You go anyway, even though the ocean is flat and your weapon of choice is meant for bigger, angrier stuff. Sitting there you remind yourself that surfing is sometimes about not surfing; that it affords you a chance to quiet your mind, and also to ride the particular waves that the brain produces. Today: the horizon is fenced in by a ring of brown haze, exhaust and discharge blown offshore by contrary winds.
Navel-gazing, literally; you are looking downward, past the slight paunch that wasn't there a few years ago, past your feet, moving to and fro like a duck's. The water is so clear and still as to be invisible. It's as if you're suspended, floating on air rather than water. You have heard and read this a thousand times: "the ocean teems with life". Today the ocean is a barren place. What you see is what a pilot might see flying low over the plains of the Gobi, or the Sahara, or even Mars. Minature dunes and canyons, a desolate landscape. Sand: the particulate fragments of rocks, and bones. Life began in the sea and everything eventually ends up there; the atomized bones of cetaceans and fish, of elephants and mice, even of men and women, all mixed in together with the grainy remains of rock and shell. You hover above a vast emptiness, a graveyard, a universe of remnants.
