Nature Boy

People joke with me all the time about how long I’ll be able to wait before teaching my daughter to surf, and there’s a reason that they do – surfing’s one of the obvious loves of my life. For the record, I plan to have my beloved on my back while I ride a boogie board next summer and maybe put her on her own boogie board the summer after that, when she’s a respectable two. What I hope I don’t wait anywhere near so long to show her is what surfing is part of for her dad – an abiding love of water and nature that started when he was very young and shows little sign of abating.

As I tell people, riding waves is very nice, but the part of surfing that casual onlookers might never figure out on their own is how deep the immersion in nature is. Whether in front of the towering hotels of Waikiki or beside a windswept stretch of the Outer Banks without a single building in sight, surfing puts you instantly and shockingly in a living ocean where creatures bump into your hands as you paddle and fly over you as you sit and wait for waves, where big fish chase little fish ahead of your rushing surfboard as you stand on it, where rain seems to happen in four dimensions. Rain, snow, and wind have different flavors when you’re sitting on a surfboard than on land.

Knowing as I do that my daughter will be immersed in technology in ways that will baffle and sometimes frighten me, I will do everything in my power to temper the cruelty of machines with mindfulness, watchfulness, and fun. I will bring my baby into the non-mechanized parts of the earth and laugh with her there.