Surf Mama
Mama would stand surveying the breakers, her long board resting against the red life guard tower. I wanted to hold her hand, but she’d pull back as if my fingers were jellyfish tentacles. I’d sit at her feet, pinching my fat thighs, admiring her tanned legs, the way she filled her no-nonsense black tank swimsuit, her dark hair in long braids. Sometimes men asked if she was an Indian, and she’d raise her palm, nod, and say “How.”
She talked to me while waiting for the waves and the offshore wind. “Next year we’ll get your board when you’re taller. Even in the baby waves there’s stuff to know.” She scanned the horizon.
“Avoid kelp because it will drag you down or get tangled in your board’s leash. Undertow is dangerous but easy to spot. You’ll see the beach’s incline,” she tilted one hand to suggest the angle, “especially when the high tide is breaking right on shore.”
Anybody knows that, I thought. I chewed the ends of my pig tails, short as mama’s toes. “High tide swimming is never fun,” I said.
She shrugged. “Rip tides don’t have to drown you if you learn to swim with them. Watch for holes around the reef –they’re too deep for you.”
The water in holes was placid and warm. I always pretended it was a swimming pool. I couldn’t admit that to Mama. She’d call me a sissy baby-girl if I preferred a cement pool. She’d glance down at me to make sure I hadn’t started reading a book. “Don’t, for God’s sake, swim during red tide. That stuff is algae that kills fish.”
“What about sharks?” I’d ask even though I knew the answer. I never tired of picturing sharks.
“No surfing at sundown, feeding hours. No surfing alone. Don’t scream or thrash around in fear. The shark’s going to do what it feels like doing, so there’s no use worrying about it.” She smiled at me. “You can always try a bop on its nose. Sharks hate that.”
I grew up with this knowledge of the rules of the sea. I learned to dive under the biggest waves instead of trying to go over or through them and how there’s a way to gauge a wave as it forms, you can see it on the horizon like a whale coming to surface except it’s the entire line of swells, rising, rising, rising, and then you catch one, speeding down its face with the salt flying in your eyes and the wind and water rushing, crushing, with a sound that’s a roar or maybe that was just me shouting into the fabulous fury.
Mama taught me the protocol of how it was rude to shoot out in front of others and spoil their ride. The most girly thing she cared about was the Labor Day white-shoe/black-shoe rule.
Ten years passed. In a teenaged freedom flight, I went with the current that swept north to Los Angeles at the end of the summer, where I was one more co-ed with straight, sun-blonde hair. I loved being lost in the masses at the university where no one knew about my distant, surf-obsessed, odd mom.
In the September twilight, I stood looking at my black flip flops next to two beefy, red-faced guys outside our co-op dorm elevator.
I thought maybe I should take the stairs, but would that be rude? They had gotten there first, they pushed the elevator button first, and they got in first. I would show poise, not fear.
The boys kept talking about football, taking the offensive opportunity when you have it. They quit talking and pushed a little closer, circling me. I smelled the citrus pomade from their frizzy hippie hair and something minty. One put his hand against my back and the other jerked up my t-shirt, exposing my braless self. “Small begonias,” he said. When the elevator stopped, they peered out into the long, empty hallway.
As Hippie Hair grabbed at my arm, I swiveled the way I do flipping my board under a wave. I swung my fist upwards and connected with a splat on the second guy’s face. A red tide flooded from his nose.
Then I ran. I thought about the rules Mama forgot to teach me about survival on land. But she had taught me what I needed to know. I nodded to the western sky and said, “Thank you, Mama.”
