A Thousand Island Lullaby
• Dan Reiter •

It is always easy going and very pleasant with a light tail wind, and if you look behind you will see a v-shaped plume rippling over water grooved like elephant hide. The stand-up paddleboard is a biblical vessel — postured, princely, weightless; its glide is cosmic, with elements of the immortal, the Venetian serenade, and shades of Charon crossing the river Styx. It is the nearest you will ever get to walking on water, and by far the finest, most tranquil way to enjoy the beauty of our river.

When I was still quite young, my uncle, Doctor Truth, and I would launch our old canoe into alligator blackwaters in search of wonderment and adventure. We coasted along cracked and rust-dripped seawalls and through corrugated storm tunnels, imagining our paddles as interdimensional instruments capable of pushing the very sun through the sky. Had we stopped rowing, time itself might have frozen still, and so we called them ors (instead of oars) because, in our innocence, they represented to us a singular control over our collective destiny.

One shining morning, the good Doctor offered up this mental exercise: “Envision a world controlled by thought alone,” he told me, “where the future flows from your perception, like water from a hose. My dear lad, it would be a nearly impossible trick of quantum physics to distinguish this world from the real one.”

I was nine-years-old at the time, and his words flew high over my head, into the cloudless sky, without touching me. But he spoke them well enough, and somehow I was able to store their lilting melody in reserve. Today, drifting past the weed-thatched point into the warm, syrupy waters of the channel, I recalled them. Recalled them as I pushed out into the open shallows and the sun fell behind purple cloud, like a phoenix egg dropped onto a downy bedspread, to spray bright tangerine haze over the mangroves. The under-light was transcendental, and though I racked my brain for the correct words to describe it, the only phrase that came to mind was “City of Gold,” which did not do the picture justice at all.

A manatee bubbled up and rolled free about twenty feet ahead — gray, grizzled, its pelt like a mossy boulder, one heavy black fin slapping the water. The herd was lolling over the sandbar in twos and threes… Was it my imagination, or were they laughing? Drowsy, drunk from long, hot hours of mating, probably. I respectfully veered south and skirted the post-coital beasts.

What words best describe that feeling you get on a glassy morning, when you first paddle out into the ocean and the light is all slow and pooled on the faces of the waves so that they have that look of wet leather, and the whole of the world is rolling out before you? It is the same taste as afternoon on the Banana River, with the wind dying sweetly and the pinks and ambers melting from sky to cloud to water, and the manatees laughing at you from the beneath the molten, silver skin of the universe.

I was on the brink of some epiphany just then, but my thoughts were interrupted by two dorsal fins, oil-black against the City of Gold, cutting gentle lines toward me. They slid against the paint-splashed backdrop — dolphins, in all their mermaid grace and power — and surfaced with smiling eyes as they passed me by, headed north somewhere. A dolphin encounter is sometimes only a momentary soaring of the heart, an inspired breath, and then it is gone.

At last the searing orange disc dropped beneath the flame-rimmed clouds, into that sweet spot between sky and land, to set the river sparkling… Words are hopeless, somehow, to describe the dark, sensual outline of mangroves and the color of the under-lit mist behind. Was it peach? Saffron? Only Monet could say it properly, or Rick Piper, possibly. I aimed my board west, held the paddle slack, and drifted for a while. The sun freed itself from the blanket now, and after a while I had to turn my eyes away to blink at a distant fisherman with the blinding circle imprinted in my lids.

Near the tip of West Point stands a strange blonde castle, a tall, kinked and narrow house that lurches over the open water as if on stilts. I aimed now for this castle, with the sky growing darker and bluer in the east. Before the mouth of the Edwards Bay I circled back to take in the final gilt and roselight flourishes of the sunset, with the low clouds swirling in distant, smoky figurines on the reddening horizon. Again the words were insufficient — prairie sun, flaming horsemen, charcoal ghosts, bloody sky, Navajo moon — none of these could capture the essence of this sunset.

Paddling home now, the low sun like a comet’s head, its tail spread out over the water, sparkling and beaming with fire, I saw the clouds with such clarity, knew them in their seven-mile distance, could physically feel the sun bending onward, radiating over another City of Gold down the line, and I felt sure that science was wrong, that really the sun was tracing a glowing hoop around the earth, which was the center of all things.

And then the sunlight dripped into the mangroves, and I could look directly at it, and the words finally came to me. They were perfect… The thin-fingered clouds banding the sun with layers of color looked exactly like the old logo of the Comfort Inn hotels. Comfort Inn. It was uncanny.

Then it was gone for good and the world was diminished somehow, as if in the crisp blueness of dusk everything were lifted from a spell… The low, drifting clouds seemed so close now, tangible, as if I could lift a finger and touch the coolness inside… The river, pale silver, pink, powder blue like liquid mirrorglass, was no more dense than the air itself. Two ducks, stiff as wooden dolls, streaked overhead, also aiming north. Behind them, an airplane, gnat-tiny upon the white clouds. The distant western clouds, drained of color, looked like mangroves themselves.

I turned homeward; a flock of pelicans soared in the eastern sky, rose over ocean and muted canvas of low plum, lemonade, and high periwinkle, and climbed higher without a single flap of wings. I came into the lee waters of the bay with that familiar feeling of a session ended, of walking up the beach but still longing for more…

Now, among the fringed and burnt coconut palms (dead, all dead from the freeze), my thoughts grew darker… The day-to-day struggles crept back in, the tiny fights, the worries and pains and concessions of life on land, like some strange oil pumping into my mind. I had a mad revelation then, to turn back, to paddle into the night and the forever stars, but in my moment of hesitation the water before me frothed up… Manatees, spooked from their slumbers, churned up the shoal waters, blasting and throttling.

I cast a final glance westward, at the vanishing wisps of smoke and light, left there by some magician, and I paddled forward, into the violence.

In the gray, shallow dusk I saw my house, my backyard, the sad palm trees… I thought of my wife, my children, and finally of those words — “Comfort Inn.” The madness subsided, I pushed on, on through the thrashing of the manatees, into the safety of the deep cut, and finally, home, home, home.

Excerpts from the Diary of a Three-Year-Old Gourmet
• Dan Reiter •

April 21: The morning’s menu was uninspired: cold banana yogurt followed up by a single, overripe banana, sliced into 3/4″ medallions. Pancakes with sweet syrup would have added much-needed texture to the menu. Perhaps the addition of an amuse-bouche, a chocolate caramel truffle, or even a graham cracker would have loosened the palate before the banana course. My suggestion to this effect was snubbed by the chef. A plastic yellow spoon was thrust before me, and I was instructed to eat the yogurt quickly, as it was apparently time for school.

