I am in Cabo San Lucas, at the bottom of Baja California Sur, where the Pacific Ocean runs out of continent and meets the Sea of Cortez. Jacques Cousteau called the Sea of Cortez the world's aquarium. The Pacific side, where I was standing this week with my phone up, is less of an aquarium and more of a gym. The waves come in with intent.
I don't know a thing about the man I watched. Not his name, not what he does with his days, not whether the pale board under his feet is his or borrowed. I know he was in the water at the end of the day with fifteen or so others, and that the light had gone soft and gold, and that he had come out here to do a thing he plainly loves. That turns out to be plenty to go on.
Most of the time he sat out past the break, treading water, a hand going up now and then to push the wet hair off his forehead. That is the whole job out there. Sitting. Watching the horizon for the shape of the next one. Nobody checked a phone. Nobody looked at a watch. The ocean does not take appointments, and the whole lineup of them seemed to know that better than I do.
Then the water lifted behind him and he stood up on it as if that were a thing a person could simply decide. One arm out. Knees bent. The wave folding white over his shoulder like a sheet being shaken out. He did not look at the shore and he did not look at me. He looked at the next six feet of water, which is, I am beginning to think, the correct distance to look.
I took three pictures of him. One of them is any good, which is about my usual ratio and, I suspect, about his. Surfing and photography have that in common: you wait a long time for a few seconds, and most of the few seconds get away from you. Cabo sits at Land's End, where the two seas meet under the rock arch everybody comes to photograph. I had my back to the arch. I was watching a man wait.
The Next Wave
He sits out past the breaking line and pushes back his dripping hair. However else his days align, this hour of them is spent out there.
Here is what I noticed from the sand: he never once hurried. Not paddling out, not sitting, not catching the wave, not sliding off the back of it when it quit on him. The wave sets the schedule. You cannot be early for a wave and you cannot call ahead to say you are running behind. You can only be there, awake, when it comes.
I have spent a good part of my life being early for things that did not matter and late for the things that did. I have hurried through whole afternoons I would pay to have back. I have also, more recently, survived the most unthinkable, which does something to a man's arithmetic. The things that used to count as big got smaller. The things that used to be too small to notice, a hand pushing back wet hair, a board catching the light, got promoted.
That is the part I want to keep from this beach. Not the surfing. The giving of the hour. The decision to sit in the water at the end of a day and wait, with no guarantee of anything except that the ocean will eventually do what the ocean does. It is a small thing. It is the kind of small thing that, if you stack enough of them, is a life. I know this now the hard way, which is the only way I seem to learn anything.
A man out past the break with his hand on his head, looking at a flat blue horizon, is not waiting for nothing. He is waiting for the one thing he knows for certain is coming. There are not many things in life you can say that about. The surf is one. The tide is one. Dinner, usually, is one.
He paddled back out, sat up, pushed his hair back, and waited. I sat on the sand and did the same. We both got something. He got the wave. I got the reminder, which I needed more.
Yours, in ink and embers,
