Underwears

Julie opened her eyes in grayness, dawn hovering still out of sight. The sky peeking through the concrete towers was gray. Her walls were gray; even the air inside her bedroom seemed gray. She felt the heat of Denver sleeping beside her. She had to get up now, right now, if she wanted a session before her workday began. She lay beside him for another beat, savored the stillness, then pulled back the covers and dropped her toes to the cold linoleum floor.

Thirty-five minutes later she pulled into the lumpy parking pad at Sacks Beach. Denver and the kids wouldn’t be awake for another hour. She had packed all her gear in the Elantra the night before, everything except her board, which she took from the storage cage in the parking garage just before she left. Water, wet suit, surf wax, a granola bar, a ratty turquoise towel that she kept forgetting to wash, a navel orange, and a yellow, sand-crusted tube of Kids Banana Boat SPF 50 were jumbled together in a plastic tub in the trunk, all of it topped by a fresh roll of Charmin. She pulled the blue tub from her trunk, loosened the straps holding down her board and locked her phone, a small change purse with her driver’s license, and a twenty-dollar bill in the glove compartment.

The sun was still a few degrees below the horizon but announcing its imminent arrival with a band of orange at the far edge of the blue-gray sea. Sacks Beach was a crap surf spot. It was a sandy-bottom beach break, so the wave meandered according to how the latest storm had shifted the sand. There was a sort-of-reliable left-breaking wave that tipped off the pier, but it was often crowded. The whole beach was no more than half a mile wide, its crescent shape the happenstance of a sea wall built to serve the needs of a gypsum port now long gone. The wooden pier was an afterthought and tended to wash away in parts during even the smallest hurricane. A storm drain emptied a stew of oily water, soiled blue surgical masks, freezie tubes, churro wrappers, cigarette butts, dog poop, and used condoms into the little bay with every rainstorm. When the swell grew beyond five feet, the wave closed out. Julie had, therefore, never surfed a wave that was higher than her ear. Sacks Beach was crap. It drew mostly newbies, a few old surfers who needed to be careful of their fragile bones and stiff necks, and a few regulars who lived close by. It was, officially, crap. But it was Julie’s crap beach, her home break, and she loved it.

She had learned to surf at Sacks Beach in a fit of contrariness at age 25, not knowing of the addiction to come. She and Denver picked their first apartment in part for its proximity to the subway line that ended just two blocks from the beach. Eventually, they got a car.

Julie leaned back against the hood of the Elantra and stared at the water, studying the swell and the waves. No matter when she arrived, or how little time she had to actually surf, she always studied the water before she suited up. It was part of her morning courtship of the sea. Each wave was unique. A southeast swell broke differently on the underwater slope of sand than a swell running from the east. The wave broke differently at high tide than low. It stood up vertically — and sometimes arched into a little tube — if challenged by a wind blowing off the land. A wind blowing from the ocean would knock it down and steal the wave’s form and power. Julie squinted into the growing light; she waited for one set of waves to roll through, then a second. There was no wind. The tide was low and rising; the swell was big. The water caught the liquid-gold of the dawn and reflected the clouds’ orange and pink celebration of the sun’s daily birth. The sand was brown and trampled. No one ever raked this park, though the city crew sometimes walked it looking for trash. Back in March, a surfer had stepped hard on a bloody needle as he returned to his car.