It is ridiculous to eat banana yogurt with a yellow spoon, of course. I refused it categorically, and informed the chef that there was a perfectly good green one in the drawer. She stiffened up, but retrieved it. I had the notion, then, that purple flatware might be better suited for the occasion, and told her as much. She seemed displeased, but brought out the purple spoon nonetheless. I thought better of it, traded it out for the green one, and the meal commenced.

The top skin of the yogurt was curdled, so I scooped it out and spread it carefully along the underside of the table. The banana medallions were too soft, so I left them. The overall presentation of the meal was shoddy, even shameful.

April 24: For my mid-morning snack, a bowl of Chilean blueberries — firm, cold, plump as grapes. To best appreciate the heady flavor of this delicacy, pack a number of fruit into the cheek and let sit for at least two minutes before breaking into the skin. This technique, known as the steep and squash, may slow the pace of conversation, but it is well worth the wait, as it never fails to produce the liveliest of spirits once the juice begins to flow down your shirt!

April 24: Tonight we dined at Café Margaux. Dinner commenced with baked Brie encrusted with macadamia and cashew nuts, and drizzled with an orange merlot sauce. I have a special affinity for cheese, but this was not cheese. It was a failed art project. My companions, perplexed at my disapproval, wondered how I could judge the dish without taking so much as a single bite. Such gentle people, who are not connoisseurs, are regularly mystified by my methods. As it was no time to try and illuminate the ignorant, I moved onto the bread without further explanation.

Like most French restaurants, Café Margaux does its bread right — warm, soft and white in the middle, with a workable, flaky crust. Unfortunately, I was served an inadequate portion. When I climbed atop the table to help myself to more, the basket was rudely pulled away from me and returned to the kitchen. (Note: the three essential elements to a good meal are: food, ambiance, and company. I am beginning to understand why so many gastronomes take their fine dining alone. Imagine… casting out the bread, when by all rights it should have been the Brie!)

The salad course I did not touch, as the chef committed the grave error of adding egg yolk to the mix. The fouled legumes were followed up by a plate of oak-smoked Norwegian salmon rosettes with caviar and traditional garnitures. The crackers were edible, but the rest was a colossal failure, completely unpalatable.

By now, I was sensing a lack of motivation on the part of the kitchen. My younger brother, who is sensitive to such things, had begun to toss various items to the floor — silverware, napkins, small plastic toys. Presently, he began to shriek. It seemed to me an overly dramatic response to the disastrous third course, but justified, so I joined in. I was promptly served a Lunchable — peanut butter and jelly — which I graciously accepted. I took special pleasure in smearing the excess jelly along the underskirt of the tablecloth.

The main course was a pear, Brie and walnut stuffed pork loin in a Bartlett and Poire William sauce. The sauce was tart, dark, sweet, and suitable for dipping caviar crackers into, but the meat was clearly an absolute tragedy, and did not require tasting.

The dessert, a crème brûlée, had all the proper elements, and bordered on perfection. Café Margaux falls into that particular category of restaurant that can botch the entrée, soup, and main dish, but somehow manage to elevate itself to two-star Michelin status when it comes time for dessert.

May 2: The newest fashion in certain foodie circles is the “art vegetable” plate. Here, raw carrots are peeled into strips, fanned across the plate, and sprinkled with raisins and honey. Broccoli is spread in a paste atop crostinis, served end to end with ranch dressing. Black beans are sculpted into the form of dogs, horses, flowers, etc. It seems to me the art vegetable movement is yet another attempt to revive an outmoded, failed idea with inventive presentation.

Last night I informed the chef that while the undiscriminating palate might be fooled by such base gimmicks, they were blatantly transparent and vulgar to me. I left the table without further word.

The next morning, the kitchen had the gall to bring out the same dish as the night before and serve it to me for breakfast, to catastrophic effect.

May 3: It seems the art vegetable movement has taken hold. Luckily, I have procured from a certain cabinet a bag of cheddar cheese Goldfish, which I relocated to a shoebox under my bed. I am inclined to suffer this current phase — which aims to threaten the very fabric of haute cuisine — in a protest of silence.

Why You Should Kill Your TV
• Dan Reiter •

A long, long, long time ago, before television came into the world, people were so exceedingly bored with their lives and had so much free time on their hands that they wasted their days watching leaves flap about in the breeze, gawking at the ripples made by ducks on the river, or staring for hours on end while ants scrabbled in procession up oak branches.

People picked flowers, walked aimlessly in circles, started wars, built pyramids, established feudal states, tamed horses, invented various irrigation techniques, scratched themselves endlessly, whittled away at pieces of wood, and pretty much did whatever they could to combat the mind-numbing ennui of their existences. Often these pitiable ancestors of ours would become so weary and depressed with their lives that they would lie down in the grass and gaze up at the clouds, hallucinating them to be animals or clowns or boats or the misshapen profiles of certain elderly relatives. A depressing, monotonous life! We are fortunate they didn’t all kill themselves. (If they had, the television would never have been discovered.) On too many occasions these poor souls, while sprawled out miserably in the grass, would turn to one another and remark something to the effect of, “Don’t you just hate it that ‘Dancing with the Stars’ won’t come on for another five hundred years?”

So life groaned along, sadly and repetitively, for many a long generation. (They don’t call it “the Dark Ages” for nothing.) To compensate for the lack of television, people were forced into abiding the most humiliating forms of entertainment. All that time spent watching flowers bloom and clouds laze overhead led many a talented person (who might otherwise have spent their time more productively, like penning episodes of “Glee” or “Lost”) to the practice of literature, or worse still, poetry. What else could be done? Nights were lonely occasions, with nothing but oil lamps to light up their drab, TV-less abodes. Thankfully, the written language is quite dead, now.

According to Neilsen’s “Three Screen Report,” the average American can now comfortably claim to watch five hours of TV per day. This number seems to me quite conservative. Consider, for example, the 8:00 hour this past Wednesday. Running concurrently were “American Idol,” “America’s Next Top Model,” “Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader?”, “Tori & Dean: Home Sweet Hollywood,” “America’s Best Dance Crew,” and “Nurse Jackie,” to name but a few standouts. Assuming you wanted to catch the NBA game (Charlotte Bobcats at Orlando Magic) and were obliged to TiVo® these other programs, by the time you made it through your prime-time lineup you would already have accounted for seven hours of viewing pleasure, all of it must-see television! Remember, this is before the 11:00 News or the “Late Show.”  It is reasonable, therefore, to assume that Neilsen’s estimates are somewhat remiss.

