Learn to surf

In the pecking order of outdoor cool, one sport stands supreme. It’s not fall-and-you-die free-skiing or whitewater kayaking. It’s not scaling thin-aired Himalayan peaks or ropeless rock walls. It’s not even one of those new-fangled extreme hybrids—say, pedaling your triple-suspension bike off a seaside cliff armed with a parachute and scuba gear.
 
No, it’s surfing.
 
Centuries after Hawaiians learned to walk on waves, nothing can touch the sport for simplicity and challenge. Biologists say we’re over half H2O, while our blue planet is more agua than not, so surfing, at its finest, can be a profound convergence of two bodies of water, balanced between a wafer of waxed fibreglass.
 
Not since Brian Wilson went AWOL to channel the MP3s of the sea has wave-riding held such a powerful undertow on our collective consciousness. These days, surf-troubadour Jack Johnson croons the soundtrack to everyone’s endless summer, from Maui to Moncton. Movies such as Blue Crush, Step Into Liquid and Riding Giants have built a mythology around conquering our fears by taming monster waves. And on teen-angst TV soaps from The O.C. to Summerland, the sport has become a Zen-lite metaphor for life, love, and the meaning of the universe.
 
Of course, I had to try.
 
I could have been patriotic and enrolled in one of the Canadian surf schools scattered along Long Beach, B.C., or Lawrencetown, Nova Scotia. But swimming in what James Joyce called the “scrotumtightening sea” didn’t appeal to my inner wuss. Besides, you never see Laird Hamilton—the über-buff American surf champion—swaddled in neoprene, tanned toes to blonde top, like some bondage freak.
 
The over-crowded waves in Hawaii, California and Australia, however, are notorious for aggro incidents of  “surf rage”. So I scouted a safer site to find my sea legs: Costa Rica. Here, on Central America’s Pacific coast, pura vida is the national mantra. (And if you insist on a translation, you’re too type-A to really get it.) Where the surf town of Tamarindo—pura vida incarnate—reclines beside a crescent beach, the foaming crests of an ample river break prove too mild for most pros, but just right for neophytes. Down the town’s main drag, board shops offer to coach newbies in a week or even a day. Better yet, I scored the Viagra of surf schools, one that guaranteed to get me up and riding in just an hour and a half.
 
My tutor was Tom, a late-40s refugee from Huntington Beach (aka Surf City, USA) who’d moved to Costa Rica because life as a California beach bum was a little too fast paced. He had a lanky physique, a hermit’s beard and a sun-baked hide the texture of the leatherback turtles that nest on the neighbouring playa. To preserve my own pale skin, he made me wear a surf shirt two sizes too small and the colour of Pepto Bismol. My fuzzy navel squeezed loose of this pink vise like a circus bear in a tube top.
 
Across the sand Tom laid a longboard and demonstrated how to balance my body along its axis and then spring to my feet in one yogic motion. After a half-hour of dry-land practice, I was ready for my exam. We splashed through the surf zone and aimed my board at the beach. “Paddle hard,” Tom advised in his unrushed Cali drawl, “and pop up when you feel the wave begin to lift.”
 
His terra-firma teachings, however, didn’t translate into fluid dynamics. Standing on a moving surfboard feels as natural and as wise as balancing in the bathtub on a bar of soap. I thrashed the water like an Evinrude and got halfway vertical before pitching over, time after time, snorting lines of salt water as the board and my tethered leg shot in opposing directions. Other surfers, beginners themselves, scowled as my self-conscious flailings interrupted their own joy rides. “Find the axis,” my surf Yoda intoned, but I was too busy falling hard on my own axis to know where to look. The minutes ticked toward lesson’s end.
 
“Stop thinking about it!” Tom finally yelled, decades of hippie calm torpedoed by my incompetence. “And just do it!”
 
And then it happened. I leapt to my feet and for once the board didn’t scoot from under my raw soles. Wobbly-kneed, I rose to my full height and let the great liquid oscillation beneath me—a wave that photos would document at a towering six, maybe even eight inches—ferry me to shore. Tom flashed a thumbs-up. I’d done it.
 
I’d also done in my body, too. Even months later, I felt as though I’d left part of my shoulder socket on the shores of Tamarindo. Some days still, I stretch the arm behind my head and grimace, and then wait for the inevitable expressions of concern.
 
“Oh, it’s nothing,” I say, as I remember the day when I, too, rode giants. “Just an old surfing injury.”