I Am a Woman Who Found Belonging in the Sea (in a Pandemic)
“When I forget how talented God is, I look to the sea.” ~ Whoopi Goldberg
If you can make peace with the urgency of the sea, you can make peace with anything. I only know this because when I tuck my surfboard under my arm in the pre-dawn light and walk barefoot across the sand — peace, soft and billowing in the waves — is there waiting for me.
I am a survivor. Anxiety. PTSD. Insomnia. A horrific C-section. These are the scars of the living. Some days my head is packed tight with a crowd of monsters that hijack my capacity and focus, distracting me from everything I love: my son, my work, my own self-care. For many years I had no diagnosis, no escape, no hope.
2016 was a dark year, a parallel of loneliness to the year of the pandemic for me. I lost people: some died unexpectedly (the only man I wished to marry, then my father), some left me (my best friend, my dream job), some I chose to leave (my half-sister the sociopath). I was alone when I felt desperate for company. My mind became my worst enemy.
But in these five years, I learned to surf and carve out space between the shore and the horizon, and command my mind and body. My 9 year old son calls me the selkie: the seal mother who finds her skin at dawn, and slips into the sea.
Let me tell you how the beauty returns. You who are shattered: Come. Come with me.
I wake in darkness before the sun, before birdsong, while my son still dreams. (Don’t think for an instant that I’m a morning person; there is no one more reluctant.) After dragging myself to the teapot, I tie back the tangle of my hair, gather my gear, strap my board to the rack, slip into the driver’s seat and select my bossa nova station. The guitar thrums soothingly as I inch my car along the empty streets where pools of light from streetlamps still illuminate the fading night.
Sometimes I can see the waves from the bridge through the mist, surging the way horses run with their heads down, nostrils flared, frothing.
Though it is mid-summer now, there has been an upwell, which means that cold water from the Pacific deep sea trenches has fingered its way up to the shore. I used to let that stop me: not anymore.
The gift? I am a woman with somewhere to bring her rage. The entire ocean welcomes my Hecuba screams. Here, rage is power, energy, thrust. Here, rage is the elegant solution. In the pandemic, I threw myself into surfing. Social distancing? My surf board is 6ft long, so every interaction I have on land, I just imagine we stand a surfboard apart. In the sea, we sit in the liquid space distancing without concern. The better you surf out here, the more space you’re given (even as a woman, imagine). It’s a thing of beauty.
The waves unfurl like a scroll on the shore. Let me trace a new line in the pages of the waves, write a new history of the warrior women here. Never think caring is a soft skill. Ferocity belongs to the mother.
The 4:3 wetsuit is the one I need. It’s as black as my own depression, an ironic shield against the icy water. I tug the suit over my head, zip in, and strap the shark repellent magnet to my ankle. The lifeguards here in Del Mar, CA, have tagged 7 great whites at this beach this year. But they’re juveniles.( I was born in 1975, the year the movie Jaws premiered, so appreciate for a moment my courage to surf in Southern California.)
I embrace the odds with a handful of men bobbing on boards in the pink dawn light. I’m always the only woman out here. In prior years I let that pressure me and trip me up: as if my performance represents all women. As if.
That’s nonsense. We’re all surfers here. We want the same thing: the thrill of the waves. I’m good enough now to hold my own anyway, and command respect with authority.
The roar of the swell finds my ears before I even see the water, and now what was once a beginner’s trepidation bursts open with heart-pounding excitement to meet the monsters I will ride.
I know no hesitation, not even in winter. I stumble across the rocks and leash up as the icy water licks my toes. Then I touch my hand to my heart and whisper, “To all my relations.” I offer a prayer to the creatures I share the water and sky with. I pray to survive. And I know that the woman I am who slips into the sea, is not the woman who emerges, free.
The sea engulfs me as I coax my board into the foam. The white water rumbles past as I mount up. In my mind the bossa nova still plays softly.
Paddling through the haze into the expanse, I aim the nose toward the horizon and find a crest here or there that lets me pass as I search for a path to the outside without too much consequence. But the urgency surges through me, all around me. Sometimes a rogue wave will swell up and black out the sky as it closes out in front of me, and I dive deep.
Don’t lose ground. You cannot lose ground on the inside. One miscalculation means the surfboard breaks your nose, or launches you back over the wave into the maw, and you’ll soon discover the true value of your own breath, raked along the bottom of the sea with the stingrays.
One final monster wave hoists me up at the last second without breaking on my head and I punch through, and whip my hair back. There are no small mercies here, but damn, I should have ridden that beauty. I’m not awake yet, but I’m in position.
Foamy aqua skeins of dappled ocean skin in the shallows become in deeper water what I can only describe as an undulating blue carpet. (Laugh, but sometimes the surface looks exactly like the fur of my childhood pal, Cookie Monster.) The waves on the horizon scissor, and dolphins pass below me almost close enough to touch. I whistle to them, giddy once I see the whole family surface and not just one lone dorsal fin slicing through the surface.
Out here everything will either heal or kill you, in equal measure.
A head-high wave hurtles toward me, offering a peaky open face. The men swivel to watch me and evaluate whether I “surf like a girl”, whatever they think that means. I snag the wave, dropping into it, and the surfboard follows my will effortlessly.
Bliss, baby, bliss!
Faster than thought I’m up, crouching, and flowing down the line. I trust my feet, my balance, and whip my board into a few fun turns. When the wave slows I cut back to the pocket. Sometimes the lag vanishes as the wave re-forms and then crests up around me, and I disappear inside a curtain of blue falling water inside the barrel, more majestic than any room you’ve ever walked through. Sometimes the wave just dies, and I’m left standing on my board in the middle of the sea, wondering where it went, and why.
Why blue?
Why buoyancy?
Why whales?
Why kelp?
Why loss?
Why rage?
Why waves, why beauty?
Beauty demanding to be felt in a world that does nothing but persecute, ruin and turn every sacred feeling to scar tissue. Disease. Death. Beauty is the resurrection from a world of loss. It is the doorway to my heart.
There is an ancient goddess called Inanna, “Queen of Heaven”, the Mesopotamian lady of liminal spaces: sunrise, sunset, doorways, vulvas, birth and death, war, sex. She is always between — like a liquid, flowing.
Sometimes I think of her when I surf. I think she would look beautiful wearing a robe of the sea.
The sea, this sacred shrine of the mother, has healed me, though my body is a nest of scars. I return to the car, to the day and my son as he awakens. In a year of pandemic, when I lost so much, I found a new identity carved of seawater, rage and ecstasy as a surfer.
Come. Come with me.
~ Kaia Alexander, 2021
