Surf rising

The little waves that ruffled to shore in my beach haiku are gone, replaced by good-sized waves that curl in with spray steaming back off their tops.

As the winter waves get bigger, the coastside buzzes with speculation about the big-surf contest held in our front yard.

"Have they called Mavericks?" asked a woman at the gym.

"I bet they'll call Mavericks on Wednesday" said the greengrocer at the farm stand.

"Surf's comin' up, swell's right," commented a laconic cop at the taqueria, "can't call Mavericks 'til the wind's right, though."

Mavericks, the big-wave spot off Pillar Point, was named for a white-haired German shepherd dog with an adventurous spirit. The spot didn't gain fame until the early '90s, and gained notoriety in 1994 when Mark Foo, a Hawai'ian big-surf legend, wiped out and disappeared on an 18-foot wave. The first surf competition was held out there in 1999. In the early days when Mavericks was called, hand-lettered cardboard signs saying Mavericks today! were tacked up on telephone poles, letting us know that we needed to skip work and stick around.

I grew up during the surfing craze of the '60s, woodies and Surfin' Safari and all, and I never got over it. I body-surfed Santa Cruz waters but never graduated to the longboard elite. Wasn't ever a gidget-type surfer girl either, good grief. Meanwhile, three hundred miles to the south, Wm was one of the longboard elite, surfing Zuma and Trestles and Malibu. We have salt water in our veins, we dream of breathing underwater, and the waves call.

You can learn all about Mavericks, check the contest status, and watch the competition live when it's on at http://www.maverickssurf.com/.

The silver lining for 2010

On the last day of 2009, Wm and I walked on the beach at sunset and we saw the silver lining for 2010! A flash of silver beneath the clouds, where the sky met the sea...


"...the little silver flash...follows the setting of the sun, making a brief crescent of light no thicker than the crescent of a fingernail along the horizon line" says the story of Umai, a girl of the Yurok tribe who yearned to know what the crescent of light was.

Umai took her canoe to the edge of the world:

"She sat at the world's edge, watching quietly. She saw that the sky does not rest solidly on the ocean, but that it lifts and dips and lifts and dips in an even rhythm...and she saw that it is this dipping sky that causes the waves...

 "The sun went down behind the edge of the world and was followed by the familiar silver flash. But from so much closer up, Umai saw that it was not at all a narrow crescent, but a waving, moving something with a center of living brightness..."*

May 2010 be filled with good health, and a center of living brightness for us all.

* This story is told in The Inland Whale: Nine Stories Retold from California Indian Legends by Theodora Kroeber, published in 1959.