Rara Avis: The New England Surfer

It was just another day at the beach in New England. I awoke Saturday morning to a pallid, milk-white sky that was seemingly unable to decide whether to rain or snow. Full of hope and giddy energy, I loaded my gear into the car and struck out towards the water. As I rolled up to the overlook at the local break, I was greeted by a sweeping expanse of gray, foreboding ocean, as flat as the Great Salt Lake. Half a dozen other surfers were convening on the bluff, gazing into the abyss. I surveyed my compatriots; dejected eyes peered longingly out of haggard faces. Was it the mist or were some of these lost souls’ eyes actually watering? For over two months there had been no rideable surf. We huddled there...the pain making it too difficult to speak but our collective sadness needed no words to be communicated and it hung over us like a great sea shroud.



Looking out into the grotesque flatness, my active imagination (de rigueur for a New England surfer) began to ignite. Just as windmills became lawless giants to Don Quixote, the minuscule wavelets morphed into head high sucking barrels. There I was stroking into a perfect wave and just as I was getting covered up...the rat-ta-tat-tat of seagull sludge landing squarely on the hood of my car jarred me back into reality. The idiotic smile on my face during this break with reality formed into a mask of chagrin. At that moment, something in me broke and I comprehended the absurdity of my predicament. Out of the depths of my despair, an insidious question worked its way into my mind. It was a question that had never before occurred to me and it struck me with Teahupoo-like force. Why did we do it? I peered around at my moribund brethren. Why did we dyed-in-the-wool New England surfers, subject ourselves to this masochism day in and day out? My attempt to come to grips with these haunting questions has brought me to the brink of understanding one of the least understood creatures in the world.

It goes without saying that the New England surfer is a breed apart. We are bound to the capricious forces of nature just as the ancient Greeks were doomed to suffer at the hands of the mercurial Olympian gods. We live in a land that is probably as conducive to surfing as Southern California is to studying. Yet we New England surfers are descendants, in mindset if not in direct ancestry, from a people hell-bent on eking out a subsistence on this inhospitable coast. A people too proud and stubborn to move to Florida. One would think that after losing half of their population during their first brutal New England winter, the Pilgrims would have wised up, cut their losses, and hightailed it back over to the other side of the Pond. However, the single-minded Puritans defied all rational thought and stayed. Yes, they stayed, farmed the poor, rocky soil and survived.

Much the same can be said about the New England surfer. Instead of relocating to more agreeable climes, we stay and derive just what we need to sustain our stoke habit from the tiny, sporadic fixes cooked up by Mama Nature. Anyone who has ever observed a New Englander paddle out in deplorable conditions simply because there is a marginally rideable swell understands this. Watching a N.E. surfer milk every last second of a ride on a two foot mush-burger provides a powerful insight into our thrifty Yankee mindset. We will trek to our local break to have our hearts puréed again and again by an ocean without so much as a ripple. Inside we scream with angst but we do not let this faze us outwardly and of course we will be back the next day or the next weekend.

Statistically speaking, the Red Sox have a better chance of winning the World Series in any given year than we have of getting great surf. The first factor to consider is the elusive swell itself. The jet stream typically hovers above New England making the predominate wind a westerly one. It sends beautiful lines to spots across the Atlantic with exotic names such as Biarritz and Hossegor but of course, none to us. Then you have the famously fickle local weather conditions to contend with. You know what they say about New England, ‘If you don’t like the weather, wait five minutes and it will get worse.’ When there are waves, what are the chances that we will get an offshore wind that does not actually blow the waves over? How many times have we been emboldened by spectacular buoy readings only to arrive at the beach and feel the stinging slap in the face of a twenty-knot sideshore gale? What about tubes you ask? The only tubes around here are the ones around our waists from too little movement and too much Dunkin’ Donuts.

And then there are the protean and devilish tides that can render a coveted glassy swell unrideable in these parts. You see in my little corner of surf paradise, practically every break is only rideable (i.e. a moderately sized swell will actually break) from three hours before low tide to about three hours after it. And to be honest, the waves aren’t that good at dead low because they lose their size. And actually these breaks are only really choice during the incoming tide. So basically there is a window of about 15 minutes when the waves can be considered “wicked pissah” according to the local vernacular and that’s only if all of the above criteria are met. As New England surfers, we accept these impediments to a good session and press on just as the Pilgrims did despite their hardships.

But perhaps the most bitter and disturbing irony is that the best surf tends to arrive during the winter. The frozen New England tundra winter. A long and dark winter that can erode your sanity if you do not drink heavily. Think Jack Nicholson á la The Shining. But all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy so we New England surfers simply choose to overlook the foul, winter weather just as we ignore the endless rain of spring, and the stifling, near 100% humidity of summer. Fall is nice though and generally considered to be the most exciting time in the region because one can watch leaves fall to the ground.

In the end, the most heinous insults that the New England surfer must endure are not hurled from Nature but rather from our fellow New Englanders. In other parts of the world, I am told, surfing is considered a “cool” activity imbuing one with respect from the general populace for the athletic prowess and courage it takes to pursue the sport. Here, we are generally perceived as immature kooks whose devotion to our “hobby” borders on psychosis. The situation is reminiscent of how the Puritans dealt with adultery: they made the offending parties outcasts in society by forcing them to wear a scarlet “A” as a symbol of their crime. It often seems as if our wetsuits are also branded with a scarlet A, signifying “asinine”.

People mock us with questions such as, “Oh, can you surf here? Are there waves, like, that you can stand up on?” Casually mention to people around here that you surf and they look at you as if you were waving a Confederate flag.
Apparently this information is disseminated from non-surfing New Englanders to the rest of the country as well. On a recent tour of a certain well-known graduate school in Boston, a guide hailing from California extolled the virtues of the area.
He detailed the offerings available for leisure-time pursuits and finished his
monologue by quipping, “Basically, you can do everything but surf.” When I asked him earnestly why one couldn’t surf, he guffawed and confidently stated, “It’s well known that there are no waves here.”

In spite of this harsh environment, don’t expect the New England surfer to go the way of the wooly mammoth anytime soon. In fact, surfers here seem to have adapted to the habitat and even found a niche where they can thrive. But the next time you decide to take a pass because the waves look less than perfect, think of the ghost of Miles Standish hovering above a bleak, rocky New England shoreline, keeping vigil as a lone New England surfer charges through snow drifts with a battered 9’2” under arm.