Tim Geithner, the stressed-out Secretary of the Treasury. Photo by Saul Loeb.

The blonde surf instructor clinched the deal with an offhand comment. We stood outside her shack a few blocks from the beach in Rincon, Puerto Rico, just after New Year’s Day, as I sized up a surfboard I might rent.  “Tim Geithner rode this board just yesterday,” she said casually.

The United States Secretary of the Treasury rented this thing, seriously? The board, a nine-foot-four Greg Taylor in pale blue with lightning bolts down the rails, suddenly became an object of fascination.  The man at the reins of our creaking economy, whose signature is on every freakin’ dollar bill, had spent New Year’s…surfing?

This comes as a surprise if you know anything about surfing and have ever seen a picture of Tim Geithner. The man approaches his job with a deep, abiding and un-surfer-like sense of worry. It is written all over his face.

At his best he looks wary and at his worst he looks hunted, like a man who might at any moment turn a corridor and face an angry mob of Occupy Wall Streeters with torches and pitchforks. This is not an unreasonable fear. In 2008 President Obama tapped Geithner as the point man to pull the United States back from the lip of economic Armageddon, and things haven’t gotten much easier since.

He took hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars to steer us out of the worst economic calamity since the Great Depression — and failed — and worst of all, did so without exhibiting Obama’s Hawaiian sense of cool. The middle-manager tension in his jaw has made it all the easier for the Left to brand him as a tool of our corporate overlords and the Right as the tax commissar of our Socialist-in-Chief. Naturally such a man would want to flee Washington for the tropics.

But as Treasury Secretary one’s options for a tropical vacation are severely circumscribed. Imagine if your choice to take a holiday in Acapulco prompted an indignant senator to declare on C-SPAN that you are exhibiting a dangerous allegiance to the peso. And so it was that over New Year’s the hunted Tim Geithner found himself vacationing in a corner of Puerto Rico, a U.S. territory where people use both Spanish and twenty-dollar bills, seeking anonymity and a brief sojourn as a surfer.

I pondered Geithner’s Yankee burden as I held his board under my arm and surveyed the waves at a serene palm-lined beach called Domes. Would the Secretary’s distress stick to me like a toxic asset, or would it dilute in the warm Caribbean water like so many shares of Citibank?

Only one way to find out.

Paddling out through frothy whitewater, I immediately encountered that bane of surfing: other surfers. Even in laid-back Puerto Rico a surf lineup bears some similarity to official Washington. A scramble for scarce resources. There is only one wave at a time and twelve guys who want ride it, just like there is only one tranche of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act at one time and two hundred lobbyists who want a piece.

We surfers waited for the next swell and eyed each other.

I played it cool, waiting to see how much skill and machismo existed out here on the reef. Took a position on the outside where I wouldn’t draw much attention. I stroked for a little wave that no one seemed to want and, to my great surprise, the Secretary’s board was stable as a barge. I popped up with ease and rode it almost all the way into the beach.

When I paddled back out to the lineup I could tell from the wordless glances of our Bermuda-shorts flotilla that this performance had promoted me from Beta to Alpha. I was welcome to park myself at the peak, where the best appointments — uh, I mean waves — were for the taking.

Not that I am some badass surfer. There was what in Washington they call a mitigating factor.

That factor is that the waves were totally sucky. Over New Year’s week the swell was small and pathetic, waist-high at best, the kind of conditions where only the rankest amateurs or desperate tourists with a departing plane ticket would bother getting wet.  The really big investors — er, I mean surfers — stayed out of the water in anticipation of a better day.

Me with the Secretary's surfboard. Photo by Anjali Kumar

Word was that the waves had been awesome a while back, and that a good swell might hit sometime soon. But right now it was almost flat. The ocean’s pulse was weak, flirting with recession, and you could pray to the sea gods or scrape together a few billion in stimulus funds, but really there was not a damn thing anyone could do.

