stance.

And we did this over and over at the command of, "pop up!"

We'd be laying on our boards while he was addressing us, talking about something other than popping up, and,"pop up!"

Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

By the start of the second day, we knew the drill. The command to pop up could and would come at any time. It was being drilled into us. I felt like Ralph Macchio in The Karate Kid, doing the same seemingly mundane task over and over and over until it became second nature, all the while wondering when I was going to do something fun.

Finally, the time to really paddle out had arrived. Tom and his two teenage sons walked into the sea, giant Tom looking like some kind of sea monster returning home. We grabbed our boards,some of us dragging them, some carrying them under their arms, and some of us, myself included, holding the rails and balancing the boards on our heads, and walked into the water.

Once the water reached my knees, I fell forward on my board and began to paddle. We hadn't yet learned anything about getting outside so when we encountered whitewater and foam, Tom or one of his sons helped us get over the wave. Soon we were all bobbing in a kind of half-assed line up. Tom and his sons, in water up to their shoulders, came up to us and, one by one, positioned us correctly, held our boards as they let inadequate waves pass beneath us, or gave us a little shove to be in optimum position when a wave they judged as acceptable began rolling toward us. I felt the momentum,the sensation of movement both forward and up.

"Pop up!"

I was up and in my goofy stance before Tom's command was finished. It was muscle memory. It was second nature. I understood why we never got in the water that first day.

My legs were unsure, as wobbly of those of a newborn calf's. But I was up, damn it! I was surfing! The wave pushed me straight into the beach. Lacking the ability to do a proper kick out, I simply hopped off the board in shallow water when the wave's momentum had run out.

I grabbed the board and turned around. Other students, in their struggle to stand up, tumbled from their boards in hilarious and clumsy manners. Those who did make it to the beach stood on the sand with their boards, unsure of what to do next. Me? I charged back out"¦



Twenty-two years a later, Tom and I stood on a stretch of beach outside the town of Wellfleet, Massachusetts. Our boards lay at our feet, covered in wax and beach sand.

Tom, still surfing and still my mentor, asked me what I heard.

I must look absurd, standing there in a neoprene wetsuit and blindfold, a bearded giant escorting me down to the sand. But this was Tom's method. This is how I started the process of getting wired in at a new beach. I listened to the sea. "Let's see"¦direction of the sound suggests they are breaking to the right. The boom is significant, but nothing like a post storm surge. Sounds like",I paused, calculating,"maybe shoulder high waves. I'm hearing a kind of hallow raddle as the break though. They sound tubular,are their tubes out there?" I asked with excitement.

"You tell me."

"Sure sounds like it. But not totally. Some of these waves are closing out. But not all of them. Offshore breeze"¦optimum conditions, bruh."

Tom removed my blindfold with a chuckle and I was delighted to see that the scene I'd pieced together in my head based on what I heard, was, in fact, accurate. It was a chilly afternoon in October and other than a few sea birds and sea scrub, the beach was deserted.

"Not bad, huh?" I asked.

"You did well, Grasshopper." Tom paused, as if he were going to take the conversation in an uncomfortable direction. "So"¦California?"

I looked down at the sand. "Yeah."

"Well, you'll fit right in. You probably should have gone years ago."

"I couldn't afford it years ago."

Tom laughed. "You're probably going to find that you can't afford it now."

I shook my head. "I don't care. I have to. Look, some people want world peace. Others want to be rich and famous. Me? I want to surf Malibu, Rincon, Huntington Beach, La Jo,"

"I know, I know. But it's not like the movies. Heat waves, smog, Sigalerts, a cost of living that is through the roof, not to mention all those locals half your age carving up the waves with their 6-4 tri-fins that are going to regard you as nothing more than a “kook' when they see that 9-6 Takayama you're dragging around."

"I can shortboard!" I said, defensively.

"Yeah, but you're not a shortboarder, Katie. You never were and you never will be." Tom paused a took a deep breath. "You know, over the years, I must have taught over 1,200 kids to surf? Where are they all?" He waved his arm in the direction of the sea. "It got too hard and so they gave up. I'd say 1,000 of those 1,200 hundred kids surfed a summer or two,maybe. But you? You I've been trying to get rid of for twenty years."

I laughed.

"See you get it. From day one, you got it." Tom shook his head. "It's not about conquering the wave,about beating it. All these kids spending all this time and money on techniques and technology designed to pretty much eliminate the wave from surfing. Longboarders are a dying breed. We don't overpower the wave, we harness it; we don't conquer it, we work with it. It's about style and grace and not brute force. Katie, you're a figure skater who wants to go hit the ice with a bunch of hockey goons. The Aloha Spirit,“hang loose, bruh!',get that out of your head right now. It's not real. Not anymore, at least."

"It should be real. It can be real again."

Tom nodded and smiled. "That's why the surf scene out there is going to benefit from you: You're innocent and naive enough to be an idealist. Peace, love, and waves. They need you out there."

I smiled and looked away.

"Just promise me one thing. Consider this your last lesson." He grabbed me by my shoulders and made sure I was looking into his eyes. "Don't ever change. Don't ever lose that innocence. Don't become one of them," he said, cocking his head to the west.

He was serious. This I could see.

"I mean it."

"Yeah. I got it."

"I know you're a nine-to-five person. You'll have to be. It's California. Most of your time is going to be either being at work or being stuck in traffic going to and from work. I understand you'll have a life outside of surfing. But when you're in the water, you're a representative of you and your ideals and of me and mine."

"I won't let you down, Tom."

Tom smiled and inhaled deeply, pulling the sea air into his lungs. He exhaled, closed his eyes in a moment of Zen-like tranquility before saying, "Well? Shall we?"
I was already trotting down the beach, board on my head, halfway to the water.

"Katie?"

"C'mon, old man! Catch up!"
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