The Scuttlefish

I’ve always wanted to surf at night. My friend has a story of hanging out one night a bonfire, and seeing two guys with boogie boards getting out of the water. When asked if it was fun, one of the guys said, “Sure, really fun. I can only imagine how great this must be during the day when you can actually see.”

I got my first chance to surf at night in El Salvador, when I went down to El Cuco with an eclectic group of surfers as part of a Surf For Life trip. Surf For Life takes surfers to exotic destinations, and gets them into waves, but also puts them to work in building and restoring schools within the communities.

I’ve done surf trips before. And I’ve done service trips before. But I’ve never done both at once. Just like I had never surfed at night.

We were up often as early as 4am in order to get an early start in the water, to ride waves until 7, to be home for breakfast and on the work site by 8 or 9. From there, we flexed our backs under the humid El Salvadorean sky and shoveled dirt, mixed cement, and built up walls using cinder blocks. Our much-needed lunch fueled us for the afternoon, which was more building, and more surfing. And we did that over and over again.

I obviously did not shoot this movie at night, but during a morning session, as the rain fell. But it still was nice.

On our last night, Alex got the good idea to go surf one of the local point breaks, even though the sun had set hours earlier. There was no wind and a bright, almost full moon. The fact that it’s a 300 yard-long right made it especially appealing. Plus, I had never surfed at night, and I’ve always wanted to. We packed 11 people and 11 surfboards into a pick-up truck and headed off.

The paddle out was like paddling into a dream. The water was warm, I was with friends, and from what we could see of the peeling white water, the waves looked really good. I was a bit nervous about the whole thing. Would I run someone over? Would I catch a wave? Would I know what to do once I was standing up…you know, not being able to see much of anything?

I sat out at the point with everyone else watched as a few of our group took off on waves. You could see them take the drop, but almost instantly they vanished into the black. Usually when you surf, half the fun is watching other people surf. It also makes things a bit more competitive, whether intended or not. You see a guy surf, you want to surf better, you push yourself, you are maybe filled with a bit of performance anxiety. Or you have a great ride, and look around to see if other people saw it, too. Not so at night. You take off, and you are gone. No one is watching.

So when I popped up on my first night-surfed wave, I loved it. I flashed down the face and then disappeared into my own world with the wave. I was hooting and screeching like I tend to do, but I have never felt so alone with a wave before. No one could see me ride. No one cared if I just stood there, or if I ripped as hard as I could. (Which isn’t that hard.)

So I surfed with my intuition. I could kind of see the wave, but I could very much feel it. And I tried to work with that feeling, to surf as I thought the wave wanted me to surf, now how I wanted me to surf, which is how I mostly do it. It was incredible.

I’ve been home from the trip for about a week, and have thought about our night session quite a bit. To surf by feeling. To turn out the lights, eliminate the pressure, and to focus on being the way the wave wants you to be.

Which has me thinking about the trip in a much broader way. We pendulumed back and forth between building a school, and surfing. Building a school = thinking outside yourself; helping others; acting with a sense of a bigger purpose. I think that deep down inside, all of us feel a need for something like that in our lives. I believe that all of us want to do something that matters with ourselves. To fill our days with purpose and meaning.

But it’s hard to be so purposeful all of the time. Even the most giving of humanitarians need a break. You can’t only give of yourself to others. There has to be another side to it to balance it out. You need also need to give of yourself to yourself. Which gets to surfing. Surfing = playing; being goofy; meditating in motion; selfishly pursuing as many waves for yourself as you can, and pretty much hoping that other people don’t get the waves that you want. Surfing is meditative, but it’s definitely done out of self-interest. There’s no “helping others” when it comes to surfing.

And I think that might be the balance. Just like you tire of only helping others, you also can’t exclusively ride waves. It gets stale to just surf over and over again. You need something bigger. You need to feel connected.

Our trip was the ultimate blend of those two impulses. It was like we were living according to how we’ve always wanted to live. We were simultaneously pursuing two of our most existential desires. We helped others, and nurtured ourselves, and the cherry on top was the we forged friendships along the way. Besides food and shelter, what else could we yearn for?

It was an incredible trip. And it all made sense to me when I was riding waves in the dark. At night, I felt what it was like to surf by feel. And during the day, I felt what it was like to live by feel.