Dear bots and the five friends I’ve had the courage to tell about this thing,
Before I went surfing today, I wrote down the friction points to go surfing.
Friction Points to Going Surfing, AE SoCal Ed.
putting the rack on my car
putting the board the right way on my car so I don’t look like a kook who’s just learning
getting to the beach and worrying about:
my board flying off my car because I didn’t put my board on right;
that there are so few other people driving in this traffic with boards on their cars;
the webbing of the surf rack flaying off my sun-aged repair paint job from whatever accident my car had before I got it with a salvage title on it
That even though I’ve never been good at surfing, I haven’t surfed much in the past nine years here, so I’m basically a kook
How surfing always reminds me that my dad wanted a boy and I wasn’t
The list could have gone on or I could have thought about what I had to do during the day or the other things that I spend 40 minutes writing about in the morning, but it was time to decide if I would actually go surfing.
I remembered that my best friend from Colorado will be visiting me soon and not only do I want to take him surfing (if he wants), I also want to take him on a bike ride up the coast. If I want to do both those things with him, I better start doing those things now. Plus, on Friday, when I planned this week, in the Adventure Auxie column, I put “Surfing” as a goal to complete this week, between “Go Rollerskating!” and “ride your bike”.
So despite the fact that going surfing reminds me both that I haven’t made time for my leisure in this near-decade of living in San Diego and that I’ve been a disappointment since birth to my dad, I went surfing.
I drove a different way than I usually go, taking the route that dear old dad, Danny Ekster, showed me this last time he took me to the beach a few weeks ago. I poked a little at the old wound, wondering how my dad would feel that a massive dose of hallucinogens downed in the mountains in Colombia helped me come to peace with our relationship. And following his advice — get a job and a husband—also brought him some peace, but now I don’t have time for him.
I thought that if I saw my dad’s friends at the beach I’d ask them not to tell him they saw me. How very like my dad that was, to ask some people whom I have loose social ties to keep a secret from a person I have close social ties with. I hoped that leaving my house for the morning before I tried to meet my self-imposed obligations (The Get To Do List) would give my stepdaughter some time alone, free from whatever she imagines I think about her when she asks me “What?” when I look at her to acknowledge her presence, time to feel her “effanineffable” self expand into my absence in the space we shared together. I thought that, if she is becoming as like me as I fear, she would appreciate it.
And going surfing was alone time for me. I was coming off a week of having chosen to be in close quarters with a friend, then with my husband, and finally almost a whole weekday (Monday) with my stepdaughter, where I asked her to run errands with me. I needed to be alone or with different people. The different people today would be a summer beach break crowd in a tony part of San Diego that wished to secede from the city.
As I drove through the neighborhood to the public parking lot, I thought how this could have been mine. My dad talked about those beach bungalow housing offers he had when he was younger but thought he couldn’t afford when he worked as a local lifeguard—before he got drafted1 during Vietnam and before he joined the Border Patrol. I looked around and thought of all these lots had once been the foundation of a middle-class beachside neighborhood. There are no more of these in Southern California.
If my father had been smarter about real estate, I wouldn’t have to drive for 40 minutes to get to a break. All that time and money we spent worrying about immigrants crossing the border from the nineties through now when the real migrants the locals should have been worrying about were the short-fingered millionaires from Arizona and the Fortune 5000 CEOs wanting oceanfront property.
I looked at the waves, feeling my namesake. Surfing is hard and I’m so rusty as to be a beginner again. The waves were steep, quick, coming from all over with a fair amount of energy, but holding some shape. A short board day, not a long board day. It wasn’t a great day to get out on the [redacted] foam board my dad got me for my fortieth birthday (#foamiesfor40), but that’s the board I had. And I had to get out if I was going to surf. I decided to surf inside, not futz around with a board that I didn’t know where I balanced on or how it handled; I didn’t want to be knocking some dude off a wave because I couldn’t handle my board. If I can’t be a good surfer, I want to be a polite surfer.
Surfing is hard but I like doing hard things. Anything worth doing should be hard, at least a little; you can choose your level of difficulty, but doing hard things is good for your brain. It’s learning.
When I was kid, everyone told me how smart I was. I didn’t believe them; the things that I did that made them say I was smart were easy. Now that I’m older, I still don’t believe I was exceptionally smart, despite the grade-skipping, the gifted and talented education, the scoring in the ninetieth percentile on the SATs at twelve years old. I was just really good at understanding verbal and written instruction.
All of those things they threw at me to test me to see if I was smart I never felt like I wanted to quit. That’s the measure by which I regard doing something hard: you have to want to quit it at some point.
The first time I recall something in school actually being hard was when I was exposed to poetry.
I was probably twelve. The books in my home were Stephen King and bodice-ripper romance novels. But here were written words that were not instructions, not novels, not something that I could make sense of easily. I knocked my head at it, I went to war with it, I bought a How to Interpret Poetry book from the Waldenbooks at the mall when my mom took me one weekend. Somehow I got that if I was going to understand poetry, I would have to write it. So I wrote poetry, lots of it, all of it bad, thankfully landfilled.
But in keeping on poetry, in learning it by making it, I learned a whole new skill set: how to do hard things. So I kept making myself do the hardest things that I thought I wanted to do: I moved alone to the East Coast, then to Denver; I took a job in South Korea and lived as a migrant worker for five years; I got into traveling and writing and dropped out of the world onto the backpacker circuit. I learned languages, how to cook, what makes me happy, how to be a good friend. It wasn’t until I was 27, in South Africa, that I thought to learn to surf.
