Shadows Of Ourselves

I’m assuming most people reading this are, like myself, not professional surfers, and thus have wondered, perhaps for way too many afternoons or sleepless nights, what their life would be like if they had corporate backing to chasing the biggest swells to the world’s premiere or undiscovered spots, how hard they would work if given the chance at a young enough age, and what sort of unlikely and perfect environment would be needed to cultivate such a chance. Just me?

Less abstractly: I was in El Salvador late last fall and winter (Northern Hemisphere) teaching math and English to a few homeschooled expat kids. I love teaching, but admittedly the gig was conceived as a vehicle for surfing in the tropics. Believe me, it worked, but although surfing was my surface-level priority, the unlikeliness of my being there, combined with the profound sense of connection I came to feel after only a few months, left me trying to make sense of it all for almost a year afterwards.

One of my students surfed. I took to waking him up every morning before sunrise so we could be the first ones in the water. We consequently ended up being seen together quite often and without fail would be asked, by locals and tourists alike, if we were brothers. This annoyed him but humored me, probably because despite our resemblances (which were many), anyone who had seen the two of us surf would have realized we couldn’t possibly be related unless I spent my adolescence in a double-landlocked country; at fifteen he was getting barreled at will and landing Flynnstone flips, meanwhile I couldn’t even get air intentionally and was happy to get one vision of the barrel a week. He’s not a future a world champ but he was the most talented young surfer I’ve ever been close with, and I saw in him a missing link between the otherworldly talent of surf films and a relatable humanity that I could know, befriend, and mentor at such a close distance that I could place myself in his shoes and accurately transport myself into an alternate timeline of my life. I unabashedly did this often; it was impossible not to.

It’s not that I was necessarily jealous or wishing I was him. It was more that I was getting a close-range portrait of my idealized childhood; I remember, distinctly, February evenings in the Mid-Atlantic just after a 4pm sunset when I would wonder, neck-deep in homework and exhausted from pre-season weight training, what it would be like to live in the unnamed and idyllic tropical locations I saw in surf ads with waves reeling down a palm-lined point as teenagers in neon boardshorts chucked airs and stalled into tubes. Advertisements are designed to create impressions of an alternate, better-than-reality place only attainable to us mortals through the purchase of relevant products, but even my teenage self knew that these images came from somewhere on this planet, so who the heck was out there living that life? And how did they get there? And why wasn’t it me? But I only had so much capacity for self-torture and, as much as I’d have loved to drop out of school and chase being a professional surfer, I had been realistic about my geographic placement, talents, and scope of free will, so I saw that athletic scholarships were my only chance at expression, “success,” and a ticket out of pseudo-suburban Hell. In El Salvador I found myself living in one of those aforementioned ads and befriending one of the kids I had so desperately wanted to be back then, suddenly able to examine it against the echoes of my childhood and see that it was in fact as good of a life as I’d imagined.

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I was not the only one to realize how good it would be to be a kid here; early on in my tenure I met a local bodyboarder who lived in a roofless shack next to an abandoned building on the beach. I internally referred to him as Salvadoran Diogenes after the Ancient Greek anti-philosopher known for his asceticism, self-governance, and complete disregard for authority in all forms. Historical Diogenes rejected the eminent philosophers of his time, like Plato and Dionysus, and instead chose to live a life that represented his philosophies through his actions as opposed to, as he saw it, by preaching them with empty words. To this day his many quips and quirks are remembered fondly but the two that are most relevant to our contemporary iteration are: he used to live in an empty wine barrel in the Athenian Agora where he would eat and hang out with dogs (eating being, at the time, an act deemed to be done in private, and to this day some historians trace the worldwide cultural practice of eating in public markets to this behavior of his, but the blasphemy of openly befriending street dogs in Athens isn’t difficult to imagine); and when Aristippus, a former colleague of Diogenes when they were pupils of Dionysus, told Diogenes that “if you would only learn to compliment Dionysus, you wouldn’t have to live on lentils,” Diogenes replied, “but if you would only learn to live on lentils, you wouldn’t have to flatter Dionysus.”

