-My brother Mike, on my voice mail.
Last Thursday, I was at Mike's house painting a surfboard. I had chosen to portray a giant hurricane bearing down on the State of Florida, in honor of the actual giant hurricane, Bill, for which the board was made. Chances were, Bill was going to start sending us the best surf of the year in 24 hours, and Mike had enough confidence in Bill to shape a board to the conditions we were expecting, and enough confidence in me to ask me to decorate it. The hurricane went on fine, but Florida...
-Uh, Mike? I've got some bad news.
-What? he said, glancing over. Ah, c'mon, man! You're killing me. (My attempts to freehand draw our already phallic home state left it looking even more penile than usual.)
-Hang on, let me draw some rivers...
-Those just look like veins.
-I think we're done here.
Friday evening, we pulled up to the ocean. Checking the surf, we saw that the first of the groundswell from Hurricane Bill had already arrived. A few minutes later, I was dropping into my first wave, a 3-foot-overhead left. I was on my own homemade board, Don Quijote, which was not consciously designed for waves like these, but it did fine. Paddling over to Mike, I told him I was okay with dying today, if I had to. He concurred, and we went back to catching waves. His new board was performing exactly as he'd hoped it would.
By Saturday afternoon, we had been surfing more or less continuously since Friday evening, pausing only to eat, drink, and sleep. Our shoulders were aching, and the skin over the points of our ribs was tender from lying on our boards all day. We'd had to leave Guana River State Park, where we'd started that morning, due to an apocalyptic lightning storm that had arrived while we were in the water. We had just arrived back at our friend Isaac's house, and I'd hoped to take a break, as I had been dealing with a - let's call it "advanced dehydration" - since I woke up that morning. From outside, I heard Mike's voice. I stepped outside, trying to let the balcony railing hide the fact that I'd already changed into dry clothes. I told him I'd meet him out there, but fifteen minutes after he had encouraged me to "grow a penis and some balls" and paddle back out, I was back in the ocean.
My last wave was a left, a near-perfect mirror image of the wave that had started my session on Friday. I dropped in (back on Don Quijote) and stayed as close to the peeling lip of the wave as I could. I shot out of the pocket, cut back, and maneuvered back into the right spot as a massive scream was building inside me, like the scream you feel in a horse race when your horse is in front, or as you watch a footballer streak toward the goal with the other team in hot pursuit. Finally, the wave closed out and I just as I was about to get crushed by the lip, I shot over the top of the breaking wave in an ungainly dive toward safety. I stood up in the chest deep water, and bellowed at the top of my lungs. Do you see that? Did every one of you assholes SEE THAT!? WOOOOOOOO!!!!
Bill had been a success, and arriving as it did less than two weeks before my departure for France, it felt like a gift. Good times.
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