.night surfing.

I looked at my tide calendar today and realized that tomorrow is the full moon. Here in California, such occurrences don’t translate into daily life so much. At home, over the summer it would mean M harassing me to spend 3 hours of my evening with my truck parked at Kapiolani park, longboarding at Queens by the light of the moon and the iridescent glitter of Waikiki. It would mean squinting into the darkness to watch for the slight rise and fall of a wave. It would mean L & L DriveThrough on the way home [peanut butter milkshakes and corndogs], driving into Manoa to drop M off and then up the Pali, home.
Night surfing is so much better than surfing in broad day light. There is something much more magical, more soulful about the darkness. Awkward though it is to romp the typically tourist-infested grounds of Canoes and Queens alone. To have your own wave. To be blind to the rise and fall of the wave in front of you - relying only on the feeling of the board beneath the soles of your feet and the ebb and flow of the water beneath that.

“It must be hard to imagine an ordinary future and something other than a lunar calendar to consider if you’ve grown up in a small town in Hawaii, surfing all day and night, spending half your time on sand thinking of point breaks and barrels and roundhouse cutbacks. Or maybe they don’t think about it at all. Maybe these girls are still young enough and in love enough with their lives that they have no special foreboding about their futures, no uneasy presentiment that the kind of life they are leading now might eventually have to end.”
- Susan Orlean


I think that sometimes I am one of those girls who left Hawaii and realized there was more.