And so Salvadoran Diogenes first garnered my attention (and soon my comparison) after I saw him fermenting roughly fifteen cumulative gallons of his own alcohol in literal broad daylight on the steps of the abandoned building next to his abode. He saw me ogling and said “bro, did you paddle out alone yesterday? I saw you going out there and was like ‘shit, this guy is crazy!’ And then I thought, ‘shit, am I crazy? Am I seeing things?’” I did, in fact, surf alone the day before in conditions that were beginning to approach consequential, but this was how I found out Salvadoran Diogenes was in fact crazy: we actually saw each other on the beach before I paddled out and yet he’d forgotten it already. In that moment I’d been curiously watching two girls trying to position a beach selfie for maximum sunrise exposure when I’d heard “hey bro!” and turned to see Salvadoran Diogenes, about thirty feet away, posing for his own selfie, yelling, “do you wanna take a selfie?” He then non-threateningly tossed his phone at me which exploded on the concrete in between us and only then did I realize that his phone was in fact a large rock that he had been holding as if it were a phone. I felt a strange sense of dissonance like I’d just watched something impossible take place, and I wondered if maybe he’d transformed the phone in mid-air or had simply been toying with my own cognitive expectations so well that it was as if he’d gone inside my mind to learn about what he could mess with. Whether he was manipulating the fabric of reality or was simply tricking me is something I’ll never know, but in either case he got me so good that it haunts me to this day.

That’s in no small part because of how much I saw myself in him as well as in my student. He was the most intense expression of some of the more extreme corners of my personality: addiction, anti-conformity, self-reliance, all taken to such ends that he was on the border between a good example of individualism and a nuisance to society. He spoke remarkable English, and when I asked my landlord about this he told me that Diogenes actually held an associates degree in Electrical Engineering from a community college in New York. “Just goes to show that there’s nothing stopping you from becoming a complete fuck-up,” he then said to me. After this observation I started to see Diogenes as a warning of what could happen to me if I let my unrestrained desires take control of my life, that without discipline even something as healthy as surfing could still render me possessionless on a beach in Central America. Perhaps that’s not the worst thing in the world, but I could at least see the ultimate conclusion of traits that I cherish, and that perhaps reaching that conclusion via the path I was currently on was not unilaterally positive; there were sacrifices and consequences of debatable merit if one tried to be a kid forever.

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Soon after this realization there was word around town of an approaching lunar eclipse. At some point the idea of surfing during it was ostensibly suggested but I can only remember my student and I talking as if we’d already agreed to do it. When the day came the peak was at 3:45am. I’ll confess that when I woke up at 2:30 I was questioning a lot, but as I sat on my front steps and drank my coffee I stared at the brightest moon I’ve ever seen and realized I was about to do something I’d almost certainly never get another chance to do.

I met my student outside of his house and we walked to the beach from there. We crossed paths with Salvadoran Diogenes as he was coming out of his shack and he took one look at us with our boards, stopped in his tracks, and said, “what the fuck.” It was 3:15. I said to look at the moon. “Yeah, what the fuck do you think I’m awake for.” A few weeks prior I’d seen him paddle out an hour after sunset in complete darkness and so I knew it was possible that he’d join us, but he instead went to the lifeguard shack and lit a cigar.

As I paddled out the moon was over my right shoulder and the penumbra was already taking a bite from it. What little light we had wouldn’t last long and we knew it. Ahead of us was an impossibly starry sky given how bright the moon was, and that celestial sea was separated from the nautical one by a gap of pure darkness where hidden clouds revealed themselves only when they dispensed lighting strikes into the ocean. “It actually helps with seeing the waves a bit,” my student observed, and I agreed. We both saw our first shooting star at the same time, and by the time I was heading home, I had counted eight.

Head-high obsidian faces broke evenly across the small point in the still night. Even with the moon being as bright as it was there was almost no visibility once we were out there. I didn’t realize just how much information I take in with my eyes, and so being blind out there was like being a kook again. I’ve always thought of the pop-up as a proprioceptive movement, but I found my timing completely off without being able to see she shape of the face in front of me, and so I had to rely almost entirely on how hard I felt the wave pushing me, which was not easy. The hardest part, however, was judging the distance to the waves as they approached. I had no idea when to start paddling and found myself getting sucked over the falls more than once. We also couldn’t position ourselves in any way and were doing more duck-diving than anything else. My wipeouts, as a function of all of this, came with no chance of preparation and were surprising me with their violence; I’d forgotten how much more of a beating you take when you’re learning. I did notice in the days after that these restrictions improved my instincts, but in the moment I realized that day-to-day, with such incremental progress, you can lose sight of where you started and how far you’ve come, but this immediate juxtaposition of my current surfing ability with my beginner self made it impossible to ignore that wherever exactly I was, I was far away from where I had started.