Recently, while waiting in line for my morning coffee at Juice N’ Java café, I ran into an eccentric fellow. I say eccentric because his hair was wild and unbrushed, his shirt unbuttoned to the navel, and because he corralled me into a conversation, though I was clearly engaged on my iPhone and not interested in chatting. When he noticed I was watching Fox News, he was particularly keen to inform me that he didn’t subscribe to cable TV. My first thought was to reach into my pocket and give the poor wretch a dollar, but he quickly smiled and waved off my charity. It was then that he revealed to me a most scandalous thing.

“You don’t understand,” he said. “I wouldn’t take cable if they gave it to me for free!”

After an incredulous pause, I thought I gathered his meaning. “Ah! So it’s satellite, then.”

The stranger shook his head.

“Hulu?”

“No.”

I wrung my mind for further explanations. “Sidereel? Catchtv.com? Itunes On Demand?”

No, no, and again no. Apparently, this madman didn’t partake in any television viewing whatever. As this bizarre claim sunk into my caffeine-depleted brain, I brought my coffee over to the table, hopeful to take leave of the situation. But this curiosity had the gall to follow me, sit down beside me, and recount this story:

“It started as an experiment, you see. I used to watch TV as much as the next guy. I would come home from work, set myself down on the couch, grab the remote, and relax into it. One day — oh, it must have been ten years ago — a power outage blacked me out for the whole evening. I wandered outside… I remember it like yesterday… and I saw the most fantastic shooting star. Blue as a sapphire, just screaming across the sky! It was then that I had my revelation.”

At this time, the strange gentleman placed upon the table a small, black pamphlet, which he slid over to me. On the cover, in bold, capital letters, were the words: “WHY YOU SHOULD KILL YOUR TV.”

“Here. Take this home with you. Read it. Just imagine… if you devoted five hours a day, every day, to the practice of a skill you always wanted to learn, but never got around to…”

“Excuse me,” I said, pushing the pamphlet back his way. “It’s very interesting, but I’ve got to go to work.”

“Wait!” He grabbed my wrist then, and his blue eyes sparkled with such intensity that it was instantly clear to me he was clinically insane. “I became a Shaolin master in only three years,” he said softly. “Five hours a day… that’s five thousand hours of training.”

I tried to wrench my arm free, but his grip was uncommonly strong.

“The subsequent year, I wrote two novels. Both were published, and sold to mild acclaim.”

Sensing my distress, he let go. But he stood up with me.

“I learned French and Spanish the following year,” he said, following me to the door. “And Mandarin Chinese the next. Five hours a day… it’s another lifetime! I’ve read over two hundred novels this past year alone, and the Bible three times!”

He was working himself into a frenzy now. I opened the door and hurried outside, but somehow he slipped in front of me, and continued to rant at me as I strode across the parking lot.

“I’m an expert in biomechanics. And I sell photographs to the local newspaper. I learned to surf! I’m in the process of mastering the art of tantric sex. Listen, just take the pamphlet. While everyone else is watching ‘The Bachelorette,’ or decomposing in front of Trident gum commercials, you have the chance become the man you’ve always wanted to be!”

I finally reached my car. As I opened the door, this oddity hovered beside me, holding out his black pamphlet. The words on the cover looked sinister, exposed to the light of the sun. I glanced around, made sure there were witnesses, and held up my hand to decline the offer.

“I’m sorry,” I said, “but your arguments lack currency. TV, a waste of time? Why not mention that the frenetic editing and continually changing perspective trigger ADD? Or that while the programs promote violence, they are steadily interrupted by commercials sponsoring sterility and consumerism? Or that the news channels propogate fear, helplessness, and the two-party system? Or that excessive channel-changing can lead to feelings of isolation and depression? Did you know that just five minutes of TV viewing reduces your alpha brainwaves to a state of near hypnosis?”

By the muted expression on his face, and the limp way he let the pamphlet fall to his side, I could see I had trumped him.

“If you had seen Craig Ferguson last night, you would know this,” I said, triumphantly buckling myself in. “You should check it out sometime — it’s a fantastic show.”

Things I Love About Cocoa Beach
By Dan Reiter

Here’s a simple writing exercise that could change your life.

Take a half-hour out of your day and find a peaceful place to sit with your computer or a pad of paper… a café will do nicely, a quiet picnic spot, even a kitchen table. Your office desk will suffice in a pinch. Sit down then, and write out a list of the things you love. Anything works — food, scenery, people, movies. Anything. Make the list true. Make it extensive. Stay on task for at least half an hour. An hour is preferable, if your wrist and wits allow. Don’t be discouraged if the going is slow. The first five to ten items will be the hardest to dig up. But if you’re a positive spirit, you will find the list beginning to flow out of you, like a hot-water faucet that has taken a few moments to warm. It is a silly thing to do, I know, but I promise you the experience will be illuminating, and possibly empowering. It is a sort of therapy I discovered completely by accident during a heartbreaking period in my life in my early twenties.

Give it a try.

As for this month’s column, I submit for your amusement a variation on this general theme. What follows is a list of things I love about Cocoa Beach, my hometown. Take it as a sort of jazz accompaniment to this five-minute lull in your day.

And by all means, please enjoy your drink.

Things I Love (About Cocoa Beach)

paper-thin yellow butterflies in spring

plumeria blossoms

papaya trees

Cedar Road oaks tangled in sunlight

brushed-glass skies over the ocean

cargo ships floating in mist

streaks of fire arcing over the Cape

time-delayed shuttle roars

paratrooper training days

the cresting waves at dawn

offshore sprays

chop surfing sessions

light north drifts

west winds

four-foot glass

eight-foot glass

six-foot high tide barrels

lake-like flatness and an inflatable raft

old, rusty sunglasses

two foot glass

flip flops

Quiet Flight

brunch at Simply Delicious

the baked brie at Heidi’s

knowing that everything will rust, eventually

the mysterious forces within the Glass Bank

peacocks perched atop car hoods

playgrounds in the sun

the mangroves at blue dusk

hunting redfish

casting for mullet

million-hued sunsets melting into the river

dolphin fins cutting through mercury

the shadows beneath the poinciana trees, summer

monarch butterflies, dancing upon milkweed

16streets.com

manatee huffs

dolphin sighs

trout plops

pelican dives

gull cries

anhinga curdles

anything on The Fat Snook’s menu

the local vibe at 13th Street

shouting “Kooks go home!” out your car window

long-haired boys

long-haired girls

the smell of an oncoming hurricane

when the wind comes to sweep everything away

when the wind calms again

when the wind smells of conifers

when the wind blows from the west (again)

