One of the biggest regrets of my life was that I’d never learned to surf, especially since I’d been born in Hawaii and had spent almost forty years in California, off and on.  My brothers had grown up surfing and would occasionally drag me out with them, usually when the water temperature was fifty degrees and the sea was throwing up frightening walls.  I’d cling to the board like a drowned rat and be carried two miles down shore before finally clambering out and trudging back to the car.

The truth is that good surfers make surfing look easy, when it is not at all easy to learn and get good at.  The waves look much different when you are lying on a board on a pitching, tumultuous sea, as opposed to standing on shore, watching the orderly swells come in.

My brother John had seen a good price on a second-hand longboard that he’d alerted me to a few years earlier, and I’d ended up riding three miles up Beach Boulevard with the hundred dollars they were asking for it in my pocket.  When I got there, I discovered it was a Wavestorm, one of the foam boards they sell at Costco for the same price new, but since I was already there, tucked it under my arm and rode home with it.  It had sat in my mother’s backyard since.  There was always an excuse not to paddle out. 

When I stumbled across the Gathering during the pandemic, what I noticed right away was a few ghosts appearing out of the sea every morning, dripping wet, with their surfboards in tow.  That’s when I met Jason and Buddy.  When they heard I had a board at home they urged me to bring it, and still I made excuses not to.

One week at the end of the summer, however, the sea and the sky were so blue, and the water temperature was so warm, that I took the Wavestorm down to Tower 7 an hour before the Gathering was set to start.  Buddy was sitting close to shore and started waving his arms and shouting when he saw me.  A few seconds later he pearled so badly that his feet went tumbling over his head.

I understood the basic principles behind surfing, but had a hard time putting them into practice.  The Wavestorm was so thick and buoyant that it was impossible to duck-dive on it.  That meant I bore the brunt of every breaker, unless I flipped over and did the turtle, holding the board over my head like a sheet of plywood in a thunderstorm.  I would usually manage to struggle out to the lineup, but on a lot of days that’s all I could do.

I chased after every wave, like a dog chasing cars, but either they passed me by, or I’d get too far ahead and they’d come crashing down on my back.  If I did manage to get to my feet, I could be counted on to do a stuntman, diving to one side like a movie stuntman leaping out of the way of an explosion, or my patented cat on a hot tin roof where I’d leap into a crouch and get stuck up on the roof of the wave, eventually just falling off the backside.

There was one freak day, where almost every member of the Gallows was paddling towards me at the same time and I took off on a monstrous, head-high wave at the last second, somehow staying on my feet on the ass-end of the board, and flailing in a way that made it appear like I was shredding across the face of the wave.  That earned me a reputation as a big-wave charger that I knew I didn’t deserve.  The truth is that Jason was a great surfer, Doc and Ezra were at least competent, and the rest of us were a clown squad. 

Were we having fun?  Jason assured us that was all that mattered.

When I got my father’s old bike back from JAX and mounted the surf rack on it, then I really went to town, expanding my surf patrol from Blacky’s at the Newport Pier to Bolsa Chica.  My priority was always Tower 7, however, and when I’d show up there at sunrise and see the other ghosts crossing the bike path, their boards tucked under their arms, it made me feel like I was one of the New Avenger’s.  It was the oddest sensation to feel like I belonged anywhere, much less to a tribe of supernatural soul-surfers.

Around the end of October, the water got cold and the north swell kicked in.  At that point the crew largely disbanded.  If I heard they were getting together I’d make a point to meet up, even if it meant getting up earlier and riding further than I felt like.  Gradually, it started feeling like I was the only one left.  New ghosts would sometimes show up with their boards and I’d regale them with stories about the good old days.