The wave was bigger than usual, on the verge of closing out, and there were already five surfers on the left by the pier and one more crew spilling out of a VW Golf. Julie nodded. They nodded back. The two men didn’t take the time to study the water, just zipped up their wetsuits, grabbed their boards and ran toward the ocean. Julie didn’t know their names, their real names, but she had shared a lot of waves with them since the duo first showed up as newbies at Sacks Beach two years before and she referred to them in her own mind as Batman and Robin. They shared a self-conscious swagger that was sort of sweet. Julie did not know the real names of most of the people with whom she shared the waves. She didn’t know how old they were, if they were queer, how they voted, where they worked, or if they liked the colour blue. They said very little while waiting together for waves. “Mine!” to claim a wave. “Outside!” to warn that a freak set was coming and everyone should paddle fast for the horizon to avoid a trammelling. And, occasionally, “Fuuuuuuuck!” if one of them got a spectacular ride. That was always followed by a sharp bark — “Language!” — from Old Doug, the only surfer whose real name she did know. Julie had no idea why he objected to swearing, if it was some weird Christian thing, or even if his consternation was real, but Old Doug always yelled “Language!” when someone swore. His admonitions seemed to encourage swearing, not diminish it. Batman and Robin were younger than she — mid-twenties probably. One was tall and one was short. Both were slim and both had a tangled mat of blonde-tipped curls that was a hallmark of hours in the ocean. She liked surfing with them. They were respectful of her and everyone else on the waves — even the newbies who wasted opportunities and then paddled back out through the impact zone, forcing surfers to bail on perfectly good rides to avoid clonking a no-nothing on the head. She had tried to describe that piece of etiquette to a newbie once after a regular screamed at the young woman with a long string of “fucks” and “cunts” and “assholes.”

“It’s like a highway,” Julie told the woman who had fled to the beach after the surfer’s tirade. “You don’t want to paddle out through the wave where everyone else is surfing. That’s like going for a walk against traffic in the middle of I-95. What you want to do is go around. Use the frontage road.” She gestured to a section of bay that was usually a ribbon of flat water squeezed between two waves. Unfortunately, no one was paddling there when she was trying to explain, and the ribbon was temporarily invisible: the whole bay was flat water in a lull between sets. In fact, the surfer who had yelled at the newbie was paddling out exactly where the newbie had been when he ditched his ride to save her skull. The surfer knew he had time to get to the line-up before the next swell arrived, so he wasn’t breaking etiquette, but he was destroying Julie’s point. Julie didn’t try to explain to the newbie that going around was also easier. A rip current ran through the flat water that would carry her quickly to deep water. Faster and easier. She didn’t explain because the woman wasn’t listening. The newbie had been expecting solidarity from the only other woman in the water; the newbie wanted Julie to denounce the screaming surfer, not explain why he was right and she was wrong. The newbie left as soon as Julie headed back out. It was the last time Julie offered unsolicited advice at the beach. Now she only offered advice when asked. Every once in a while, a first-timer did ask. Those tended to be the ones who came back. Mostly she kept seeing newbies make the same mistakes over and over and over and over again. They were the same mistakes she had made ten years ago.

Julie looked again at the left. Batman and Robin were hitching a ride on the rip out to Fishhooks. Many waves had a name. Mavericks, Jaws, Canoes, Trestles: those were the super famous ones. But even crappy little waves were often named. There was The Moose, Nosedives, Mermaids. Surf the same wave often enough and it begins to feel like a living thing with its own identity and needs. The wave at Sacks Beach was called Fishhooks. Rumor was that a surfer had been hooked by the line of a fisherman and it tore a big hole in his new wetsuit. Who knew if that was true, but there had been conflict between the surfers and men fishing off the pier above them, both groups trying to stake their claim to the water on the south side of the structure. The surfers won. The fishermen often came out as early as the surfers, but they kept to themselves and now fished only from the north side and far eastern end of the pier.

The way Fishhooks was breaking, only one person would be able to take off on each wave, maybe two if they were absolute buddies. But she knew all the surfers out there and none were that close, not even Batman and Robin. They looked like a flock of ducks in the water, almost identical in their black wetsuits and wet hair but Julie could identify them by the way they paddled (Thor took huge, deep strokes that shot him through the water like a train); by the way they popped up (Jiggly waggled his butt as he rose to his feet); and most of all by the way they rode. Baby Ears wove a pattern of white trails on the face of the wave, dipping and rising and sliding and, sometimes, riding the lip like a skateboard on a rail. Red Beard liked to take the drop early and get as much speed ahead of the wave as possible. Webby almost always surfed a fat wooden slab that hung off the wave like a diving board, its nose suspended in air and its fin and rail held fast by the water. Julie envied Webby’s ability to toe-ride but every time she had tried to copy his prancing step she toppled into the water. Old Doug was the easiest to spot for he always wore a ratty Tilley hat while surfing, even over his hood in the winter. He was the most consistent surfer of them all: steady, predictable, safe. His hat never got wet. There were eight surfers now in the lineup at Fishhooks. Waves were coming in sets of six with the first one mush and the last closing out, so four reliably surfable waves per set. Fourteen second period between waves and a good four minutes at least between sets. Julie would be lucky to get two waves before she had to leave for work — and that’s if the lineup held steady and no one else showed up.