Tony Sasso’s pig roasts

the Cocoa Beach cops (who don’t pull over the locals)

the locals

the street parties

the art scene

Mai-Tiki

Rick Piper

Henry Lund

Bruce Reynolds

the nestled serenity of the Beachside Guesthouses

lightly buttered fish at the Pompano Grill

the old peppered strawberries at Fischer’s

miles and miles of beachbreak — when it’s working

secret coves and deep spots — when it’s not

the magical spirit of Driftwood House

hundreds of white pelicans roosting in the river

cruising the Banana River on a stand-up paddleboard

exploring the Thousand Islands by canoe

a cruiser cycle ride on the beach, low tide

everything about September

bright cloudless winter days

Jazz nights at Heidi’s

seeing elderly couples holding hands, after all these years

Sunday morning roads, empty and clean

the sages who roam the aisles at Ace Hardware and hold the answers to life’s every problem

playing tennis at Ramp Road park

skateboarding down Brevard Avenue, mid-day, summer, after it has been re-paved

soul sessions at 6th Street

family-style longboarding at 11th street

high-tide hurricane swells, on the fish

the roast beef subs from Boardheads Deli

afternoon tea in the back yard

the multi-layered, bizarre history of the town

the Space Program

neon phosphoresence in the river at night

airborne schools of mullet

the syrupy smell of jasmine in bloom, once a year

yellow and pink hibiscus polka-dotting the road

the measured ease of Country Club Drive

high-drifting clouds, skirting the edge of the sun

distant purple rainclouds, strafing the western sky

double rainbows over the ocean

sighting a bald eagle

snowy egrets, their tails ruffling like ladies’ hats

the rhythmic shush of the waves, four blocks away, after dark

the starriest, articulate winter nights

huddling close

sharing a bottle of wine on the beach, night

kissing in the full light of the moon

watching a child’s fingertips pluck tiny penta flowers

the Norfolk pines

the hanging orchids

the skyline, low and organic, as seen from the ocean

the pizza at The Shark Pit, and the fish tank

Roy at Oceansports World

Tom Neilson shapes

O’Hare shapes

the sushi — if it’s fresh

the espresso martinis

the East Coast Surfing Hall of Fame, and its inspirational exhibits

Sunseed Co-op

hovering through the aisles of Publix, on a slow day

scanning the new releases at Blockbuster, on a slow night

tequila sunrises at Coconut’s, on a very slow day

jogging the beach

swimming

falling asleep in the sand

cold beer on the beach

freedom, hope, and good sanitation

the “Locals Only” parking pass

“Old Guys Rule” bumper stickers

Longboard House bumper stickers

Salick bumper stickers

kids who sport retro-style ’70s hairdos

the skate park

Cocoa Beach High sports

the legacy of Kelly Slater

tiki huts

quaintness

kitsch

Roberto’s Little Havana, coffee and cuban melts

kite surfers launching airs

the nighttime view from the 520 bridge

watching it rain through a blurry window

the song, twitch and scamper of the squirrels

the lizards, both the small and monstrous

the hummingbirds, both rare and magical

the fact that we are on an island

the narrowness of the south end, two hundred feet from river to ocean

when the third sandbar breaks

when the second sandbar breaks

when any sandbar breaks, really

the sporadic 100-foot tall cabbage palm, swaying gently above it all

when an ocean-going dolphin looks you in the eye

manatee mating season

the slowness of summer

the flight of the great herons

white ibises, scratching themselves

moments of unimaginable beauty

passion flowers

February 20, 2010

The Honorable Barack Obama
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20500

Dear Mr. President:

My name is Dan Reiter and I live in Cocoa Beach, Florida. We have a charming little town here, rich in history, culture, and scenery, but poor in most everything else. Once –- a half century ago –- the Mercury and Apollo missions launched from these sands to stir the hopes and dreams of the world. For a shining instant, we stood at the edge of human imagination, gazing out into a future bright and unknown. Sadly, those days have long since passed.

At the very heart of our town stands a building known as “The Glass Bank.” It is a curiosity of mid-century modern architecture with I.M. Pei-style curvatures and ranks of windows on all sides. It is a lonely monolith in the center of the city, towering high over the cabbage palms and low-lying roofs surrounding it. In its time, the top floor of the Glass Bank was home to Ramon’s Rainbow Room, where luminaries such as Gus Grissom, Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis, Jr., and Walter Cronkite sipped cocktails over the moonlit stillness of the Banana River.

In recent years, the Glass Bank, like Cocoa Beach itself, has fallen into disrepair. Hurricane Frances took out many of the windows, which remain boarded up to this day. The commercial tenants folded up shop long ago, skipped town, and the place has been abandoned now for over six years. The absentee owner of the building has allowed the façade to rot, and a thin layer of black mold festers over what stucco remains between the windows. In places, the raw steel bones of the structure show through gaping holes. This cracked and ragged edifice has become, unconsciously, the symbol of our city’s decimated property values. One look at this slouching giant is to see in material form the toll the recent recession has taken on all of us.

Our City Commissioners have tried to take measures to remedy the eyesore. Maximum fines and penalties have been levied upon the owner, who continues to amass a glut of code violations. Legal avenues have been explored as well, to no avail. Apparently, eminent domain can only be invoked when the values of the fines surpass the appraised value of the building. I am told this will come to pass in the summer of 2061, should the current pace continue. I spoke at length with the city superintendent about this issue, along with the mayor, two of our state senators, the clerk of the county court, and the proprietors of three local surf shops. The general consensus is that the best and cleanest resolution to the problem of the Glass Bank would be to bomb it into oblivion.

Therefore, I write to you now humbly requesting the use of an idle V-2 missile. If a V-2 is unavailable, similar tactical ballistic weaponry would be acceptable. If no missiles are readily obtainable for this purpose, I hope that you might allow me to propose another, less costly, alternative.

The current owner of the Glass Bank has stated that he would part with the historical building for a price of $5 million. Two years ago, the City of Cocoa Beach considered purchasing it for their city offices, fire department, and police headquarters. Contractors were called in to estimate the cost of repairs. They deemed that an additional $2 million would have to be spent to get the thing back to respectable shape. The total price tag of $7 million was only slightly out of range of the city’s budget. However, instead of trying to drum up the remaining $6.7 million, the deal was inexplicably shelved.

I would propose the following:

A Federal grant be issued to the City of Cocoa Beach to purchase and restore the historic Glass Bank building.

Green construction methods will be used in the reconstruction. Rooftop flora, solar windows, renewable materials, and the leading Florida green technologies will be implemented, and the process held up as an example to all builders as to what can be accomplished in the coming age of environmental responsibility.

The City of Cocoa Beach, upon completing the construction of the building, will relocate its own offices to the first floor, and issue 20-year leases for the remainder of the units. A focus on green construction methods, space exploration, and alternative energy research would be promoted in the selection of tenants, who would occupy the space free of charge.