As I bobbed out there on the blue I put my ear to the Secretary’s board and listened, listened to learn what it is like to be the Secretary of the Treasury on a surf vacation. This is what I heard:

The waves are small but you don’t really care because life has suddenly become so simple. Belly-deep in ocean and a blue horizon touched by a few clouds. No one recognizes you now that your Kennedyesque bouffant has been flattened by seawater and a layer of zinc sunscreen disguises your sharp nose. No one even seems to notice you except for that Brazilian surfer girl in a bathing suit so small that just a glance causes your interest rates to surge.

Your mind wanders, and in the next moment you’re back to fretting like you usually do. Durable-goods orders are down and that the trade balance is a friggin’ disaster, and you’re wondering what the hell you’ll say to the Chinese finance minister when you’re in Beijing next week to discuss sanctions against Iran. Before you know it, while you were preoccupied, a good wave has come through. Some grinning German with shoulders as broad as Angela Merkel’s is cruising by on a wave that should have been yours.

But, hey. Oh well. Even a bad day of surf beats a good day testifying before the House Financial Services Committee.

A swell bears down and you decide to go for it. The board picks up speed, you struggle to a standing position, and then it happens: You are surfing, riding your sky-blue board toward shore, looking down past the nose at a calm sine wave of water. It shimmers with the kind of transparency that any regulator would admire. Eventually the wave peters out and you bellyflop into the shallows with a boyish splash. You pop up to the surface and let out a whoop.

You put your belly to the board again and point your nose back toward the lineup, and realize, hey, maybe I need to hang loose, man. Maybe I’ve been a little too uptight. Maybe all the worry in the world won’t hurry up a recovery. Maybe just for today, before I return to the buzzards, I’ll enjoy a swell ride.

A Board Meeting with Tim Geithner is a post from: The Ferris Files

San Francisco’s wastewater treatment plant sits directly opposite the city’s most popular surf break, but the doctored water doesn’t end up there. Nowhere close, in fact. The effluent is discharged from a pipe four miles offshore and 90 feet down – in other words, a fish’s problem, but not yours, unless of course you eat fish.

Our guide Catania led us hard-hatted curiosity-seekers to a little trapdoor in the floor, where we could see the water flowing out of the plant toward the deep blue ocean. Doesn’t look too pure to me. I took a video. Judge for yourself.

The Wastewater Chronicles, Part IV is a post from: The Ferris Files

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These “climber screens” are the first line of defense, where things like rags and sticks are taken out.

Once through the door and into the innards of the Oceanside Water Pollution Control plant, our guide Catania showed us the “influent gates” where the first big chunks are removed, and from there on to a series of vast, almost Home Depot-size rooms where alien activities took place.

One was the basement level of the 70-foot-tall, 750,000-gallon “digesters” where the solid waste is mixed with bacteria and, over the process of two weeks or so, turned into “biosolids.” This transformation emits loads of heat, which is harnessed to supply almost half the plant’s power.

The bottom of a digester looks like a concrete stalactite.

Where does all that stuff end up? About 60 percent of solid waste in the United States is turned into fertilizer. In San Francisco about a quarter of what goes down the drain and the toilet ends up tilled into the farms of Sonoma County.

Will I be able to forge this the next time I breathe in the aroma of a Sonoma cabernet?

To be continued…

The Wastewater Chronicles, Part III is a post from: The Ferris Files

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I drove down the Great Highway and past the entrance to the San Francisco Zoo, which has more to do with the neighboring treatment plant than most people know. The plant scrubs and burbles underneath the animals; seventy percent of the plant is dug into the hillside, making this the wastewater plant where one is most likely to be mauled by a tiger.

Following the directions I’d been given, I turned on a sidestreet I’d never heard of and through a tunnel with a massive gate that looked like it could withstand a direct nuclear attack. I emerged into an open courtyard with concrete buildings and to the left a row of onion domes 70 feet tall, each of which, it turns out, can hold 750,000 gallons of sludge. Wow, I thought as I craned my head out the car window. This is an operation.

A staff of 53 works round the clock every weekday, on an annual budget of almost $17 million, and all to clean the dirty water of just one third of the city, and a quiet third at that. That’s how much effort it takes to, in the words of our guide Catania, “get your dirty water clean again.”

