The_Notebook_7

“Hey look, seals!” I looked around, but nobody had heard me over the waves. My instructor Stanley was helping Noah, a twelve-year-old San Josean boy, catch a wave. The seals were swimming away, probably to avoid the tumultuous breaking waves.

To follow them I paddled farther out. to catch the next set of big waves. By now, I had learned to distinguish the dark blue crest from the lighter, thus smaller, crests. Looking out, the ocean seemed endless. I wondered how far my 20/20 vision was seeing.

Waves travel hundreds of miles across the ocean. Some literally traveled from one continent to another. Wondering where these sets of waves had come from, I came to marvel at my own arrival to Manresa Beach. It had been unpredictable as the waves themselves.

Senior year summer session meant college camps and internships for international field seniors. Or I thought it would be. After getting my fifth and final rejection letter—all oceanic research centers were governmental institutions, meaning they didn’t take interns—I decided this was going for the better. Opening my google browser once more, this time I typed in surf camp: something I had only dreamed of. It would be the perfect chance to improve my surfing, something less available for someone living in the mountains of Gangwon. Ten minutes of searching lead me to Club Ed Surf Camp in Santa Cruz. On the website’s banner was a picture of nineteen teenagers and one man—presumably Ed—in the water smiling warmly. Though it crossed my mind that maybe it seemed so because the picture were fuzzy and old, and though there wasn’t much information on the website, an intuition told me this would be my summer. I was ready to set sail across the Pacific.

Now seeing waves spill exactly as I had tried to emulate in my artificial surf pool modeling project, I was finished with my finals, six-month-long semester, and it was practically the end of my Korean education. Korea was notorious for its education system, and though I hadn’t exactly followed along, it was nonetheless the world I had been in my entire life.

  

Ed turned out to be an expert surfer in his sixties, coming from a renowned surfing family. His grandma had been in the Olympic swim team for ’24 and ’28 games, and the first female surfer to perform a headstand. Looking around his wall at pictures of him surfing 20ft+ waves, I was gratified by his passion for teaching.

When we were done with the day’s surfing, there would be an entire empty afternoon. We would play games, read in the tent, or sit in a camp chair next to McKenna singing and strumming one of the thirteen instruments he claimed to play. At night, we sat around the fire sharing stories. Chae used to work as a mailman, biking almost a hundred miles a day. Stanley was going to work in a surfboard craft shop, and set on a surf trip in Mexico. These were tales I had never heard of, a world outside my sphere. Fascinatingly, the lives of local surfers were centered around surfing, and they made it work. I was a foreign traveler to their world of sun bleached hair and tan skin.

On our last day at camp, Ed invited us to his house. He let us freely tour his house for surfing photos and surfboards hung on the walls, and most kids ran outside for the trampoline. Listening to Ed’s upgrowing in Santa Cruz and pipeline survivals, I found myself wondering what my own life would be. The hot Californian air hanging around Ed’s house seemed to be enchanted. The surfers had made their dreams to lives, and their life made them dream on.

            Only three days after leaving Santa Cruz, I was back in school on an abandoned rooftop. Cutting out planks of wood for a skate ranch, I looked up at the sky. The sun was shining down strongly as it had in Manresa Beach. There was a US history project to finish by the weekend, along with my vector calculus online lecture. After I’ve gone through that, there will be something else to do. And another. And another. When I find something that I am willing to give up everything for, will I have the courage to do it?

Wave Alert: a school guard was approaching the storage rooftop from the hills above. I looked around and found the “Staff Only” sign hung high above the entrance. As I stood up from my work, a gust of wind blew across my new skate park, cooling my sweating back. The grass around the English department whistled like the Eucalyptus trees surrounding the Santa Cruz campground had.

I was going to make it work, too.