The boon to the local economy would be tremendous. As you know, the Space Coast has staggered under the weight of the housing crash; massive layoffs at Boeing, United Space Alliance, Northrop Grumman, ATK, and even NASA continue to cripple our workforce. With the purchase of the Glass Bank, engineering and construction jobs would be created immediately. Vibrant and educated labor personnel will be employed and remain within our community. Surrounding businesses will thrive. Our downtown area will be revitalized. The tourism industry would benefit. Brevard county, and all of Central Florida, will stand up and take notice of the building. Here, in the form of a single, remarkable structure, we have the opportunity for instant, tangible results in a land full of skeptics. And all this, for less than 1% of the cost of the high-speed rail! Think of the far-reaching implications. The restored Glass Bank will stand as an iconic symbol for a green future and a fresh, rejuvenated space program. Once again, our little seaside village has the opportunity to ignite the imaginations and hopes of Florida.

I am enclosing with this letter two photos of the Glass Bank. The first shows it as it appeared in the 1960s, during the apex of the Apollo missions. The second depicts the structure in its current state of decay.

I hope you will consider this unique proposition. The people of Cocoa Beach await your decision with the highest of hopes.

With deepest regards,
Dan Reiter

Enclosures (2)

* Note to the locals: this letter failed to mention the fact that the top two floors of the Glass Bank are currently occupied by an eccentric recluse, a man by the name of Frank Wolfe, who refuses to part with his property, and who has blocked in all the windows of his pied-a-terre. Ironically enough, Wolfe once served as city attorney during the “flush times” of the early ’60s. This trifling fact was either too unseemly, or else too unimportant to bother the President with — the reader is free to decide which.

Marriage

It happened one idyllic afternoon, over six Valentine’s Days ago.

The sunset flooded in through the church windows and shed a dreamlike, coral pink glow over our clasped hands. We recited our vows and donned the rings. I was 26. She, 21.

At the reception, a friend of my father’s approached us on the dance floor and said, rather unwittingly, “Cherish it, my boy. This will be the happiest moment of your life!” I thanked him for his gracious words and twirled away to dance with more optimistic folk. I hoped what the old codger said wasn’t true; after all, marriage wasn’t the end of the journey, but the beginning… right?

We glided through a sea of friends and loved ones, and though most were smiling and joyous, I detected a tinge of remorse in some of the older couples’ faces. Was it possible that poor devil was onto something? I took care to etch the evening permanently to memory just in case — the sumptuous ballroom with its high, inlaid ceilings, the tables adorned with hydrangea and sweet-smelling lily of the valley, my bright-eyed bride, a delicacy of silk and embroidered satin in my arms… The music, the spread, the wine, our happy hearts… Truly the old man must be mistaken — marriage was nothing less than a blessing from the heavens! This ecstasy was bound to last forever, and only be enriched with each passing day!

This buoyancy, this hopeful confidence, is common among freshly-married brides and grooms. Not a one of them expects the glow to fade, to dim away, and eventually disappear. Sadly, 50% of all marriages in the United States end in divorce. The other half, I suppose, end in death. It is hard to say which is worse, divorce or death — only that a bad divorce is commonly acknowledged to be worse than a good death. Why then, given equal chance of success and failure, do intrepid lovers flip the coin at such alarming rates? What misconceptions draw so many into doomed marriages? And — more importantly — what can we do to avoid them?

“You only know what happiness is once you’re married, but then it’s too late.”  — Peter Sellers

Maybe unreasonable expectations are to blame. Just talk to a young girl about weddings. At the very mention of the word she will tremble with excitement, stricken with visions of satin gowns, ladies-in-waiting, her tall, handsome prince, roses clambering up a stone wall, and the castle guard standing at attention. Bluebirds and sparrows will flutter about her head, eagerly offering up white ribbons. Hers is a dream of happily-ever-after, preened and cultivated since early girlhood. No matter that the fantasy is unattainable. She wants it all the more.

A young man’s expectations of marriage might be markedly less picturesque, yet he will crow on about “defying the odds,” or how “love will conquer all things.” He, too, has fostered an illusion, a thinly-applied plaster over his emotional attachment to her legs, her breasts, and the gentle curve of her neck.

The very young see marriage as an opportunity to better themselves — a noble endeavor — and yet in some way they have been fooled. They fail to understand certain implications of the pact.

Why do we marry, really? The covenant is as old as civilization itself. It has been around at least since our first recorded history, when the code of Hammurabi dictated marriage laws to the people of ancient Mesopotamia. (Infractions often resulted in one party or another being cast into the river.) Over the centuries, humans have used matrimony to promote stability, to propagate the species in an orderly fashion. Logic tells us that the coupling of one male to one female assures no one be left out of the child bearing equation. But is marriage a man-made construct, or does it run deeper than human society?

Poets, philosophers, and biologists have long extolled species like swans, wolves, ducks, and prarie voles, who mate for life. The scientific term for this phenomenon is called “pair-bonding.” Some theorize that marriage, like pair-bonding, is an innate instinct in the animal kingdom. This view has recently been called into doubt, however, by certain scholarly types. Anthropologists David Barash and Judith Lipton, in their 2001 book “The Myth of Monogamy” prove that cheating — or “extra-marital copulations,” as they phrase it — runs rampant even among pair-bonded animals. Their findings seem to conclude that holding a single sexual partner for life is not only a difficult task, but an unnatural one, especially for (get this) the more dominant males of the species.

While Tiger Woods may take comfort in these scientific findings, I for one, cannot abide them. I say, when we start looking to beasts for marriage counseling, we may as well go ahead and try out eating our young, or bathing ourselves in our own feces. No, I do not see marriage as a struggle against our own nature. Rather, I view at it as an elevation of it. Yes, we all have animal instincts. Undeniable, physical instincts. But why not rise above them… mold our perceptions to our will, exalt our own mates over the rest, glory in their imperfections… and tarnish forever the allure of extra-marital copulations?

“Marriage is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.” — Oscar Wilde

I’m sorry if I’m beginning to sound religious. Well, I suppose I do believe that marriage is divine. A holy, life-altering, magnetic force. A miracle that draws two souls together, and holds them fast as a single flesh.

“Every creature seeks its perfection in another.” — Martin Luther.

And yet, I have known men who loved each other just as profoundly as any man and woman. I have seen such couples pair-bonded for long years, and I have come to believe that they, too, are married. I have looked upon these heathens and somehow I did not recoil, nor once fear for the safety of my children. Why? Doubtless, I figured, looking into the eyes of these rapturous deviants, my two-year-old daughter understood their relationship better than I could ever explain it to her. Who am I, anyway, to try and account for God and his sundry works?