Catania walked us across the courtyard to a metal door leading into the plant. We eyed it with caution. Behind the door the entire building hummed, almost rumbled. The plant consumes two megawatts of electricity daily, a third of that dedicated to ventilation. I pictured banks of giant generators rattling, red-lining, barely constraining San Francisco’s waste from surging into the streets.

She opened the door and a great wind blew in our faces.

To be continued…

The Wastewater Chronicles, Part II is a post from: The Ferris Files

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Oceanside Wastewater Treatment Plant. Image Source: www.sfwater.org

The answer to that question turned out to be a lot less interesting than some other things I learned. Example: If a toothbrush is flushed down the toilet, it can, under unfortunate circumstances, melt inside a piece of high-performance equipment and cause $10,000 in damage.

It’s never occurred to me to flush a toothbrush down a toilet. I looked around at the 17 other people on this tour – kind, gentle people wearing red hardhats labeled “VISITOR” – and concluded that the kind of people who would tour a wastewater treatment plant on a Saturday morning are not the same people who commit acts of toilet-bowl terrorism.

This did not deter our guide, a stern, sixtyish woman named Catania, from enlisting us into the ranks of the hygienic. She passed on these gems:

– In order to get your hands really, truly clean, scrub your hands with soap for 20 seconds. This is as long as it takes to sing the “Happy Birthday” song twice.

– A major contaminant of SF’s water is dog poop. San Francisco is home to 140,000 dogs, which is greater than its population of children, and with poorer bowel control.

– Another polluter is the new DeYoung Museum, the copper façade of which is leaching heavy metals into the soil of Golden Gate Park.

– When you put synthetic towels, like wet-wipes or Swiffers, or down the toilet, you make the sewer people very, very unhappy. These things don’t degrade, and they collect, and then somebody has to go down there and break up the big clumps of sewage by hand. Bad news. The same goes for cooking oil.

And we haven’t even gotten to the tour, which I will have to cover in another post.

The Wastewater Chronicles, Part I is a post from: The Ferris Files

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My surf buddy Matt said the swell was small today so he was going to give Rockaway a try. Why not? I paddled out just before sunset. Rock pinnacles stood in black against a sky of apricot and lemon. Seven guys were out, Matt and I on our longboards and the rest shortboarders, locals, whooping and catching every good wave and slapping the lip with their aerials.

As the sun departed all the hotshots did too, leaving me and Matt alone in the undulating orange and pink. I paddled for a wave, dropped down the face and turned and there it was off my shoulder: a wall of water, steely blue, with its lip about to drop on my head.

My eyes are wide. This is virgin terrain. I have been surfing smaller waves, but now am getting into overhead territory, where the wave is less like a countertop and more like a wall. There is some elegant way to manage this moment, sneak under the lip and enjoy a long glorious ride, but I don’t know what it is.

I am coasting at the bottom of the wave’s parabola, where, if you graphed the wave out, the x-axis would originate. In this flat spot there is no speed or power. If I stay here the wall will topple onto me.

So I lean hard on my back foot, hoping I still have enough speed to climb the wave and ride down the line. In my desperation, though, I make the turn a little too hard, rocket straight up the y-axis and go flying off the lip.

I have launched off the lip before, but never on a wave this muscular.  I go so far skyward that my arms start to pinwheel before I splash back down into calm water, the wave spending itself with a roar behind me.

Matt and I stay out until well after dark, navigating by the lights of the burger joint and hotel on shore and by the three-quarter moon blazing in the sky. When I catch a wave and can’t see its shape next to me, I know it’s time to call it a day.

Virgin Territory is a post from: The Ferris Files

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Yes, that’s me below, modeling the O’Neill SL Psycho Glove and the O’Neill Squid Lid, both in black. There is no other color. Among Northern California surfers, black is the new black.

I know what you’re thinking: These new synthetic rubber accoutrements round out my surfing look in the same way that a Versace suit just sings if you get the right handbag. But I admit it isn’t all about the looks.

There’s also the temperature. Today the air at Ocean Beach was 55 degrees, and the water was five degrees colder than that. It’s just so last year to come out of the surf all blue and numb and shivering.

