Surfboard Tales: I’ve Always Wanted To Try That [1993]

The first time I ever saw Rut, it was on the long entrance drive to the private school where I had just started working. I was driving a typical teacher car, a compact station wagon, and he was headed directly towards me on a skateboard. I was going about 15 miles an hour; he was travelling about 20. Instead of giving me a panicked look, as one would expect from someone who was about to die on the hood of a Ford, he smiled, waved, and then ran off the road and into a drainage ditch. Great, my first day at a new school and I just killed someone. I hadn’t even gotten the keys to my office yet.

It turned out that he was okay.  Rut looked at me from the ditch, smiled from under a grossly askew helmet and, indicating the skateboard, said, “I’ve always wanted to try that.” As I was to discover, he was used to falling, as he owned a variety of sporting equipment that, from time to time, ensured it. I also discovered that, not just for his frequent tests of gravity, Rut was a bit of an anomaly in the school community. A private secondary school is, after all, a place organized for and dependent upon the pursuits of youth. But Rut was not a youth; he was not a student or even a young teacher freshly graduated from college.  Rut was well into his sixties. He was a Army veteran who had been a motorcycle dispatch rider, ski instructor, rock climber, had hiked the Appalachian Trail in its entirety, worked a variety of jobs, and, while a graduate student at Boston University, had lived across the hall from Martin Luther King, Jr., to whom he would refer, and not ironically, as “my buddy, Marty”. Now in his seventh decade, he was a history teacher and “outdoor skills” coach at a second-rate prep school. “Rut” was the nickname assigned to him by the students because that's often where he would be found while skateboarding.  It rather fit and he liked it.

I learned of his history in five minute installments, chatting from our adjacent classroom doors during the daily change in classes. One day, Rut told me that he had bought a mountain bike and was looking forward to trying it out later in the afternoon. “I’ve always wanted to try that,” he said. The next day he was on crutches, telling me of the deceptively steep trail that he’d discovered. Later that year, at a faculty meeting, he arrived sporting a new cast on his arm. We exchanged looks and he just said, “Inline skates”. He’d always wanted to try that, too, you see. Because of events like these, behind his back some the students and twenty-something faculty called him Rut the Nut.

I could see why.  According to the hobbled world view of the students and younger faculty, Rut was too old for skateboards and mountain bikes, too old to be a teacher [he was at least twenty years older than any of the other faculty members], and would talk about things that were, well, just plain old. After all, as a young faculty member once asked me, who is this “Marty” guy?  Despite the pretense of uniqueness and originality, ably reinforced by the professional marketing community, teenagers are remarkably uniform in their tastes, style, and world view. Like artists, they think of themselves as edgy and progressive and, like too many artists, seal themselves off in an attitudinal bubble that ensures that they will be anything but. 

Which was why, of course, Rut did new things. As there will always be those who seek the safe cocoon of homogeneity, their counterparts will be challenging any notion that limits human activity and endeavor by prejudices about age, culture, gender, ideology, and spirituality. I recognized that kind of defiance immediately as it was and is a strong part of surfing, an activity that, in those days, was beginning to reclaim my attention and activity. This recognition was ratified one morning when, for reasons that are clouded now by time and distance, I had used a surfboard to teach a lesson to my philosophy class. After carrying a Hanson board, bright in the colors and pattern of the flag of Finland, across the campus quad from my classroom to the administration building, I found Rut in my office eager to talk of surfing, surfboards, and what one has to do to get started in the sport.

“You know, I was stationed in Hawaii when I was in the Army and used to watch those local boys on those enormous boards out on those waves. Man, it looked like fun. We wanted to do it, too, but we weren’t allowed to mix with the locals in those days. This doesn’t look as heavy as those boards did, though. You know, I’ve always wanted to try that.”

Before I could explain that surfboards were no longer made out of koa wood, Rut grabbed the Hanson, ran outside and placed it between two picnic tables by the dining hall. He then sprung, with considerable vigor, onto the board and began to mimic the motions of a surfer on a wave. At first, I was worried that he would snap the board in two; then I was worried that he’d fall and have another visit with his close friends at the local emergency room. But after a minute of surf pantomime, he nodded, brought the board back to the office, placed it carefully against a bookcase, and asked, “Where can I buy one?”

As the closest surf shop was clean on the other side of the state, I suggested that he try to order one through the sports equipment provider who was contracted to the school. To this day, I wish I had been privy to his conversation with the salesman. It arrived shortly before graduation.  Rut showed it to me while loading up his car the day after the last day of the school year and told me he was going to try it out on the particularly bone crushing waves on Cape Cod. I more or less expected that this meant I would see him modeling some form of orthopedic gear upon our return in September but, as I knew from my own experience, with some things you just have to get out there and do it. It’s the only way. I don’t think that process ever had to be explained to Rut.