I leave you as a Valentine’s gift five well-trodden phrases which have served me well over the past six years, and which I hope can help at least one couple stay together, thus tipping the scales in our favor. Please, use them liberally, and be sure to say them with intention.

“Let’s open a bottle.”

“Date night.”

“Don’t worry, I’ll do the dishes.”

“I appreciate you.”

And finally, the most important phrase of all… and you simply cannot overuse this one:

“Yes, dear.”

Just the other day, I was out on the river on my stand-up paddleboard, skirting the periphery of the Thousand Islands, soaking up the last, honey-coated days of summer. I cruised along the warm, glassy waters in the lee of the mangroves — hovering, really, like a blissed-out gondolier — scarcely conscious of my body. It was one of those weightless moments when all seems right in the world, all things perfect and silent and harmonious.

The sunset spread out before me in jeweled ribbons of color — the clouds something out of a Monet painting — and me, lost in the beauty of it all. It was as if the whole river were holding its breath, carrying me to the brink of some fantastic, life-changing revelation… Suddenly, the water in front of my board heaved — a flash of gray — and then, a fin rose up, sliced through the calm, and made a hard line for me.

My board lurched, and I was tossed skyward, like a mullet flicked up by a dolphin. As I tumbled through the air, I glimpsed the algae-coated surface of a manatee’s hump below me, a violent white frothing in the water, and then, at close range, the blunt clamshell of the beast’s tail. This was the last thing I saw before I lost consciousness.

Luckily, I landed on my board. When I awoke, drifting on my back in the dusk, I realized I had been swept south, to the southern tip of Merritt Island, where the paper-mache dragon once lurched its ragged neck over the lagoon. Cool sideways rain was strafing my face. I knee-paddled to shore, retreived my cell phone from my dry-bag, and called my wife. It was a freak accident, I explained. I had been attacked by a manatee… could she pick me up? Yes, I was serious. A manatee, I said. That’s right, attacked.

My brush with death shook me up, and I couldn’t sleep all that night. For some reason, I felt myself drawn back to the river, like Ishmael, in search of this killer beast. Before I boldly took to sea, however, I would need to arm myself with more information about the manatee. Was it possible that my knowledge of the creatures had been predicated on myth and hearsay? Were they not slothful, somehow fragile, peace-loving herbivores? I dove into the internet, demanding answers.

In regards to swimming speed, I found this: manatees are known to travel anywhere from 1 to 2 miles per hour. Reputable scientific studies have not verified it, but when fleeing predators, some claim a manatee may reach speeds up to 15 mph. In one isolated incident, a fisherman in the British Honduras purported to witness a manatee swimming at a speed of 30 mph, though this assertion has been called into question.

There has never been a documented manatee attack. As proof, I encourage you to Google “manatee attack.” You will find links to punk bands, Facebook pages, and blog sites — but nothing newsworthy.

The more I investigated, the greater the gulf between my research and my encounter became. In all of recorded history, I could find no incidences of death by manatee. None. I began to doubt my own experience. Was it possible something else had assaulted me?

After an exhausting, six-minute investigation, I finally came upon a promising article. Only weeks ago, a story had broken in Madeira Beach: Russ Sittlow, a 78-year-old man, had videotaped a 30-foot monster in the canal behind his home. Authorities claimed the alleged monster was a manatee, but Sittlow vehemently disagreed, saying he had seen manatees, knew manatees, had watched them loll around these canals for over fifty years. “Normandy Nessie,” as he called her, was no manatee. A snake, maybe, or some kind of serpent, he offered.

Was it possible I had been attacked by Nessie, or one of her kind? There was only one way to find out. I bought another paddle, tied it to my wrist, and set out carefully into the river. I quickly came across a herd of grazing manatees.

At rest, these animals seemed harmless enough, like large river rocks, or half-sunken beach balls, but as I approached, I realized that even in the shallow water, they could move with suprising speed. After two sweeps around the pack, both times eliciting a furious storm of whitewater, one of the beasts turned its snout toward me, submerged, and with two impressive thrusts of its tail, launched me again into the air. This time, I was ready. I held onto my paddle, assumed a more favorable landing position, and successfully avoided head trauma this time.

As I paddled back in, wide-eyed and drenched, my neighbor called out to ask what had happened. When I told him, he laughed, and told me that his 12-foot catamaran had been flipped by these same manatees some months ago.

Was it possible Wikipedia had its facts wrong? Maybe manatees were really violent, hostile creatures. No… it was useless to doubt Wikipedia. More likely I had stumbled upon an pack of rogue manatees. Potentially, even, a new breed. I proceeded to the next logical step in my Google research; I punched in the term “manatee evolution.”

Accordingly: manatees are highly adaptive, intelligent animals, descendants of the elephant, or aardvark, or the hyrax (which is something like a gopher). Like the dolphin and whale, they made the move from land to water long ago. Scientists do not understand how, but they have an amazing ability to survive hurricanes. Some theorize that they find shelter, or else use their body structure to their advantage during the storms. The manatee has no natural predators, and for 60 million years they have thrived in these waters, until the recent introduction of motor boats, which has abruptly brought them to the verge of extinction.

Boats were really only introduced into these waterways en masse in the past fifty years. Doesn’t it makes sense, then, that a sort of weeding out process might have occurred? A premium suddenly placed on awareness, speed, and the ability to avoid an outboard motor? Perhaps we are seeing a “next generation” manatee — Florida Manatee 2.0 — built stronger, faster… and more deadly.

I longed to get back out in the water, to study these animals in greater detail. My mind raced. I would take a trip to Madeira Beach, meet with Mr. Sittlow, and fit my board with a waterproof video camera. This trend needed to be documented, analyzed… publicized for the greater good of mankind. When my wife caught wind of my intentions, however, she pointed out the potentially negative effects on my health, and demanded I give the wretched beasts a wide berth. I pleaded with her, but as always, her logic won out. What choice did I have? I was forced to watch from a distance.

I suppose I should end with a warning: Never approach a sleeping manatee, and for God’s sake, steer clear of manatee orgies. Do not take these animals lightly… they are not your father’s sea cows.

His wife died giving birth to their second son, Melvin, which was about as serious a problem as you could come across, when you think about it. Her death hung like a sick, black cloud over Harold’s life for many years. But Harold was resilient; he watched for glimpses of sunlight through the darkness, and he did his best to be a good father to his boys.

They lived in Orlando, which was, of course, a problem. Orlando is a lovely city to visit, for a day or two. Ten years can positively wear on a man’s soul. Harold was upside-down in his mortgage, and so he could never justify selling his house and moving away. He stayed. The city was especially hard on his sons, who, like their father, were surfers. They loathed the hour-long drive to the beach across the dull, uninspiring marshlands.