Back in Black is a post from: The Ferris Files

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Image Source: puddins-pictures.blogspot.com

If you’ve ever seen a surf video, you’d think that the song in a surfer’s head is pretty much electric guitars, drum machines, and a lot of screaming from a raspy-voiced grungestar with greasy hair. I am here to tell you that’s a bunch of marketing hoo-ha.

Today as I floated off Linda Mar Beach in 52-degree water, with my feet slowly going numb, I sang to myself this ditty I learned when I was four:

How cold my toes, tiddley-pum
How cold my toes, tiddley-pum
How cold my toes are growi-ing
Are grow-ing
Tiddley-pum.

See original

Tiddley-Pum is a post from: The Ferris Files

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Last week’s oil spill in San Francisco Bay had finally reached my bread-and-butter break. Dead, oily birds had turned up at the beach that morning, the cop explained, shortly after a similar bodycount emerged at Rockaway Beach, one headland north.

After the spill last Wednesday it seemed that the coast south of the Golden Gate might be spared from the goo goblin. Slicks and distressed birds were reported on the north coast as far as Point Reyes. But now the blobs are drifting everywhere. There’s no harbor from our fossil-fuel catastrophe.

I walked down the beach with my camera but was only able to find one bird (pictured). No way to know for sure if it was a victim of oil or natural causes.

As if the Bay Area’s plight isn’t bad enough, there’s a sister disaster emerging in the Black Sea, where a tanker broke up in a huge storm on Sunday and dumped more than six times the volume of fuel that we’re suffering here. Thousands of birds are struggling on the beach, too coated with oil to fly.

2007 is a lousy year for the birds.

Slimed by the Goo Goblin is a post from: The Ferris Files

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Image Source: San Francisco Chronicle

My plans to surf at Ocean Beach today were drowned, or rather coated in oil, when I heard about the 58,000 gallons of fuel oil spilled by a container ship when it grazed the Bay Bridge yesterday.

Reports have big slicks moving north along the Marin coastline, rather than south toward my usual haunts, but Ocean Beach is close enough to the Golden Gate that the likelihood of swimming through big gobs of black goo is high.

The Hanjin container ship is docked in San Francisco and its shipments to South Korea will be delayed. Small inconvenience compared to those now being suffered by the seals, grebes and scoters along the shoreline that may pay with their lives.

Not So Slick is a post from: The Ferris Files

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Bob America (right) and Rich feel the stoke.

Psst. Don’t tell anyone, but I think I just might be getting better at this surfing thing.

If you’ve been reading this blog, you know that there’s a move I find super-scary – tipping myself over the edge of a wave that is big enough to go vertical. It feels like leaping off the top of an armoire.

This Sunday, surfing with my buddies Bob America and Rich in ice-cream-headache water at Linda Mar, I chased after a wave.  Suddenly I found myself riding left and crouched like Spiderman. With my right hand I gripped the right rail, or side, of my board. This helped me dig the left rail hard into the wave, which might have actually been vertical.

I was moving so fast at the time that I couldn’t judge. Only a minute later, bobbing from under the spent wave, did my conscious mind catch up and ask, in a rather awed tone, Did I really just do that?

Climbing the Water Wall is a post from: The Ferris Files

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Driving to Linda Mar in the bright sunshine I noticed that the American flag off Rockaway Beach was flapping hard and pointing due west. Good sign. Offshore wind like this props a wave up, like a dowel holding open a steamer trunk, and gives the surfer a wide, steep surface to ride.

I met Scott and his buddies Jonah, Ethan and Sean, and we headed into the water, which was frigid, recently delivered from the depths off the Pacific shelf. But a consoling gust of warm air hit my face. I closed my eyes with pleasure. San Francisco can be windy and it can be warm, but windy and warm, now that’s something to cherish.

Unfortunately, shortly into our session the tide changed and the waves closed out. This means instead of folding on itself in a line, like a Ziploc bag closing, the whole body of water topples over as a unit. No fun for the surfer; no Ziploc trail to follow.