Julie wriggled into her wetsuit and wrapped the Velcro cuff of her board leash to her left ankle. The sand was cold between her toes. She strode past an ice cream wrapper, one blown-out pink flip flop, a cracked plastic pail with a chipped goldfish decal on its side and a torn, dew-drenched, sandy mess of a towel in the no-man’s-land between the parking lot and the sea. The water reached for her feet. She was surprised it was only slightly colder than the sand. The current must have shifted. She could have gotten away with her lightest wetsuit. Instead, she was wearing her oldest O’Neill: three millimeters of neoprene wrapped around her torso and two wrapped around her legs and arms. It was like being rolled in industrial under-carpet and then tied in rubber bands. The wash tickled her feet as it swept up the beach, then pulled her ankles toward the sea in its exhale toward the horizon. Three strides. A filigree of foam lace swirled around her knees as she tossed her board on the water with a smack and then threw herself on top. Bumps of sticky wax kept her wetsuit from sliding off the board. Julie paddled steadily: her fingers reached almost to the tip of her board as she dug into the water, then cycled all the way back to her hip before emerging. She never stopped paddling when she headed out, even when the wash of broken waves was pushing her back to shore, even when her shoulders burned and the ocean was smacking her face. The ocean demanded commitment. It demanded commitment in many ways. There was the way she shaped her life to accommodate this passion — the car, the compromises with Denver, refusing to take a job that started before 9 a.m. But the more important commitment was here, on the water.

Julie was afraid every time she paddled out. It was the price of surfing, to paddle through that fear. Some people liked the fear. She didn’t. She had never liked roller coasters or haunted houses or scary movies. That sudden jolt of hormones flooding her blood and nerves was neither fun nor pleasant. But every time she started to paddle, she felt its shadow in her veins. Denver didn’t know she was afraid. She hadn’t told him because she couldn’t explain.

Denver didn’t understand her need to surf, but he did support it, and that was good enough. He liked to brag about his wife, the surfer. He was always the one who brought it up — at his office party, when she met his cousins before they married, even at their first parent-teacher conference. He used to exaggerate her skill, describe the “epic” waves and “amazing barrel” his wife had surfed, but she began to roll her eyes and not just demure, but out-and-out contradict him: “That’s not true. It was just a normal wave.” It was one of the things that first attracted Denver to Julie, her exotic pursuit of this foreign element, her ability to stride toward the horizon without looking back at the land. In the first years, he had come with her and watched from the parking lot, but it got boring to sit on the land and the waves did not call to him at all. For a while, he nagged her to try new surf breaks: “We could take a surf trip down the coast!” and to compete, “You’re the best, you’d beat any other woman out there.” She mostly ignored his suggestions. When he explained that she needed to try different waves to improve her own surfing, she laughed in his face. She regretted it immediately and finally tried to explain: “I do try different waves. Every single wave is different. No two are the same. Each one has a different speed and texture and shape. I might catch them at the same place, more or less, but they aren’t the same at all. Every time I take off, every time I drop in, I’m meeting a new wave I have never met before. It’s infinite variety, right there at Sacks Beach.” He was quiet, waiting for more. “Like, if we had kids, would you tell me to go have kids with another man because all our kids are the same? No. They would all be their own person, their own life. Each ride, each wave, is like that for me.” It was an imperfect analogy, but he seemed to sort of get it. It was the first time either of them had raised the subject of children.