I saw him next at the new term’s opening faculty meeting, nearly a year to the day I had almost killed him.  Rut sat next to me and, while our new headmaster droned on about the difference between culture and character or something like that, I heard the familiar tales of a neophyte’s first surfboard summer. He could have been 12 and it wouldn’t have sounded much different.

“It was momentous. I just spent all day at the beach. I felt like Hemingway.” He paused to explain to one of the twenty-something English teachers who Hemingway was. “Nothing but sun and water. Some shellfish, maybe.” He leaned forward and said conspiratorially, “A little rum.” He responded to one of our many faculty health scolds with, “At my age, you don’t worry about skin cancer. By the time you get it, you won’t live long enough to die from it,” and employed all of the appropriate terminology of surf life such as “pearled”, “puka”, and “stoked”. Yeah, he was stoked alright.

That year, our classrooms weren’t next to one another and, owing to a promotion that meant I had to spend more time with administrators and less with faculty, I didn’t have a chance to speak with Rut on a daily basis. Sometimes, whole weeks would go by when I would only see him across the quad, or nod to him across the dining hall. One day, in the midst of a particularly miserable winter, when all of us were spending too much time indoors, he came to my office. At first, I thought it was just to visit, but he seemed to have something specific on his mind.

“Do you still have a church somewhere?”
“No, I just sub for other clergy on Sundays.”
“Oh. Uh-huh.”
“Why? You looking for one?”
“Went a couple of times when I was a kid. Before the war. Indoors in a dark place never attracted me.”
“Well, some of them have electricity now.”
“But I was thinking that I’m not getting any younger and I should expand my horizons some. You know a good place?”
“My wife’s church. Not far from here.” I gave him the location.
“Yeah, I know it. The pretty one with the glass. Okay. Sunday mornings, right?”
“Usually. You can go on Wednesday mornings, too.”
“No. I want the Sunday experience. Might as well do it right. Organ music, right?”

Boarding schools maintain brutal schedules for their faculties, with only Sunday mornings free of scheduled activities. That, coupled with the late 20th/early 21st century need for the college-educated to present themselves as worldly and intellectual by disdaining religious practice, meant that church attendance was as rare and worthy of comment as was a 65-year-old on a skateboard. I knew that Rut was joining in corporate worship and religious inquest for the same reason that he skated, biked, and surfed: To push the limits placed on us, not by time or age or undeniable natural force, but by the conventional thinking that the mediocre use as a complacent cage.

So, with the same defiance that marked his physical endeavors, Rut found his church, attended regularly and, one evening, even saw to the organization of a parish’s pancake dinner. When other faculty would comment on his devotion, he would shrug, smile, and explain his burgeoning spirituality by saying, “I’ve always wanted to try that.”

[Excerpt from Reading Water, all rights reserved ©2011]

Surfboard Tales: Memoriam (1993)

It was a sad thing, and not what I had ordered. I had ordered something green and blue and alive. What I got was a ring of brown, dried flowers. So much for using an 800 number to order a floral arrangement. The florist had been defensive when I looked at it. She informed me, in response to my puzzled expression, “It’s what everyone’s ordering this season.” I said I found it a macabre offering for a dead friend. “But, they’re dead flowers, you see?” she continued. Yeah, I saw; I just didn’t feel like arguing the point about how funerals are celebrations of life and resurrection with someone whose primary concern was with “what everyone’s ordering this season”.

I had parked in the common lot that was shared by a number of shops and tossed the dried flower ring into the back of the pickup.

“Whatcha got there?” asked Dylan, who worked at the surf shop next door, and who was enjoying a Marlboro on the back steps amid a confusion of cracked surfboards, shredded wetsuits that could no longer be rented, and other detritus of the trade.

“It was meant to be a something for a friend. I found out yesterday that he had died. Not really sure what I can use it for.”

“Old friend?”

“Yeah. Over ten years, anyway. He even came to the shore for a week or so once. We took him out [surfing]. He liked it. I don’t know if he ever went again, but he liked it when he was here.”

“A lot to like when you’re here. Sun, beer, girls, waves, easy job. Mostly waves. Even guys your age seem to like it.”

“Yeah. Thanks.”

“You going out today? It’s kinda junky.”

“I don’t know. I was going to leave this at the memorial garden over at Holy Trinity, say a prayer or two; but it seems weird to leave dead flowers.”

“Do they float?”

“Um, maybe.”

“Bring it down to the 7th Street beach after I get out of work. Around 4:30. Bring your board. We can do something with it. You said he rode once upon a time, right?”

“Yeah. Awhile ago.”