They were beautiful, though. The wind opposed the wave and sent a giant cockscomb of spray off the lip, sprinkling onto the glassy water behind it. Then the wave closed on itself with a BOOM.

Wild Westerlies is a post from: The Ferris Files

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Waves rolled out of the mist, but I couldn’t read their size or contour. The beach was back there, somewhere, but no telling how far. Gray sky, gray water. The only thing I could see clearly was other surfers, a muddled line of them that extended north and south until they ghosted away.

The only way to orient myself was the Taco Bell restaurant on the beach, which was invisible except for its orange sodium-vapor deck lights. The Taco Bell seemed to float, too, like a visiting ship.

The water and air were about the same temperature, low 50s, and I shivered and reminded myself that I need to buy a new wetsuit, one that doesn’t leak.

As the dusk fell and my core temperature continued its downward creep, I headed for shore, got in warm clothes and picked up a couple of warm chicken Chalupas from the U.S.S. Taco Bell.

Surfers in the Mist is a post from: The Ferris Files

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With the help of two grades of sandpaper (one for roughing up the
spot before, one for smoothing it down afterward), the deed was done.
However, I live in the Land of Fog, and our tepid sun took three times
as long to finish the job as was indicated in the instructions.

The ragged spot where the tear was is now smooth. My fingers can
detect just the slightest dimple. It’s gratifying to make a fix without
a mishap like, I don’t know, bonding my finger permanently to the
fiberglass.

A Resin in the Sun is a post from: The Ferris Files

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image source: treehugger.com

If a wave at Linda Mar (my usual break) pushes like a fishing trawler, a wave at Ocean Beach summons the force of a Hanjin container ship, the kind that is six stories high and blares its horn as it maneuvers under the Golden Gate, just a headland north of where we float. There’s no jetty, no reef, no promontory to ease the power of the swells at Ocean Beach; they are delivered to the shore of San Francisco with all the terrible power of the mid-Pacific storms that formed them.

I get jumpy every time I surf O.B. Today I watched the break carefully before I agreed to enter. The waves were small, about four to six feet, and, for this beach, kinda gentle. The sun was out and the water was warm (high fifties!) and Scott and I floated in sight of the white stuccoes of the Presidio and the pale Marin Headlands.

We paddled for the same wave. Scott caught it and soared off to the right, while I thrashed hard and caught nothing. I watched the broad face of the wave roll away from me with one part frustration and two parts relief.

When he paddled back out I hypothesized aloud that the reason I failed was my weight. I’m several inches taller and outweigh Scott by 35 pounds. He looked over at me. “If you’d wanted it, you’d have caught it,” he said.

When I stroke for one of these Ocean Beach waves the swell lifts me like a toothpick and I have a moment to look down the face as my board accelerates under me. Something deep in my brain stem, the part where my chimp forebears learned not to plummet from trees, yells Stop! Danger!

The reasonable part of my brain knows that there is nothing much to fear from falling down the face of a wave – cheerleaders have higher injury rates than surfers, for chrissakes – but there is not much time for the chimp and the collegian to sort things out. In the moment of a wave tipping I have only a second to decide, and if the wave is too big I chicken out.

On one side is fear. I fear the ignominy that ensues if I fall off the wave and Ocean Beach swipes at me like a grizzy bear and sends me spinning, forcing brine into my nostrils.

On the other is joy – the buttery ecstasy of the ride. A feathery memory I can recline on with a smile for days afterward.

One of these days I will huck myself over the thing.

Facing the Fear is a post from: The Ferris Files

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Photo Credit: bible.ca

I drove into the Linda Mar beach in Pacifica, found a parking space and observed the break from the driver’s seat. The ocean had been blue-green a few days ago. Today it was green-brown.

Thirty or so surfers huddled near the south end, the only safe place, since to the north the waves collapsed in a giant and confused roar. I slid on my wetsuit quickly, shivering a little, and walked down the sand, which was covered in washed-up seaweed giving off that rotting-salty smell, and looked up at the sun, which lay behind a scrim of high cloud that covered Pacifica but left the rest of the coastline unmolested.