Julie did not like to talk about surfing. It was a private thing. It had started as a dare a decade ago. She couldn’t even remember who had thought she couldn’t, wouldn’t, do it, but she had, and it was a revelation. Some described surfing as dancing with God and yes, sometimes it was like that, but really it was more like having sex with God: a full-body, in the moment experience that, on the best days, offered nothing short of ecstasy. Surfers called that stoke. But the fear. She still didn’t understand that part of it. Over the years, she had sprained both ankles, knocked out a tooth, torn a big gash in her left arm and returned from the sea with all manner of bruises and dents. But the possibility of more physical battering wasn’t what sent a shiver up her spine every time she zipped up her wetsuit. The small, reliable voice that told her to turn back every time she got wet was not warning her of pain. It seemed possible to Julie that one morning she might dissolve in ecstasy and never return from the ocean at all.

It was an easy paddle; she glided toward the horizon on the lovely little rip current that wove between the waves. She was headed to a spot roughly even with the pier on the opposite side of the bay. She had seen a hump of a wave rise there many times. Usually, it just rose and died and never broke — when it was there at all. But a few times she had seen the hump rise and crest and then break, peeling a zipper of white away from the seawall and across the bay. It was rare and unreliable, and she had never seen anyone surf it. She didn’t know what was making the wave rise like that near the mouth of the bay. It could be a heap of boulders just below the surface, boulders that would break her board — or worse. She had only seen the hump rise at low tide, and only on a southeast swell, like this morning. Today she had seen its peak form and break twice in each of two sets: four times total.

It took her almost ten minutes to get to the spot she thought she wanted. She swung her torso up and dropped her legs in the water, straddling the board like a horse, taking a moment to sit, catch her breath and get her bearings. It was hard to tell exactly where the wave had been. She had tried to figure out some markers from the beach, but distances and angles could be elusive on the sea. She had figured a hundred yards past the storm drain, roughly even with the pier and in a straight line from the abandoned chip wagon. Her feet were no longer cold in the water. Julie had to squint at the horizon to check for swell, keeping her board parallel to the beach so she could quickly pivot the nose forward and take off. The sun was fully up now, and the puffy clouds had vanished. She could feel the first heat of the day through her wetsuit. She glanced at the city; a few windows sparkled, but the city was mostly still a study in grey. The growing light intensified the shadows of the concrete canyons and bled all colour from the steel, stone and concrete faces of the towers. A cormorant was perched on the seawall, its wings spread wide to dry in the sun. Six seagulls wheeled above her, two crying a high-pitched squeal in unison. They banked right and drew her eye to a flutter on the surface of the sea. A patch of ocean the size of a Little League diamond was stippled and moving and flashing; tiny wavelets jumped up like the water in a glass slammed too hard on a table and then a burst of silver confetti rose from the water flashing in the sun, dropped and rose again. One of the seagulls fell out of the sky, barely touched the water and rose again, a small silver tail twisting at the side of its yellow beak. The cormorant launched off the seawall and skimmed the bay low as it headed toward the troubled patch of water: the feast. Julie tried not to focus on the school of fish leaping and shimmering in the sun. She knew they were being driven to the surface by a predator from below and that was something she did not want to hold in her mind. No one had ever been bitten by a shark at Sacks Beach, but she had seen a distinctive fin twice — once just beyond Fishhooks as she was waiting for a wave and one far inside, in water that would have been only thigh-deep for swimmers. Both times it was winter. The first time she yelled, “Shark!” but felt silly doing so. That first time she paddled back in, followed by most, but not all, of the nine surfers on the break that day. Only Old Doug had stayed out.

There had been three shark attacks at Ryland Beach twenty miles south of Sacks, but Ryland was unusual: a beach at the edge of a river estuary teaming with life where all manner of beast went to hunt and feed. Two thigh bites on swimmers playing near shore were clearly mistakes. Each time the sharks swam away after one taste. Speculation was that both attacks were the bumbling mistakes of immature blue sharks. But the third attack wasn’t a swimmer. It was a surfer and he was eaten. Sean (that was the surfer’s name) was sitting on his board waiting for a wave when a shark lunged up, took off his arm and pulled him into the ocean for more. About a third of him was gone — a chunk of his torso, an arm, a shoulder, his leg below the knee — before his buddies dragged him to shore, pretty much already dead. That was the part that got Julie about the attack. Who sees a shark thrashing someone and points their board that way? Who paddles toward screams and flashing fins and a sudden river of blood? She knew she wouldn’t.