Surfing is the hardest. When I surf I hit my head against the psychological shit that is my birthright. I can’t surf like a local because I was born a girl and I never trusted my surfer dad. So I’ve learned from others. When I get in the water, I remember what the hwajangnim of the surfshop at [redacted] in South Korea taught me about balancing on a board in the paddle out. I think of the lessons in popping up that the Balinese surf instructor who I hung out with for a week in Kuta taught me. I think of another migrant teacher, a professional snowboarder from Canada, asking me one Chuseok surf session before he gave me advice, “Can I give you some feedback?”
I don’t remember the feedback that he gave me, but I loved that he asked me. I wished more people had asked me if I wanted advice, these last nine years. I think I would have consented. I would have listened harder to the friends who told me that I was working too hard, that I cared too much about the wrong things.
But people were telling me how good I was, when I was working so hard that I had no time for surfing. They were appreciative of my efforts. Or they were calling me on my days off, soliciting my opinion. That is addicting.
It is no matter now, though. I quit my job. It was hard to do, quitting. I had tried twice before. The hardness of the work was also addicting. I thought I was learning something. I was learning, just not much useful and it was taking up the time and mental space for me to learn the important things about the family I was trying to be a part of.
I walked down to the water, trying to find the rip current out, and do my arm warm ups. I am forty, trying to learn how to surf again. Before there is the pop-up, there is the paddle out. Can I duckdive an eight-foot-foamy? No, it’s a turtle roll. Is the inside that heavy? It’s not.
The water lapped at my feet and I remembered to record the activity with my fitness watch. There is a part of me that believes that if I can record how much time I spend riding my bike, doing yoga, dancing, hiking, walking, surfing, swimming, climbing, backpacking, and weight lifting, that I will know how much leisure time I need. I will have a point for negotiating, with my family and future work partners. I need to move x many hours in a day, week, month, year and I won’t sell or give any time that conflicts with that. Manage your expectations for my output because my brain needs a lot of movement, probably more than I can fit around a 40-hour workweek. But they are never 40-hour workweeks. Not in America.
A quick three-wave set came in, and I tried to catch the white water. The water took the board, but I was too far back, my weight acting like a brake on the board. I got off, tried to walk back to where I thought the line was and then I felt it—the bracing pain of something entering the top of the foot.
I have never been stung by a sting ray before. This is it. I’m forty and these fuckers finally got me. I grew complacent, thinking that all the other surfers in the lineup had scared them. I was also hopeful it wasn’t a sting ray sting. My only experience of being around a “victim” of a sting ray was a teenaged girl getting stung on a Baja trip when I was kid. She cried for hours. This didn’t feel that bad. Maybe it wasn’t actually a sting ray, but some flotsam hitting the top of the foot, cutting it up. I got out of the water, stopped my timer. Nine minutes and 47 seconds surfing today. I saved that activity. I got in the water, so it counts. I didn’t bail.
On my way back to the car, some dude coming out of a $200,000 van asked me how the surf was. I looked at my bleeding foot, and said big, then corrected myself. Steep, fine, short.
I stripped out of the wet suit borrowed from my husband, as mine no longer fit me. Around year two in Korea, I started admitted that I wasn’t coming home because I didn’t want to get fat again. I was elated when I came back and maintained my Korea weight, but that didn’t last once I got an office job and could afford more than a couple slices of pizza a day.
My bleeding foot deserved a photo which I sent to my husband. He told me to go to the lifeguard station to get them to look at it. I refused. It didn’t seem to hurt that bad. Board back on the car, I drove home, listening again to the webbing hit my roof. It was worse on this route. My foot throbbed.
At home, I grabbed a black hose with a spray nozzle on it and hit the top of the my foot with the sunwarmed water. The pain abated; it was sting ray venom. I had forgotten what to do after this point and felt a little chagrined. Shouldn’t I know how to do basic first aid to the common dangers of my sport? But most of my surfing injuries have been from the board: getting hit in the face because I mistimed my roll, getting hit in the shins because I was out in typhoon swell too big for me and a giant wave caught me sideways, trying to turn to catch the wave. The other surfing injuries weren’t injuries per se; they were just the terrifying fear that I was going to drown because I got held down in a powerful set. Sometimes the waves pounded me against the sandy bottom. I’d probably have more stories about infected reef cuts, but even when I surfed badly in the tropics, I only surfed at beach breaks.
Here I was, though, a local San Diegan stung by a local sting ray. I looked up first aid, and got some hot water ready to soak in for an hour or more. I thought of the Get To Do List I wrote before I left. I wasn’t going to Get To Do any of it today. I was going to call this day a wash and see how my foot was.
I thought of all those bastards who can dawn patrol and go to work; one of the sticking points about my last job is that I wanted more guaranteed leisure time. Take it, I was told, so long as you get your work done. Go do those things before your job, figure out how to make it work.
I preferred not to. I preferred to have clearer guidelines. I preferred to fantasize about a past that I never experienced, one where you could be middle-class in Southern California and be able to have the weekends to enjoy it. I didn’t want to be another cog in the infrastructure that sells the landscape and the weather to rich people. I just wanted to have what my dad had, the advice I never consented to but should have taken, “Work to live, don’t live to work.”
So here it is, almost twelve hours since that sting ray got me. My Get To Do List gets re-positioned for tomorrow. Most of it is figuring out how to “Work to live, not live to work.” Surfing gets crossed off the Adventure Auxie column for the week. Tomorrow, I’ll spend some time in the Hausfrau column, because that is another experiment I am doing with my time, supporting others in doing hard things. And hopefully, in the process, I can relearn how to do that other hard thing that I love: writing.
Sore-footedly yours,
Auxie Ekster
Only this year does he describe his joining the army being caused by the draft; for my whole life before 2023, he said he enlisted to avoid the draft and because his father, a World War II vet, made him feel like he was pussy for not joining up.