Harold’s job allowed him the luxury of being able to pack up and head off to the beach with the boys at least three times a week on whichever day suited him best. As soon as they would turn onto I-4, though, the fighting would begin, and it wouldn’t stop until they arrived at the beach… or until one of the boys was knocked unconscious. Harold’s sons did not get along — another problem.

Harold had arthritis in his knees (another problem) and so he became a “sweeper” — a stand-up paddleboarder. Being a sweeper was not one of Harold’s problems, as he was very good at it, surfed mostly uncrowded breaks, and thus avoided the scorn of the masses.

Harold’s oldest son, Nick, was a longboarder. Like most teenagers, Nick both despised and exalted his father. He would silently curse his father every time Harold dropped into the set wave and carved down the unbreaking face before Nick had the chance to paddle in.

“Go ahead!” Harold would call out to his son. “Take it!”

Not wanting to drop in, Nick always let the wave pass him by.

One day, on the van ride home, Nick made a sullen remark which cut Harold to the quick. He said, “You’re just accommodating for your little pecker and thinning hair with that long-ass board.”

Melvin, the shortboarder of the family, laughed out loud, and repeated Nick’s line ad nauseam until he earned himself a punch in the jaw.

Nick was too rough with Melvin, that much was clear. Once, after Melvin had dropped in on Nick in the shorepound (the inside was barreling, and when Nick ditched his board, its nose snapped off), Nick dragged Melvin to the beach, threw him down on the hard-packed sand, and fractured his right arm.

For many years, Nick insisted that his brother refer to him only as “Smooth,” “Your Smoothness,” or, “Your Royal Longboard Highness.” Any deviation from these titles would earn Melvin a thrashing. After the beating, Nick would sit on top of his brother’s head and munch on potato chips, repeating the words, “Gnar, gnar, potato chip head,” over and over again.

One day, after dinner, when Melvin had finally got up enough “sack,” he took off his shirt, stood on the couch, pulled out an eyedropper, and put on a show of tilting his head back and putting the drops into his eyes.

“What the hell are you doing?” Nick said. “You been smoking weed or what?”

“Nope, not for me, Smooth. Just call me ‘Eyedropper’.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Oh, you’ll see, your Smoothieness. We’re going surfing tomorrow, right Dad? The 120 buoy’s pinging.”

“Dawn patrol,” Harold said from his chair in the corner. He turned the page in his book. He had learned to ignore the boys’ constant squabbling; it was just their way of showing their love for their dead mother, he thought.

The next day, on Nick’s very first wave, Melvin intentionally dropped in and slammed into his brother like a cornerback blindsiding a wide receiver. When they surfaced, Nick paddled over to Melvin and took a few swings at his head, but Melvin deflected them and swam away.  Nick was left to swim in to the beach for his board. On Nick’s next wave, Melvin dropped in again. This time Nick kicked his board at Melvin’s head and missed by inches. Melvin ducked low into a steep face, carved up to the top, sent spray high over the lip, then finished out the ride. Harold watched the display from the outside, and was happy for his youngest son.

Eventually, both of Harold’s boys went off to college. Life became dull, then played out in shades of gray. One lonely, introspective November evening, Harold stayed out too long in the frigid water and caught a cold. This cold weakened his immune system and he contracted the H1N1 virus from the woman behind him in line at the Publix deli.

Sweating, delirious, and sure he was on his deathbed, Harold vowed that if he could miraculously pull out of this one he would follow his childhood dream and move to California.

Harold did recover, in fact, and in a matter of weeks, he packed up his things and moved to Santa Cruz. The frigid waters of the Pacific actually helped his knees, and he found himself able to spend full days out in the glorious California seascape, surfing long, glassy point breaks.  Eventually, Harold became so proficient on his stand-up paddleboard that he began to ride in jeans and a T-shirt in the summer, and decked himself out in a fleece, scarf, gloves, wool hat, and a pair of rubber galoshes in the winter months.

Harold entered his fifties a strange, new person — a sort of wild-eyed wizard. Santa Cruz was a renaissance period for him; it was not long before he met a fresh, beautiful hippie girl named Penelope, who became infatuated with this free-spirited angel of the paddleboard.

Harold fell in love again, for the second and last time in his life.

They rented a well-kept cottage by the beach where, for two years, Harold lived his life as if each day were a new, dazzling dream. When Melvin came to visit, he was shocked at the change in his father, and absolutely floored by Penelope’s beauty. He tried to explain the situation to Nick over the phone and Nick just laughed and said, “Dad’s always been a strange bird.”

One summer day, while Harold T. Sweeney was cruising down a steep face at Half-Moon Bay, a great white leaped from the wave and gobbled him up, plucking the man clean off the paddleboard. As the shark re-entered the frothing sea on the other side, Harold’s 11-foot board completed its ride, cruising through section after pitching section until it washed up on the beach.

Harold didn’t know it, but Penelope was pregnant with his third son — Harold, Jr.

Like his father, Harold, Jr. would have his fair share of problems. For one thing, he would never meet his father. At ten years old, he was diagnosed with Asperger syndrome, a variation of autism. In time, though, Harold, Jr. would come to be a four-time world champion boogie boarder.

On Beauty, Part II
By Dan Reiter

(This is the second of a two-part series. The first explored the beauty found in everyday moments, and contemplated the choice we are all given: whether to consciously seek this beauty out, or else to ignore it.)

I was surfing alone last week, alone in a warm, green sea all simmering with seaweed, with the onshore winds ripping at my hair, and tattered and broken waves bumping up the surface.

Why was I alone? Probably because it was Tuesday, because we were coming off a good, clean swell the previous weekend, there were rumors of sea-lice in Satellite Beach, and the sets were maybe four feet at best. Nonetheless, there I was: low tide, a long period swell coming in, and a wobbling line of shadow steadily advancing from the horizon. I turned, paddled, and dropped in at an angle just as the wave crested and converged with another. These moments are like butterflies — so airy, intangible… The face pitched to vertical, I crouched low, and for a fleeting instant I was locked in, encircled by icy-green water.

Then, spitting out and finding the high line, I took four quick steps to the nose, let the cool air rush beneath my toes, arched back, took in one deep, glorious breath, stepped back to the tail, cut toward the foam, and headed back for the reform. Now the wave pitched up over the inside sandbar — smaller, faster, more critical. I crouched low again, and again I tucked into a white-green barrel, shot like a bullet onto the shoulder, and kicked out over the top, blissed out, my spirit soaring heavenward.

