The_Notebook_8

“Hey look, seals!” I looked around, but nobody heard me over the crashing waves. Behind, Ed was helping Noah, a twelve-year-old boy from San José, catch a wave. The seals started to leave the breaking zone, and I paddled farther out into the sea to follow. Swells traveling from thousands of miles away were breaking smoothly, exactly as I had tried to make in my artificial surf pool project. Wondering where this set of waves had come from, I came to marvel at my own arrival to Santa Cruz, unpredictable as the waves themselves.

The day before my flight, the student guidance teacher summoned me to her office. “This was a surf camp?” she asked incredulously. “Not for scientific research?” “Well, the art of surfing involves intricacies of hydrodynamics, Ms. Jung.” It was summer session, and by tradition, international field seniors were given permission to skip school for internships and college summer camps. Apparently, surf camps didn't count. “Hajin,” she sighed, “I know you like surfing, but this is a waste of time and money. You should study.” Hearing Ms. Jung’s concerns, I wondered if I too should have done academic research or a lab internship. But it was too late. The flight to California was tomorrow.

             Back in Santa Cruz, Stanley paddled toward me. “Spilling one or the plunging one?” he asked. “Plunging, please,” I said as I lay on my board. “Are you sure?” Stanley asked, raising one sun bleached eyebrow. Even through drenched seaweed hair, it was clear that this swell was my biggest yet. “Yeah” “Okay, wait… Paddle!” The board started to lift from my heels, and I popped up. But the wave barely gave me time to balance before crashing its crest. Caught in the Santa Cruz Laundry Service, my body span in circles while saltwater poured through my nostrils like jets of soap. After much nosedives and wipeouts, however, I gradually came to read and understand the waves of Santa Cruz.

After the day’s surfing, afternoons were free. Timetables filled with Literature (up in Eucalyptus branches was A Room Of One’s Own), Civil Engineering (stop-that-tent-it’s-blowing-away), Psychology (the old truth-or-dare), and Music (relaxing in a camping chair next to McKenna strumming one of the thirteen instruments he claimed to play). With night came Oral History. We sat around the bonfire sharing stories. Chae was once a mailman, biking almost a hundred miles a day, before he decided to wholly absorb himself in the water. Stanley worked part time crafting surfboards, and was planning a surf trip to Mexico this fall. Fascinatingly, they had centered their lives around surfing, and made it work. I was a foreign traveler to their world of sun bleached hair and tan skin. Listening to Ed’s seaside upbringing and Pipeline survivals, I found myself wondering how my own life would be. Mist from the sea encircled the campground, drenching deeper with the surfers’ dreams and hanging there.

             Three days after leaving Santa Cruz, I was back at school in an abandoned tennis court. Cutting out planks of wood for a skate ranch, I looked up at the sky. The sun was blazing down as it had in Manresa Beach. The library was closing in twenty minutes, and there was a book to borrow on Cherokee assimilation. There was a vector calculus online lecture to attend, too. Among the superposition of waves, I was in the lineup, trying out different small waves. When the water piled up, and I found The Perfect Wave, would I navigate fearlessly navigate through the barrel, indifferent to everything else?

As I stood up from my day’s work, a gust of wind blew across my new skate park, cooling my back. It must have touched the Ocean while coming here, I thought. The grass around the skate park whistled as the Eucalyptus trees of Santa Cruz campground had.

Where the wind was headed I did not know, but I was going to make it work, too.