Jim, flustered and still really upset about something, Tash can’t guess what, tries to return to the dropped explanation. He makes a hash of it. The students are looking openly rebellious. Rules of punctuation are not Jim’s forté anyway; he’s more an inspirational teacher than a technical one. But it’s a student body looking for rules and regulations, and they are getting angry at him as he flounders.
“The example you used with me,” Tash says in an ominously silent pause, “is definition versus added information. You use ‘that’ to help define, like in, ‘On the day that it rained.’ And there’s never a comma there. ‘Which’ is for additional information—’Last Friday, which was rainy, turned out well.’ And there you use commas to bracket the interjected phrase.” Several students are nodding, and a relieved Jim is quickly writing examples on the blackboard, screech! Wow, got to watch that chalk, Jimbo. He’s definitely not all there tonight. What’s the problem? “That’s how you put it when I asked you last week,” Tash adds, and begins scribbling the examples in his own notebook.
Then when class is over, Jim packs up swiftly and is out the door and gone before Tash even has time to stand. Too upset to talk about it? Now that is unusual.
Tash shakes his head as he leaves the concrete bunkers above the Arroyo Trabuco condos. Too bad. Well, maybe he’ll find out about it later, after Jim’s had a chance to calm down. Meanwhile he can’t worry about it; he’s got to get ready to go surfing.
Yes, it is just after ten P.M., and Tashi Nakamura is going to go home and eat and do a little carbrain repair, and then drive down to Newport Beach and go surfing. This is his latest innovation; after all, the waves are jammed with hordes of surfers by day, and so—think about it—if you want to avoid them, there’s no choice but to surf at night.
All his friends laughed themselves silly at this idea. It had the trademark Tashi characteristics, following a solution out to a logical but crazy end; Tashi, Jim said, just didn’t believe in reductio ad absurdum. And they laughed themselves sick. Ahhh, hahahaha.
But did they ever try it? No, people tend to judge new ideas without actually testing them, and so they remain on track all their lives, a part of the great machine. That’s fine with Tash, because among other things, it means he can have the nighttime waves all to himself.
The trick is to do it when there is a full moon, like tonight. So at 3:30 A.M. Tash parks in Newport Beach, walks down the dark, quiet street, surfboard under his arm. Curious how unanimously diurnal people are. Between the fashionable beachfront condos, with their walls of dark glass facing the sea. Onto the broad expanse of sand, milky in the moonlight, lifeguard stands looming on the bright surface like ritual statuary.
Stone groins extend into the water every four blocks; they’re there to help keep the trucked-in sand on the beach. Just off their sea ends waves break, faint white in the darkness. That’s another trick to night surfing: find a regular point break with a clear orienting marker. Each groin starts a left break when there’s a south swell, as there is tonight; and they’re easy to see. Perfect.
Tashi waxes his board, steps down to the water. He arrived in his wetsuit, so sweat reduces by a fraction the room for seawater. Still, wading in and strapping the board’s leash onto his ankle, the soup surges up his legs and gives him the familiar shock. Cold! Lovely salt stimulation. He shoves the board into a broken wave, jumps chest first onto it and paddles out, puffing walruslike at the rush of chill water down the wetsuit’s neck. Pull of the backwash, the rise into a wave almost breaking, slap of water into his face, the clean cold salt taste of it; he takes in a big mouthful of ocean, sloshes it around in his mouth till the taste fills him. Swallows some to get it down his throat. He’s back in Mother Ocean, the original medium, the evolutionary home of the ancient ancestor species that he now feels cheering wildly, down there in his brainstem. Yeah!
Outside the break, paddling with smooth lazy strokes. Pretty much directly out from the 44th Street groin, his favorite. Newport Beach now seems a long strip of white sand backed by hundreds of toy blocks. As usual there’s no wind, and the water is perfectly glassy, like dawn glass only better. A liquid heavier than water.
Seeing the waves. It is a bit of a problem, naturally. But the moon’s millions of squiggled reflections rise and fall on the swells outside, making a pattern. And close up the black wall of a wave is hard to miss. It’s a good sharp left tonight, lips pitching out and dropping over with clean reports as they hit.
Tashi digs the board in, paddles to match the speed of a point about to break, pushes up and stands in one fluid thoughtless motion. Now he’s propelled along without further effort, it’s merely a matter of balancing his weight in a way that will keep him moving ahead of the break. There’s a kind of religious rapture in feeling this movement: as the universe is an interlocking network of wave motions, hitting the stride of this particular wave seems to click him into the universal rhythm. Nothing but gravitational effects, slinging him along. Tuning fork buzzing, after a tap of God’s fingernail.
A wall in the wave that Tash doesn’t see knocks him over, however, and it’s underwater night soup time, an eerie experience of cold wet zero-gee tumbling, up to the roiling moonwhite surface, where a million bubbles are hissing out their lives and popping a fine salt rain into the air just above the water. Tug on leash, grab board, get on, paddle hard to get over the next wave before it breaks. Success, barely. Back over to the point off the groin. Try another one.
It’s a pas de deux with Mother Ocean at her most girlish and playful. Quickly Tashi gets into a rhythm, the interval between crests is known to his body more than his eyes, and sometimes he takes off on a wave without even looking at it. He wonders if the blind could surf, concludes it would be possible.
Well. Of course waves are variable; like snowflakes, there are no two the same. And in the dark they bring a lot of surprises, sudden wall-offs, unexpected bowls, backwash ripples and so forth, which catch Tash off guard and knock him down. No big deal, it’s interesting, a challenge. But the neat thing is that about the time he is getting tired of the unexpected variable dumping him, the stars in the east dim, and the sky grows blue. The water is quick to soak up the sky’s color, as always. Tash finds himself skimming over a velvet blue like the sky in Jim’s orange crate posters, a pure, intense, glossy, rich, blue blue. Wow. And he can see a lot more of the wave’s surface. It’s so glassy that he looks at one smooth wall about to crunch him and decides he must need a haircut: wild-haired guy grinning back at him like an Oriental Neptune, surfing inside the wave like the dolphins do. Who knows, maybe it was Neptune.
The best part of the day. A renewable miracle: always so astonishing, this power of the ocean to resist humans. Here he lives in one of the most densely populated places in the world, and all he has to do is swim a hundred yards offshore and he’s in a pure wilderness, the city nothing but a peculiar backdrop. Wildlife refuge, and him the wildlife.
Not only that, but the tide is going out and the waves are getting hollower and hollower, little four-foot tubes tossed into existence for the five seconds necessary to stall back into them, so that he can clip along in a spinning blue cylinder that provides swirling floor walls and roof, with a waterfall fringe at the open end, leading back out into the world. Might as well be in a different dimension when you’re in the tube, it is such a wonderful feeling. Tubed, man! How tubular!