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| Wind Tales Be the wave I scurry across the jagged rocks in my bare feet, "ugh, ouch", down the rockery that lines the road, then expecting relief from the blunt edges of the rocks, onto cool sand. Instead the sand is scouring hot. Straining to balance my rig and board against the steady side shore breeze/gale and save the remaining nerve endings of my feet I dash across the sand until I sink into a soft damp patch. "Ahhhhhh" the feeling of sand squishing through my toes. I bite on the thought of enjoying a cold beer late tonight recouping and embellishing the day’s sailing stories while burrowing my bare feet into the sand for warmth. I persist forward toward the ceaseless droning noise of waves crashing onto the shore. My ears slowly tune into the forceful machinery that beholds me. I can clearly distinguish each waves thud as it collapses onto the jetty. I hear waves thrash on the shoreline, waves overtaking the previous wave’s ebb, then breaks and then spills over the shore line like runny pancake batter. My nostrils are stung with the dull salty ocean air, combined the shivering feeling you get when the gorge is a 100 degrees and you step out of your mobile 4 hours later and it is a brisk Florence 70 degrees. My eyes perceive threat as the ripples in the ocean race toward the break zone, instinctively grow and grow until their innards can’t support their own dimensions. With a clap and a deafening roar the wave breaks, crumble and make their final jab at the coast line that they are fighting so valiantly to reclaim. The foam races across the shoreline and in hem my feet with frigid Pacific Ocean medium. I pause there for my wave sailing preparation ritual, who will get my car?, my board? and then smile knowing both aren’t worth enough too joke about at such a great moment. What awaits me? gleeful bliss or punching bag pain? I feel the butterflies bouncing off the walls of my stomach, my feet are buckets of wet cement. I wonder if it is too late to find a port-a-potty. Gulls over head are hovering motionless, then peeling off down wind in dive bomb formation. I take a deep breath to regain control of my tingling limbs. My eyes instinctively zero in as a wave wholly engulfs the jetty in one bite. The demon in my mind commands me forward as my limbs beg to retreat. Then the moment of polarizing happens, mind and body unite, to the sea I go……. ……My toes searchingly grip the foot pads for that extra bit of control that my straps fail to provide, on my port tack toward land the sea slowly swells up behind me, I slow to let the steepest point of the swell catch me. I am alive, shining. The break zone approaches and my senses pique. My instincts scream telling me to run out of the breadth of this wave, I resist. Then in a parabolic time sequence the swell erects itself into a wall, a wave. I shutter as the wave elipses the afternoon July sun, a sense of dread commands me like what a gazelle feels when a lion is chasing. Defiantly, I lay my rig down low and carve my board leeward across the smoothly sculpted wave face. I fell as though the the grace and the force of the wave transcend through my body. Momentarily, my fears reinstate as I glimpse at the top of my mast that just narrowly missed breaching the crest of the mast high wave. Quickly, the energy from the wave returns, flowing my veins avalanching through my feet to my knees, each part of me glistening with energy until it finally bursts into a smile on my face and in my soul……. |
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