All week I had been tracking the development of a deep, deep low spinning and tightening off the coast of Nova Scotia, which then settled somewhere south of Greenland. The digital runes were predicting ten foot waves with a period of fifteen seconds, with little or no coastal wind to speak of. A whole host of fickle corners, reefs and points were going to be lighting up that had been dormant all summer. It was the holy month of September and the surfing dilettantes had flown back to their workstations. I should have been working too, and struggled with the usual weighing up of responsibility and desire. I chose, in the end, to rise before the dawn and head to the sea. I knew I would gain nothing from this endeavour, and that I would just burn some petrol and burn some calories.
In the half consciousness of the dawn patrol the shipping forecast confirmed the position of the low and the direction of the wind. As I listened to its soothing litany I remembered what acid guru and Harvard Professor of Psychology Timothy Leary said about surfers. According to Leary the destiny of mankind as a species was to evolve toward an entirely aesthetic realm, a realm dedicated to the dance. Leary saw surfers as the living, breathing embodiment of a sector of human society dedicated purely to the dance, and as such that they were the throw-aheads of human evolution. The dance was, in the very earliest days of human history, no less than the creation of the Now. The moment of the dance was the instant that truthful, unmediated being came into existence. The dance was beautifully symbolic therefore, of the transcendence of the animal necessities of food, shelter and protection that humans have been perennially burdened by. The image of the surfer riding close to the curl, at the point where the energy of the wave is exploding, resonated with Leary as symbolic of the complete, joyful immersion in the present. Whilst riding a wave, he said, the past is exploding into nothingness behind you, and the future is unwinding and unfurling in front of you, begging to be created. For Leary, being dedicated to the search for these fleeting moments rather than acquiring the trappings of ‘success,’ the surfer achieved merely moments in the ever-present, but in so doing tapped into a part of the human soul accessed rarely by the mass of men. Through a kind of evolutionary wrong-footedness, rather than placing that life-affirming dance at the centre of his existence, early man put the will toward accumulation in its place, and built entire cultures dedicated to the kind of material wealth that created the world around us. Early mankind made a grave error. He fucked up, dude.
I crossed the moor and reached the apex of the headland and caught my breath as I saw lines of swell stacked to the horizon, and smooth, evenly spaced sets wheeling and peeling into the bay. I parked, pulled on the neoprene and submerged myself in the ever-present once more. Within minutes I was dancing. And nothing else seemed to matter any more.