A so-called expert declared that the shark had mistaken Sean for a seal. But that was stupid. Sean didn’t look like a seal, and he sure didn’t smell like one. If Julie could smell a wetsuit stored in a car trunk as she walked past, the planet’s best nose could smell it too. Both surfers who paddled to Sean’s aid insisted it had been a great white, but they were not believed until that was confirmed four days later by the same expert who kept insisting that sharks – including great whites – don’t like the taste of human flesh and that the attack was a mistake.

The official story was bullshit. If great whites don’t like the taste of surfers, why did the shark go back for two more big bites of Sean? Julie figured some sharks were just psycho. If people could erupt in unpredictable violence, why not other animals? She had met a couple of psycho dogs and she once lived in an apartment building haunted by a psycho squirrel; that one was a blessing, as it liked to kill mice and baby rats. So why not a psycho shark? Or maybe it was a dominance thing? When someone was killed by a shark, it was always by a great white, the apex predators of the ocean. Maybe they just needed to remind everyone of that fact once in a while — humans included: “I will kill because I can.” Julie tried not to let her fear of sharks interfere with her surfing. True, the first time she saw a shark fin slice through the water, she had paddled back to land, but the second time, the shark was inside the break between herself and the shore. It was her turn in the lineup and a clean third wave was rolling in just as she saw a fin cruising the shallows. It was one of those tiny, micro-second decisions that constitute the whole experience of surfing. “Fuck it,” she thought, and paddled into her wave. It was a lovely ride: clean, long, the lip of the wave tickling her elbow as she traversed its face. It deposited her more or less where she had seen the fin, but the shark was gone. She had examined the surface of the bay carefully before forcing herself to ride the rip current back out to get another wave.

Julie studied the boil of water beneath the gulls. She knew that sometimes fish like to play in the water. They like to swoop and spin and twist through the columns of dawn light as the sun’s new beams penetrate the ocean gloom. But this was not that. The school was moving in one direction — fast — and the fish were leaping constantly, trying to stay out of the water and whatever was pursuing them from below. Julie saw something shiny, round and dark pop up: a seal. The fur on its head reflected the sun like a search light, outshining everything else nearby: the seagulls, the fish, the water itself. Something else broke the surface of the water in a glistening curve and disappeared with a flap and a splash: another seal. Two seals, but almost certainly something else too. Fish aren’t spooked by seals.

Julie spotted a set of waves rising mid-horizon past the school of fish and realized she was too far in; the wave would form another thirty yards further from shore. She swung her board toward the open ocean, lay down flat and began to paddle hard. She saw that she had not only misjudged the location of the wave; she had also underestimated its size — by quite a lot. There was no time to look for the rip. She paddled straight out toward the rising hills of water as fast as she could. Her board glided up the face of the first wave and was briefly airborne before it fell with a smack on the wave’s sloping backside. Julie kept paddling. The second wave was cleaner than the first wave, and larger, but still sluggish. The crest of the third wave was starting to whiten by the time she cleared the top. She flew over the lip of the fourth wave just as it started to break. She glanced quickly right and left at the top of the wave, trying to get a fix on where the wave was breaking so she could find it again. A glimpse of a pouty boy in bright red underwear to her right: a Calvin Klein billboard loomed over the curve of the expressway that skirted the seawall. On her left: nothing: a gap between the end of the pier and the harbour buoys. She also saw that the set had only five waves. She would have to turn and takeoff immediately if she hoped to get a ride.

