LAST WAVE: Adventure of a Lifetime

The most adventurous thing I ever did in my life didn’t happen on the reefs of Indonesia or on the rivet-ruined roads of Baja or deep in the Fijian jungles hiking toward a rumored surfing Mecca. No, unfortunately for me, my most adventurous moment happened at Topanga Canyon State Beach in Malibu, California in 1992, during the summer between sixth and seventh grade with a guy named Peter Finn.

If surfing has taught me anything, it’s that you deal with what you’ve got in front of you, but I’m still inclined to exercise creative license here in making up a better start to my surfing career—something a little bit more glamorous, perhaps.

Sadly, the memory of where that surfing career started is so vivid that I couldn’t fake it if I wanted to. I remember every sensory detail of that experience: from the misty gray fog bank sitting over the water (I’ve since come to expect nothing less of California summers), to the dew-moist sand underneath my feet, to the chest-high rightbreaking waves peeling softly along the otherwise glassy ocean, to the oversized neon green and black hand-me-down spring suit that my rail-thin arms and legs couldn’t quite fill out yet, even if my dad said that it “looked pretty good” to him (patting me on the back in such a way that I expected him to say, “hey, hey”).

For sheer adrenaline, I’ve probably had adventures that top this one, but in terms of paradigm-shifting experience, no contest. I was dragging the yellowing tail of a humorously oversized, 1983 vintage 6'4" squaretail thruster with boxy rails and fixed fins that my brother Brian had bought secondhand—Play It Again Sports, maybe—letting the leash trail 6 feet behind me. To my left was Peter Finn, whose mother had driven us here in her navy blue Jeep Wagoneer with the wood-paneled siding, and if I was unpoised and comically outfitted, Peter had all of the gear. His wetsuit fit just right, and his board was white and perfectly waxed. (I didn’t know what surf wax did at that point.) He knew how to let the leash loop just over the front of his board as he carried it under his arm and he looked every bit the part of a fully formed 12-year-old surfer.

For my part, I was starting to regret having told Peter a week before that I was a surfer, and that I knew exactly what I was doing. The lie worked on the dry land of the San Fernando Valley playground, but it was going to become incredibly transparent in the next two minutes. No, I would have done better to tell Peter that my brother Brian had taken up surfing—though I’d never actually seen him do it—and that I figured it couldn’t possibly be that hard if Brian could do it.

When we were standing there on the sand, if I was really keen, I might have taken a hard look at the faces of the surfers in the water, stepped back, and thought about the absolute resolve they all seemed to undertake the sport with, but I was 12. Peter attached his leash to his ankle expertly, made a quick dash to the water, dove in, and paddled off to the lineup, leaving me standing alone on the sand dune, trying to figure out how to make sense of any of the apparatuses I’d been given. My wetsuit was so oversized that I had stepped through the neckhole to put it on, and as I looked at the leash, I had no idea which leg it was supposed to go on, so I opted for the left, though when I attached the Velcro around my ankle as tight as possible, the whole loop still slipped off of my foot, and I knew that I was not going to make as deft an entrance as Peter.

As it turned out, I jumped on my board in the shallows, its nose pointing west and my body pointing vaguely southwest. The cold, salty water flooding my wetsuit so that it hung sloppily over my wire coat hangers of shoulders. The surfboard suddenly seemed like an extremely complicated piece of equipment, my arms transformed into rather ineffectual and awkward appendages. Peter was sitting in the lineup with the grownups and high school kids, and though I did my tenacious best for the next half-hour to join him, it was no use. I grew up over the hill from Topanga Canyon State Beach, in The Valley, and though I had seen enough TV to know that this made me a “Val” and that this was somehow bad, I also knew that it didn’t matter, because surfing was something I was not cut out for. I tried to convince myself that surfing was stupid, and started yearning at that exact moment for a football and consequently a pastime that made sense, because all of this surfing stuff just seemed so frivolous and silly when you compared it to, say, Marcus Allen and the Los Angeles Raiders.

Maybe my life would be easier if I could have convinced myself of this. Maybe if that had happened I would today be able to sit still for more than two hours at a time without having to consult a surf report, or I wouldn’t have the impulse to drive the same two-mile loop to the beach five times a day, or I might not feel the need to make a ridiculous phone call to somebody I don’t really want to speak to so that they can assuage my fears and tell me that the surf is utterly terrible.

But I didn’t succeed at any of it.

And, OCD tendencies aside, there were more profound moments to come in my surfing career—times more triumphant and poetic and meaningful—but I guess it wouldn’t be right to track it back to anything but Peter Finn, a god-awful surfboard, and 30 absolutely ridiculous minutes of pure desire at Topanga Canyon. My life literally hasn’t been the same ever since. If I would have slept in, or ignored it, I might be somewhere else in the world, but I’m not.

And thank God for that.