At this point more than half of the moon had been eaten by the Earth’s shadow and we agreed that it was time to catch a wave in. I seemed to be in a good enough position for one that was approaching and went for it. After an extra-deliberate pop-up I was very far forward on my board, crouching low, feet nearly together and at a 45-degree angle forward. In the black and windless face of the wave ahead of me I could see small iterations of the moon reflecting back at me, and as the water curved progressively higher all of those replications merged into one long silver streak that traced an arc identical to the one on the surface of the moon at the exact border of the eclipse. That was all I could see but I could feel the barrel approaching behind me. Suddenly I was high on the face of the wave and being thrown with the lip into the flats, my ride cut short by darkness-induced incompetence, but the three seconds before that were sublime. I came up from underwater and saw my student treading water nearby. “Were you on that too?” “Yeah!” “Sick, let’s call it.” When we got to the beach we could see the cherry of Diogenes’s cigar in the lifeguard shack as he silently and shirtlessly puffed away, the eclipsed moonlight reflecting in his sunglasses.

My student and I sat on the beach in silence as the moon began to redden. The stars had intensified, the lightning wasn’t stopping, and we kept seeing shooting stars in all directions. I could finally admit that perhaps I was right, that given the chance at such an upbringing I would likely have been as talented as him. Perhaps if we switched places he would have been a scholarship athlete and I would be on the path to being a professional freesurfer, and all of this was merely a matter of circumstance and chance. How little say we have in such monumental factors. And yet how much say we have in whether or not we choose to fight through wherever it is we are to get to somewhere else we’d rather be. And so I’ve also spent a lot of time thinking about if I would choose to go back and switch lives with my student if given the chance. I’m honestly not sure. Because what I can’t parse out is what surfing would mean to me if it had taken the same level of priority that it does in his life. I’ve always surfed, but it was my escape from sports and school, and perhaps the spiritual completeness it brings me is because of that. If it were instead my focus, my lifeline, my career, would it bring me that same sort of joy? Or would I have crushed it through over-obsession like I did with the sports I had no choice but to play, and consequently love, when I was growing up? What, then, would I have now? I know for certain it wouldn’t be surfing.

I then asked my student if he ever felt any type of internal conflict. He couldn’t give me an answer. The idea of an un-unified Self was so alien to him that he didn’t even understand what I meant by “internal conflict.” And so I also realized how much I’ve learned from my own internal conflicts that ultimately stemmed from the massive disconnect between my destined childhood and my desired childhood. This fact used to crush me, but I now cherish it because the lessons along the path of correcting course towards a life that I actually want are the most unique and powerful available to a person. In other words, the parts of my life that I so desperately wanted to change were the parts that had the biggest influence on who I am today. Those are also the parts that would have been absent if I was in my student’s place. At this point I wouldn’t trade that for anything, and that includes surfing professionally. But if I’d been exposed to surfing the way my student was, would I have then been so complete and satisfied that I would have never felt a need to improve my Self and circumstances? Or maybe, no matter what, I was destined to push myself no matter what transitory games and forms came my way, and perhaps then surfing would have propelled me even farther along this path than I already am, in which case I can only make up for lost time.

Whatever the truth may be, I’m at peace with it; the real truth is that, independent of whatever unanswered questions remain, I was on that beach staring at that moon on that night, and even with a different upbringing, and even with a different future, I would have been there watching that eclipse, watching that night lightning over the ocean, watching those shooting stars, and surfing those waves during it all. Sometimes our alternate lives converge in one moment that we can confidently say happens to all, or at least many, versions of ourselves, and we know that at that place in that moment we are where we belong no matter how many “what ifs” we have concocted; it’s just seldom that we experience it in a way that we realize this. But for one moment, I was in a place without wishing I was somewhere else. No, more than that: I was in a place and no other part of me was somewhere else.

Now I’m left wondering if, from now on, each path I choose will lead me to becoming Salvadoran Diogenes. Most days I don’t want to end up there, but sometimes I don’t care. Sometimes I wonder if trying not to become him is the surest way to take the paths that lead to him. I’ll know if it was destined only once I get there, and then I can decide if I ever had a choice.