An encampment of tarp-tents clung to south end with a banner reading “San Pedro Surf Club,” fronted by a row of longboards that together meant a surf competition. The announcer on a plank podium tried to make the best of it. “The winds are only 10 knots onshore!” he said, as if to explain why the waves sucked so bad.

The water I paddled into wasn’t brown/green, but white. Or rather, the water wasn’t white but its surface was – a carpet of foam extending 100 yards offshore with gobs lying on the surface. I scrambled for a wave alongside jittery, unsmiling boardsmen and –women, many waiting for their turn in the competition. The waves bitch-slapped us suddenly and at irregular intervals, sending everyone scrambling back and forth, in a sea that resembled a tubful of old dishwater.

Dishwater. I peered down over the rail of my board. The three inches of opaque water I could fathom teemed with…stuff. Little green bits and little brown bits and – is that a hair?  What is all that stuff?

No one knows, of course. There had been rain. Every surface in the municipality of Pacifica had washed here overnight. For all I knew, the liquid under my board contained the drippings from the oil pan of a 1995 Subaru, the detergent someone used to spray a driveway, insecticide for the flowerbox nasturtiums, seagull poop and the remains of a Diet Pepsi Slurpee. I tasted something acrid on my tongue and spat and then spat again, not knowing if my palate was actually tasting something or reacting to my imagination.

I paddled for shore without waiting on another wave. Surfing isn’t worth being poisoned.

Troubled Waters is a post from: The Ferris Files

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image source: seafloor.csumb.edu/Map_Gallery

I wonder sometimes if America’s obsession with surfing is due for an ebb tide. Haven’t all the good waves have been surfed already? Is the demand for “Endless Summer” movies really endless? Is there anything left to say about this sport?

However, after attending a lecture on the science of surfing last night, I feel we’re much more in the middle of the session than riding a last one in toward the beach. I arrived late at Axis Café to find it was standing-room only with curious people spilling out the door. Playing on a giant screen was a short film by KQED’s Quest about the science of big waves like Mavericks. All 150 people watched mesmerized as the giant green walls of water reared and roared.

Both of the evening’s speakers were big-wave experts, but with perspectives that could hardly be more different. One was Toby Garfield, a professor of geological sciences at San Francisco State and one of the Bay Area’s leading authorities on waves and the ocean floor. His counterpoint was Grant Washburn, one of the best surfers ever to ply Mavericks.  (The professor had a paunch, and the surfer a set of shoulders like Aquaman’s.)

What they had in common was a fascination with how waves form. Washburn, it turns out, brings a scientist’s eye to his sessions at Ocean Beach, having recorded his observations of ocean conditions daily for the last 20 years. “Being a surfer is just being a data object out there,” he quipped.

The most interesting revelation is that the charting of the sea floor off of Northern California is just getting underway. Garfield mentioned that in the next few years, our knowledge of the bathymetry – or underwater depth – of the coast will become more exacting as new data comes online. Combined with steadily increasing knowledge of storms, wind and swell, forecasts of surf conditions will get far more accurate. How this will change surfing is anyone’s guess.

image source: San Francisco Chronicle

The science of wave prediction is building, as evidenced by Garfield’s current crop of protégés. Three of his grad students are themselves surfers, drawn to careers in science because of their curiosity about the winds, swells, ridges and sandbars that make waves happen.

The crowd – studious types with thick glasses, surfers with their lustrous tans, fleece-clad environmentalists – had lots of questions. There were high-school students. There was a grandmother who didn’t even know how to swim.

With interest that broad, I imagine the surf movies will draw long popcorn lines for years to come.

The Geek’s Guide to Surfing is a post from: The Ferris Files

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The first sentence, about a seal execution, raises the hackles of a surfer and keeps him reading: “The killing took place at dawn and as usual it was a decapitation, accomplished by a single vicious swipe.”

Photo credit: www.have-a-great-time-in-south-australia.com

The book follows the single-minded quest of journalist Susan Casey to get chummy with the world’s most dangerous sharks. First she must wrangle a stay at the Farallon Islands, one of the world’s most fiercely protected nature preserves, home to seals, seagulls, sharks, four or so biologists, and absolutely zero guests.