“Doesn’t matter how long, right?”

“No, it doesn’t.”

Rich and I had worked side by side in a downtown office for a cantankerous collection of buyers for a department store chain. As we were the same age, 25, and the only members of the office under the age of 40, we became good friends. I left after a year; he stayed until he had enough saved to start his own business. I was ordained, had my first and subsequent parishes and chaplaincies, and he built his business, until the day when he learned that the rare form of cancer that had killed his father was genetic. He died at the age of 36, six months after the diagnosis.

Rich was the first close friend I lost and I grieved for him. I didn’t mention to Dylan that, in addition to losing a friend, I was beginning to have intimations of my own mortality. This was exacerbated by the fact that I was alone at the shore, with my wife caught up in work back in Massachusetts and all the kids doing their own thing that summer. It bothered me that the death of a friend was causing me to think mostly about myself, even as I know from professional experience that it happens. As I had received notice of his death too late to get back to Ohio for the actual funeral, leaving a wreath at the local parish’s memorial garden seemed the least I could do.

At 4:30, I went down to 7th Street. There weren’t too many people in the water, as it was unusually cold for August and the waves were almost too choppy to ride. Dylan was there, though, with three others. Two were a brother and sister from a local family that owned one of the amusement piers. The sister I recognized from a recent newspaper article, as she was an accomplished surfer and had just won some serious competition that summer. The third friend of Dylan’s was Stash, one of the buskers who used to live play guitar along the boardwalk at night, until the town made it illegal for musicians to do so without a license. [As the license cost more than what was dropped into an open guitar case during the length of the summer, it was no longer a cost-effective means of earning extra money. That was exactly what the town wanted, of course, so they could fill the boardwalk with semi-professional barbershop quartets and ersatz jazz groups; types of music deemed more “family-friendly”.]

At Dylan’s urging, Stash took charge of the flower ring.

“I’ve seen them do this thing in Hawaii and it’s cool. It’s called a ‘paddle out’. Although they don’t use dried up flowers”, he said, looking at the florist’s absurd product. “Still,” he brightened, “I even have some words.”

Outside of those with whom I’ve worked professionally, I generally don’t share my occupation with people, nor do I shove earnest amateurs out of the way when they wish to take a lead in informal ceremonies. Despite polls that often show the United States to be a “religious” nation; most people know little of what religion is about, outside of the misshapen forms presented by bilious politicians and brain-addled Hollywood royalty. When they discover that they’re speaking to a priest, they get uncomfortable, make strained attempts at humor, are perpetually worried that they’ll say something offensive, or feel the urgent need to present their own personal spiritual view, adamantly and at length. My reticence is occasionally criticized by colleagues, as they think that it’s an exercise in evangelism to reveal their occupation loudly and proudly to anyone who’ll listen, but I’ve found that evangelism doesn’t work too well when people are uncomfortable, defensive, strident, or nearly hysterical. Sometimes it’s simpler and truer to just be one of the gang on the beach and to let the “amateurs” be the spiritual guides.

At Stash’s direction, we paddled out to a calm area beyond the breakers, formed a rough circle, and placed the wreath in the center. It floated. Then Stash launched into the greatest oration I’ve ever heard while seated on a surfboard. After evoking the importance of life in the midst of the raw nature of the ocean, he continued,

“The waves are like life, man. And I don’t mean that like in those books about surfing. Waves aren’t about metaphysics or Eastern religion or Californicated gibberish. Everyone tries to apply some deep meaning to life, too. They create massive organizations to define it. Folks have tried throughout history to apply meaning to it, and life resists it. Life is just life. That’s why it’s like the waves. All of that verbiage, all of those words to try to turn a wave into something mystical, and the wave just is. You can tell me about energy and gravity and moon phases and [stuff], but I don’t care. I know it’s just a wave. You just ride it. Like, it’s just life, we just live it. And even when we think it’s over, we still ride it.”

With that, we watched the tide slowly take the wreath in the general direction of Ireland. I said something from the Book of Common Prayer about the departure of the soul, something I’ve said a dozen dozen times professionally; that I would have said with Rich if I had been there for his final moment. Stash turned to me, said “That was beautiful, man. Did you make it up? C’mon, let’s ride some waves”. Off we went, even in the junky, unpredictable surf, over and over again; trying every which way we could to wring energy out of the waves, to stay balanced when they were at their trickiest, and reach that shore, tired yet accomplished, and ever ready to try it again. Yeah, the waves are like life.

In a quiet moment, after the others wandered off, and while the wreath was just barely visible on the far horizon, I was able to whisper, “So long, old friend. You just got the best funeral homily I ever heard.”

[Excerpt from Reading Water, all rights reserved ©2011]