She slung her board toward shore as soon as she hit the trough and paddled hard, but her board didn’t move. She felt the wave sucking her backward into its embrace. She was resting too far forward on her board, and the wave was rising too quickly. And she hadn’t found that crucial moment of calm when she greeted the wave and asked for permission to play. One stroke, two strokes, three strokes. Julie felt the tail of her board rising. For a moment, she thought she would be blessed by grace, that as the bulk of the wave began to pass beneath her, she would dig in and then fly. Instead, her board rose to the top of a steep wall of water and simply fell. It cantilevered like a two-by-four slipping off the edge of a building. Julie hadn’t cartwheeled off a wave in a very long time, hadn’t misjudged a wave’s size and shape and speed so thoroughly in years. She was floating in the air, the face of the wave close to her own face. She wasn’t afraid. She was never afraid once she took off on a wave; the fear was always left behind at the moment of commitment, replaced by focus, calm and an elongation of time. A ride usually lasted no more than twenty seconds, but it could feel like twenty minutes: every breath and every drop of spray distinct. Julie examined the water. It looked like skin; creases and dimples played across its wrinkled grey-green face. She blew all the air out of her lungs and drew in as much as she could and waited, but she was still falling, still suspended in the air, the wave face still rising (or was she sinking?) beside her. She knew she was upside down — her head would hit the water first — but she didn’t know how far she had to fall or how long she had before she hit the water. Or what was underneath. Should she take another breath? Did she have time before the water swallowed her mouth and nose? She was in shadow, the fat wave blocking out the dawn. Far above her, the sun shot a weak crescent of gold through the foamy curl at the top of the wave. It looked like a stained-glass window high in a modern cathedral: a mystical glow revealing a web of white lines that only the ordained would fully understand.

Julie blew out her lungs again and took another big breath. She was very surprised to still be airborne. A fall with enough time for two breaths. Big wave. And then she slammed into the water, was sucked back up in the curl and smacked into the trough again as the wave broke. The water was deep. The wave pushed her down into a murky, boiling blackness. They called it the rinse cycle, that bomb of underwater energy beneath a broken wave. From land, the moment was marked with a crash and a wall of white water. Beneath the surface it was different: first a spinning cylinder and then chaos. A breaking wave is a demonstration of what happens when an unstoppable force (the energy of the sun, translated first to wind and then by the wind through the water) meets an immoveable object: a rising shoreline or underwater hill. The waves at Sacks Beach were created by winds hundreds of miles offshore and had travelled, organizing themselves along the way, for an average of three days before rising at Fishhooks. The trick was to relax, and not to surface too soon. The effect of an unstoppable force meeting an immoveable object is an explosion. Julie knew that it was important, underwater, not to be an immoveable object, to let the wave’s energy contort her body at its will. She tumbled in the blackness, trying to sense if there was any bottom nearby. She heard a moan of metal, probably the chain of the harbour buoy, but she didn’t hear any tumbling rocks. That’s how people died in the rinse; if they smacked their head on a rock and fell unconscious or if their board leash snagged and they couldn’t get back to the surface. Julie felt the wave toss her around and shake her again, her arms flailing, her torso twisting and untwisting; even her feet flapped underwater like flags in a breeze. And then the energy was gone.

Julie hung in the blackness, unclear what was up and what was down. If she had been on the second or third wave of the set, she would have climbed to the surface eager to get air and get going before the next wave crashed on her head. But she knew there was flatwater above; the fifth wave had been the last of the set. She could feel the leash of her board pulling on her left foot, guiding her toward the surface. Still, she stayed down, mentally checking her joints and limbs and making absolutely sure her board was at rest. When she first started surfing, she popped up for air as quickly as possible, but her board leash was made of surgical tubing that acted like a huge rubber band and that, she learned, can be deadly. She came up too quickly once and her board flew toward her like a missile, piercing the water just inches beside her head.

Her board was floating, tamed and serene, on a flat sea when Julie surfaced. A wide white triangle of foam on the ocean’s grey expanse marked the peak and path of the wave that had just pummelled her. She slid on to her board and paddled just beyond the tip of the white foam triangle and took her bearings again. Yes, the bright red underwear billboard, the chip wagon and a spot about twenty yards west of the harbour buoy. That triangulation would put her in the right spot when the wave came again. There was no sign of a set yet. Julie figured she had about twenty minutes before she had to get back to her car and go to work. She glanced at Fishhooks. Thor was paddling back out. He had clearly gotten a nice ride off the same swell that put her under. Thor wore a watch surfing and always left ten minutes before she needed to get out of the water. She was safe for time as long as Thor was still hunting waves.

