Surfing

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Surfers celebrate this land by heading out to sea

By Elisabeth Gause

July 3, 2006

San Diego--Along the country’s coasts, Americans flock to their beaches to lay out their towels and watch Fourth of July light shows. It’s the surfers, however, who have truly found the best way to celebrate our country’s birthday: We leave this great land.

In San Diego, it has become a surfer’s tradition to paddle out and lie under the light show, literally. Some of us just paddle out alone to our favorite breaks. Most of us bring out our longest boards so that we too can lie on our backs, something we never do on a surfboard.

It would be politically correct to say surfers are superpatriotic—and some are. But surfers aren’t real into boundaries, even if they’re lovely ones that give us freedom and Monday Night Football. As much as we love the sight of the light show above us, we love the sight beneath us and behind us. The joy for the ocean beneath us should be a given, but when we turn around to gaze upon the shore, let me tell you what we see.

Very little sand. We see bonfires shimmying their way up to the stars and black shadows jumping around them. We connect them with the slightly delayed sounds of high pitched girlie screams and baritone brays of drunken boys. We see a beach entirely covered by humanity and we’re separate from it. And that’s the part we like.

I don’t know if we’re supposed to admit something like this, but we like that you can’t get out here. We like that even if you paddle out all the other days to ride the waves, you won’t paddle out this evening. This is our special place. In the way that all Americans celebrate our unity on this evening, we surfers further celebrate in a clique.

We love that you have to stop at the water’s edge but we get to keep going. I’m sure it’s small-minded and mean-spirited of us, but it’s honest. We’re like a bunch of strangers smiling at each other backstage at a U2 concert. We don’t hate the people outside who weren’t lucky enough to get backstage passes; we’re just so freakin’ happy we did and we’re here.

But for those of you who are bound to the shore, let me recount one journey to sea.

Red tide was around during last year’s Fourth of July and provided surfers with a second, possibly even more exciting, light show. In the evenings, the bioluminescence is blue, so as one paddled, a fume of blue creamy streaming light followed after our arms.

Being one person paddling was a trip, but being in the water with two hundred surfers was a light show. Four hundred streaking arcs of neon azure danced beneath the water and lit up our faces in a spooky way that only blue can. Some terrestrials claimed to have seen the flickering lights from the shore, but really, it was our own private light show and we couldn’t woo-hoo enough about it.

This year, however, we will have no red tide and only a slice of moon, so when we paddle out, it’ll be into the solid black. We’ll follow the hoots and hollers of surfers already in place, trusting the strokes of others that we hear. Many people choose this holiday to celebrate this land, we celebrate this water. Even in the blind night, we trust it. And we trust each other.

We celebrate our land’s independence by being with each other in the water. Contradiction? Nope. Perfection.