Sometimes taking off on a wave is like dropping a needle on a vinyl record. It's the closest comparision to the smooth sensation of something moving underneath you and then becoming that thing - becoming the moving water or sliding into a room of sound. Perhaps you need to have experienced either to understand the connection. Both sensations enter my dreams - I am moving along the green face of a velvet glass wave, or the black vinyl is circling, circling, smooth as black sheets.
On Monday I paddled out on dark - there's enough light before the official first light to see, and if you can hear the waves and know what direction the wind is blowing, you know it's going to be worth it, even if just to be in the ocean as the dawn comes. I knew sun up was at 6.43, and if I put my phone on between the folds of my towel by the edge of the outgoing tide, I could get a few waves (first light is a suprisingly long stretch of time) and then check to see if I'd got a text to come in. My timing was immaculate - I had five minutes to sit, catch my breath, and hope like hell I wouldn't be called in by the deadline of 7 am so I could head back out there, which I did - the surf was good, as forecast, and it was beautiful out there.
It's hard to explain just how beautiful it is. Perhaps you've felt it walking very early in the morning - the world is calm, just waking up, Perhaps the light hits the trees, a dressing of brightness as the colour is dialled up and the night slides away. Perhaps it's birdsong, the dawn chorus. The sun sliding over the hills.
Out on the water, I look east toward the furthest headland and say 'morning, Dad' as I do every dawn I surf this place. It's where his ashes went, and I feel his presence deeply here. Gulls take flight in messy formations. Lately, dolphins - the first fin enough for the heart to skip, and then the recognition of friend over foe. George the fisherman walks to the point, his white bucket expectant. Black cormorants air their armpits to the cool air. Behind the rocks, the bigger sets crash, signalling time to prepare so that the surfers can slide, in their turns, onto the wave. Early, there's only a few of us - later, many.
The sunrise can be either a technicolour event complete with alien spaceships and red vortexes of clouds, or more moody blues and purples with the orb invisible and the only inkling it's arisen being the trustworthy brightening. Either way, the heart expands out into the universe. How could it not, when the ocean and sky are so beautiful? So, so beautiful?
It's moments like this I feel the meaning of life. It is this - to breath with the birds, the dolphins, the stingrays. To take part in the life given to us, to be moving in nature, being in flow with the world. What else is there? I wonder at the young women who are coming down the beach, the old men who must take prognisterone and have hot showers to warm up before they paddle out on their various watercraft, the men who surf no longer, the women who leave to have children and come back, like me, after those decades are gone. My father, ashes in the salt.
One day, my hips will fail me, my paddle strength gone, my balance upset. Perhaps soon I will swim instead, come here at dawn to take photos, or sit watching the clouds become castles or dragons or alien cities awash with crimson and tangerine.
I don't want for much else. In these moments, nothing else at all matters, just the moving water underneath me, the leaping fish, the seaweed hanging below the surface, and the tide moving out, and in, and out again.