The school of fish was no longer ruffling the sea. The shadows were sharp now, all colour but blue bled from the sky. A garbage truck rumbled over steel plates in the curve of the expressway near the seawall, timpani for the orchestra of cars and buses and machines whining and clicking and roaring and screeching out the first movement of the city’s morning symphony.

Paddling out, nose down, all Julie could smell was the salt and the tang — the ocean’s blood — and sometimes a hint of iron when gliding near a patch of rockweed. But now, sitting up on her board, she could smell the familiar city stinks. The undernote was still ocean salt, but it was topped with the peculiar perfume of early autumn grime: diesel exhaust; used fry oil; rat shit, rat dander and rat urine; the pollen of goldenrod and asters; sticky ice cream wrappers; warming asphalt; airplane fuel; overloaded, rotting dumpsters; and, at the edge of it all, a whiff of roasting coffee from the Nabob factory buried at the far end of the next bay. She looked across the water. Only seven surfers now at Fishhooks, one slapping his hand flat on the water in an obvious incantation for waves. And it worked. A set was building on the horizon. There was a whiff of breeze now from the ocean, but not enough to disturb the shape of the swell. Julie checked her position. She had drifted a little too far out, was level now with the harbour buoy instead of inshore of it. She found the spot again, then paddled a little off of it. She wanted to be on the shoulder as the set arrived. She would use the first wave for altitude to examine the ones behind it and pick her best ride. She knew she only had time for one. If she wiped out again, she would head to work without getting a single ride.

The first wave was a mushy, lazy thing that passed by without even breaking. Julie realized the tide was rising and soon this wave would disappear — vanish like magic as the water deepened over whatever hillock was making it rise up. It looked as if the third wave was best, though it was hard to see from the shoulder. The second wave’s peak was just slightly inshore of the point of triangulation, which meant if the third wave was slightly larger, her imaginary dot on the ocean should be dead on. Julie did not wait. She began to paddle as soon as the second wave had peaked. Barely six strokes in and she could feel the third wave rising beneath her. She dug in hard. Two more strokes, three, and then she was there: at the last moment of indecision, the instant of commitment. She could throw her weight back and let the wave slide on without her or plunge forward toward uncertainty. There was no thinking in this moment. She could not see what was rising behind her. She had never met this wave. Her body would decide and the only thing it had to go on was the feel of the wave as it came to life beneath her. There was no promise in the moment, only hope. Julie flowed to her feet as her board dropped lower on the wave face. For a moment, she was not in contact with anything, then she landed: right foot forward, left foot back, knees bent and fluid, torso facing the beach, her whole body momentarily contained in a plane defined by the rails of her board. She felt the board catch, felt the wave’s jaw grip her board like a toothpick, and then she was flying. She shifted her weight and her board sledded to the bottom of the wave and got out ahead of it. She was used to facing the water on a wave that broke left, but this wave broke right. She could hear the breaking lip of the wave chasing her, but she couldn’t see it. She shifted her weight and the board climbed back up the wave face until she could just see over the lip: a sharp blast of sun, the empty horizon, and Fishhooks on the other side of the bay. Her right rail was buried in the wave, her tail held fast by the water like a plank in a vice, but her nose was free and clear, sticking out of the wave like a diving board. Julie didn’t even think about it. She didn’t think about any of it. She just danced toward the nose, leaned back, stuck out her right foot and curled her toes over the tip of her board. She could hear noise. It seemed very far away. Hollering? Then she danced back. Her board shuddered over the wave in little spasms as it telegraphed the texture of every wrinkle in the water to her feet. It felt as if the ride lasted forever. The wave was shrinking, slowing. Julie pushed down with her right foot, pumping, and her board picked up speed. Then it was almost gone. Julie used the last energy of the dying wave to ride up over the lip of its falling shoulder. She had travelled three-quarters of the way across the bay and was in water only knee high. She peeled the Velcro cuff of her board leash off her ankle, shoved her board toward the beach and fell back in the water in a full-body flop. She stared at the sky -- all blue, not a shadow of a cloud or a bird or a plane – and felt the gentle rock of the beach wash as she floated.