Needless to say, she succeeds. Then Casey goes on to describe her forays into the waters around Southeast Farallon Island with the biologists, where sharks seventeen feet long bump against the boat.  They lunge up and nibble on the gunwales with their two-inch-long teeth.

When I am belly-to-board this week I am looking anxiously seaward, scanning the swells for fins. Wondering what’s gliding around my feet as they dangle carelessly off the board. And I’m only on page 41.

I have learned that great whites can attack from two directions. One is that of Jaws fame; a dark triangle, the dorsal fin, speeding from the deep, “tunneling toward you like a German U-boat, creating a sizable wake,” Casey writes.

(Cue the music: Dum-dum. Dum dum dum-dum.)

The other – the more likely scenario – is from below. Sensing the electric tick of a heartbeat, and recognizing the shape of something seal-shaped near the surface, the shark jets upward at 40 miles an hour, enclosing prey in its two-foot-wide jaws.

As a surfer, thumbing through The Devil’s Teeth is a deliberate exercise in terror. I might as well pull Edgar Allen Poe from the bookshelf while home alone on a stormy night, or, halfway through a trans-Atlantic cruise, pop Titanic in the video player.

But then, if I didn’t want to be scared, I wouldn’t have started surfing in the first place.

Fears with Fins is a post from: The Ferris Files

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Photo Credit: newscientist.com

It’s a fact of surf etiquette that an alpha male (or female, rarely) always and instantly emerges, even among complete strangers. We watermen are like chimps or wolves, but in rubber suits. A human must dominate or defer. Or perhaps Methuselah’s superiority was a testament to how powerful it is when someone simply demonstrates these waves are mine.Methuselah talked to no one and no one talked to him. A few guys hovered on their boards just a couple watery feet closer to shore than he. I paddled out and joined the beta males.

A wave approached that was just a little bigger than average. Methuselah showed no sign of movement. I took chase. The swell plumped into a delectable riding surface: bigger than expected, with a large and lazy face that I carved up and down for what seemed like forever. I finished it off by doing a 280-degree turn and catching air off the back.

I paddled back out to Methuselah’s orbit. He turned and gave me a nod and flashed his bright blue eyes. He said, “That was a nith one!”

Methuselah would have said “nice one” if it wasn’t for the two front teeth he was missing. Or mithing.

“Best I caught all day!” I grinned, happy for the benediction of the head chimp, but with an implicit bow: I am a bad surfer. I not your equal.

I am a chimp, after all. Can’t upset the order of things.

Dominating the Waves is a post from: The Ferris Files

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Bob is a rock n’ roll hero but hasn’t caught a wave in two years. I pulled out my 9’6” Softop, which I keep as a loaner for friends, and on the drive to Ocean Beach he ranted about the jackass antics of our local senator, Dianne Feinstein. Bob is always good for fervently poetic observations on politics and culture, such as Phil Collins, whom he recently described as “a touring piece of saffron that sang monkey songs from a schooner.”

From the cliffs above Ocean Beach we could see the break was in a playful and mellow mood. I paddled straight out for a ride; Bob floated about in the shallows for a while, marinating.

Twenty minutes or so later he mustered the mojo to stroke out through the whitewater to the real waves, and there he sat, staring toward the open ocean for what seemed like a long time. I wondered if I’d see no rock n’ roll at all today.

I caught a grand slow roller and, surprise, there was Bob, catapulting in toward shore right next to me. We got buried together. That was Bob’s Wave #1. Near the end of the session came Wave #2.

I saw Bob spring to his feet, watched his board planing straight for where I floated; he bailed, kindly, because if he hadn’t I might be writing this account for you minus my scalp.

Perhaps three seconds of ride time in a two-hour session. Afterward, while drying himself off with a red, white and blue towel, Bob America declared himself satisfied.

“When you ride a wave, it’s good as sex, and as good as playing rock n’ roll music. So if I can just set my sights on those three things, my life would be fulfilled,” he said.

Bobbing with Bob America is a post from: The Ferris Files

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