Great Expectations
Baby stepping my way into a week of waves.
We’ve reached the eve of what could be an all-time surf bender for a father of two little girls. I write to you with those little beads of sweat you get on your upper lip after playing football at recess in middle school because I’m just now sipping my first coffee of the day in the afternoon heat. I had to skip my morning coffee for the first time in 30 years to get a “routine CT scan.” It was miserable (skipping coffee, not the scan). Finally feeling like myself again. And now I wait for the results.
My girls are visiting family on the East Coast starting tomorrow and this dad has a long checklist of house work, proposals, pitches, pre-production meetings, home repair and self care (watch a sport! Go Canes? Knicks?) to catch up on. But the top of my list reads: SURF! My wife made the list. I love her, she’s a big fan of my surfing because it results in her husband being better in all facets of the game of life.
In fact, she is encouraging surfing’s version of a bar crawl for me next week. She saw the stoke in my eyes when I watched Mark Sponsler this week. When I read my morning Chascast forecasts each morning. She could tell something was brewing. “What’s the forecast say, Settie? El Niño coming?”
My boards are primed, waxed, ready for battle. There are like four back-to-back south swells with enough wind swell sprinkled on top to break up the lines. This is what we look for in these parts. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t excited to surf. I will miss my family of course, and our reunion will include some beach time together so I’m psyched to get there, but this reintegration into a surf life, the stacked swells and the “free time” have all built my expectations into a huge vat of anxiety and fear.
Like Pip in Dickens’ novel Great Expectations, I have the knowledge of a certain windfall in my future and I’m doing my damndest not to become a prick like Pip in the meantime. I don’t want to make his mistake: desiring the wrong thing. I keep reminding myself the windfall isn’t the thing. Getting to surf at all is the thing.
The optimistic forecast is just Pip’s fortune, the shiny thing out there trying to distract you from everything you already have. A surf window! But I’d be lying if I said this week wasn’t hard to keep my eye on the ball.
I avoided knowing too much about next week. I limited my intake of information while also peeking behind the curtain enough to get borderline optimistic. I know when the swells peak, but I don’t want to know much more. I’m still happy my surfline cams are unplugged.
I’m now learning that the majority of our surf life is anticipatory. We live in perpetual expectation of what might be. What could be. What should be. And it heightens our disappointments and it’s why locals are grumpy and frantic when waves arrive.
We ride actual waves for such a small blip of time, the anticipation and forecasting becomes a bloated portion of our surf life. It’s like excitement and disappointment fencing for your attention.
I keep checking myself, repeating out loud: I am excited to surf. I am not excited for the forecast. I am simply excited to surf. Like the babystepping Bob Wiley in What About Bob, I am baby stepping my way into tomorrow and next week. “Baby steps to the beach. Baby steps to surf. Baby steps checking it. Baby steps paddling out…”
Instead of visions of sugarplum pits and me on a conveyor belt of tubes tomorrow morning, I inherently lean toward pessimism. I tell myself it’s gonna be too walled. South wind will ruffle it and extinguish any hopes of tubes. It will be crowded. With tons of current. And no parking. Or maybe there will be a marathon or some kind of goofy dog surf contest killing the vibe. But even if all that happens, I’m prepared to be OK. Just as long as there’s a coffee waiting for me in the car.—Travis Ferré