She was rinsing off in the public shower outside the toilets when the whole crew from Fishhooks rushed up the sand. They were yelling. She looked out at the break, concerned. A shark sighting? An attack? But even Old Doug was headed to the beach, and he wasn’t afraid of sharks. He really wasn’t.

Red Beard was the first to reach her.

“Awesome! Fucking awesome!”

His face was open, beaming, as happy as a split watermelon at a Sunday picnic. It took Julie a moment. He was talking about her ride. She smiled.

“On the nose, man! Riding the nose!”

Batman and Robin led the rest of the pack up the beach. Julie rinsed her board, then started to dry off with her dirty turquoise towel.

“Nobody’s ever surfed that,” said Robin.

“Yeah, nobody,” said Batman. “Fucking rad, man. Fucking rad!”

“Language!” Old Doug had finally puffed up from the beach.

“Fucked up fucking wipeout!” said Jiggly. “You were fucking trashed!”

“Yeah, quite the fucking baptism you got there,” said Thor.

“Bitch, you the man,” said Baby Ears.

Julie smiled again. Baby Ears’ compliment made no sense in any world. She was still dazed from the ride, still in a fog of ecstasy too deep to appreciate this heaping of unexpected glory. Doug shuffled his way to the front of the little crew as she threw her board on the Elantra and reached for the tie-down straps jumbled on the driver’s seat.

“You really are the first to surf that wave, you know. I’ve seen a few try, but you were the first to dominate.”

Julie winced. Sometimes the surf lingo was so wrong. She had been invited for a dance. She was a grateful guest on the wave. She was not there to conquer. It was all about pleasure and grace. Doug seemed to sense her unease.

“I mean, you were the first to ride it. Impressive.”

“Yeah, and you rode the nose,” said Webby. “What are you going to call it?”

Julie was confused.

“That’s right,” said Doug. “You get naming rights. First to ride, first to name.”

Oh, they wanted her to name the wave, name it as if she owned it or had given birth to it or something, as if it were hers. But it wasn’t hers. It belonged to itself.

They looked at her expectantly.

“Sewers?” suggested Red Beard.

She realized that he too thought the outfall pipe was the southern marker for triangulating the wave. He had made the same mistake she did at first. Doug frowned. He didn’t like names that lacked majesty.

“Temples?” he suggested.

“Wipeout?” said Jiggly.

“Little Fishhooks?” said Webby.

Julie thought about the bright red briefs of the Calvin Klein billboard, how the colour stood out in all that grey: a beacon to guide her to the right spot on the water. She could call it Red, but that name wouldn’t stick. The name needed a whiff of victory, danger, sex or silliness to last.

“Underwears,” she said, and left them in a moment of silent confusion before she shared her knowledge of how to triangulate the wave and when it might be breaking: low tide on a full or new moon, southeast swell of at least four feet.

“Why not Billboards?” said Doug, clearly uncomfortable with the reference to veiled genitalia.

“Naw,” said Baby Ears. “Call it Billboards and everyone’s gonna figure it out. Underwears is great. It’s a clue, like we can tell who we want, but it isn’t like, open to everyone.”

Julie smiled. He got it. She leaned back to pull the front strap tight and wrapped the tail of the strap around the rack’s crossbar. Then she did the same for the back strap. She threw the blue tub in the trunk and banged it shut.

“Congrats,” Doug said as she got in the car.

“Yeah. Thanks,” she answered.

Julie eased the Elantra across the broken parking lot pavement, then headed toward the thrum of the city. Two seagulls flew out ahead of her like royal heralds ready to trumpet her arrival from the sea. They paced the Elantra for miles, flying half a block ahead and two stories high. And then, as Julie reached the towers of the city, the birds began to play. They dipped and soared and crossed back and forth in the air currents created by the concrete canyons. They flew and flew and flew without even once flapping their wings. It looked like an aerial square dance, Julie thought.

It looked like they were having a hell of a ride.