All the while, the everyday world of the mainland was spinning as hectically as ever, agonizing its poor head over the important issues of the day — health insurance, car payments, taxes, bailout money, celebrity gossip… Ah, free society, where you can be anything you want… Rich, poor, conservative, liberal, Republican, Democrat… Endless choices! Endless responsibilities! Endless nonsense, I say! What is any of it worth without these moments of pure, unfettered beauty?

Listen: it happened on a Tuesday. Yes, I realize I might have been doing something more productive, but there, it happened, about 100 yards north of O’club, in four-foot slop nobody else deemed worth of swimming into, with only the mullet and pelicans to bear witness… the best wave of my life!

Then again, the best wave of my life followed shortly after that one. And yet another, right after that. In fact, it seems I catch the best wave of my life almost every time I go surfing, nowadays. That’s not to say my surfing skills are improving, or even the quality of the waves, rather, I think am getting better at appreciating my time out there.

Remember: beauty can strike you anywhere, at any time, even on the mainland. If you are alert, your senses keen and poised to accept it when it shows itself, you may find exquisite beauty even in the most mundane situations. Take a run to Publix for example, to pick up bread and milk, something we all do. Even this trivial task has potential. You might find yourself floating along the polished white floors, when suddenly the cereal boxes, the endless rows of cheeses and juices, the soup cans, all the multi-colored jumble blurs in the periphery, and only the ivory corridor shimmers before you. Soft, heavenly music wafts down from the cool skies, a man in a green smock approaches, and he smiles (perhaps he’s an angel?) and asks if he can help you with anything. No, nothing, you say. Nothing at all. You drift on weightlessly, and for no other reason than because you deemed it so, your worries and pressures melt away in one cool, ephemeral moment, and in that instant, all is right and perfect in the world.

Of course, it is not possible to keep such sanctity up all the time. Adversity is natural. Daily problems have a way of distracting your attention. But if you’re always reminding yourself to seek out the beauty in the moment, even during times of sacrifice, you will find joy in places you never before thought possible.

Try it sometime. Next time you’re pumping gas into your car, take a moment to study the motion of the clouds. If low tide is at 10 p.m., go for a mystical bike ride on the beach beneath the stars. Stroll around town just after a rainstorm, smell the freshly-washed leaves, tilt your face into the last drops of the sunshower. Raise your eyes to the sky and you could be astounded by a double rainbow.

Last night, I was sitting on the dock, my feet dangling over the water, when a dolphin erupted from the river and actually brushed my toes with its dorsal fin. I jumped to my feet, startled. The outline of the creature’s body glowed in a neon blue radiance below the surface. The river was alive with bioluminescence, and the dolphin was stirring it up as it swam, fanning up a sapphire spray with each thrust of its tail. Only minutes later, still rapt from this thrilling encounter, I saw a shooting star scream across the night sky, trailing orange sparks behind it as if from a comet’s tail. The meteor traced an impossibly long line through the blackness, and finally burned out in flame as bright and red as a Delta Heavy rocket. Was it a coincidence that these two seemingly unrelated, magical incidents occurred in one night? Dumb luck that I had been there to witness them? Or was it because I had been sitting there on that very dock, gazing at that same sky and river for over forty nights in a row? Perhaps it had taken all that time to make me worthy of these visions.

For you who truly wish to change your lives, to attune yourselves to the beauty around you, I offer you this bit of advice: turn off the television (it will impair your senses), find the person you love, and look that person in the eyes — not in the normal way, this time; no, when you look in those eyes, notice how the light strikes the pupil, refracting, glinting, questioning your motives, perhaps. Study the rays for a fraction of a second longer than usual, the play of light and shadow. Forget everything else and take that moment to see the plain and simple beauty in those eyes. You will find something magical there, something you may have forgotten long ago.

It takes time, but in the end, appreciating the beauty around us is the easiest, most natural thing in the world. Remember: it is the in-between moments that are sometimes the best of all. And look, you already have a head start. You took the time to read this article, so you must already be thinking the same thing I am.

I leave you with a final thought, which may or may not pertain to surfing: check the waves every day, even if the report says its flat. Once in a while you’ll discover a sneaker swell, and you never know, you might just catch the best wave of your life.

You can read “On Beauty, Part I” and Dan Reiter’s other stories at: www.thebeachsideresident.com/category/local-scribes/dan-reiter

I suppose I should begin by telling you that I am a Jew. That is, I was born one… I had no choice in the matter. I would apologize for my heatheness, but in the almost 6,000-year history of my silly, guilt-ridden people, not a single Jew has ever apologized for his ancestry… it is one of 18,000 time-honored traditions purveyed by the keepers of the religion. Ridiculous? Perhaps, but I refuse to tamper with such a remarkable streak.

The fact is, most American Jews have relegated God to some high, dusty shelf in one of their spacious closets. They invoke His name infrequently, mostly at dinner time, in a language that makes no sense to anyone at the table. Suffice to say, God is not at the forefront of most Jewish children’s minds. I did attend synagogue while growing up, but the holy vision of the girl sitting in front of me distracted me from the ceremonies. I was kept awake only by the endless sitting and standing, the girl, and the wistful anticipation of the cookies we would be eating at the end of the service. I hear it is not much different with children of other faiths.

It wasn’t until my teenage years that I first embarked upon my quest to find God. I was driving down the Pacific Coast Highway one foggy afternoon when I had the sudden realization that I was lost… completely lost in this world. It was such a simple truth, yet so devastating to a young man of eighteen.  Minutes later, the sun broke through the clouds and shed a surreal glow upon a nearby hilltop. There, written in glorious letters, were these words:

“JESUS LOVES YOU.”

My heart raced… it was providence, blowing down from the skies upon me!  I felt myself lifted from the depths of despair… a spiritual joy coursed through my veins.  Yes, yes… I could feel His love!  I was found!

My salvation took the form of a massive, newly-constructed house of worship, a church with a congregation of ten thousand – clean, honest, well-living people – who saw it fit to welcome this heathen with open hearts.  I got a haircut, took a steady job, and showed up every Sunday morning with my khakis pressed.  I was lost no more.  Jesus was the way, and He was the answer.

But curiosity drove me deeper into my faith.  I took it upon myself to read the New Testament, a hobby only a small percentage of churchgoers ever attempt, and which can prove dangerous without adequate supervision.  I was a mere ten minutes into the good Book when my eyes fell upon this curious passage (from Matthew 6:5):

“And when thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites are: for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men…”

The Savior goes on to explain, with reasonable clarity, how one should pray inside the confines of one’s own closet, and to be very sure to keep the door shut, and never, ever to use ‘vain repetitions.’  Strangely enough, Jesus follows this wisdom up with none other than the Lord’s Prayer… “Our Father which art in heaven, etc. etc.”

I closed the Book.  I suppose some might call it an epiphany.  Others, a relapse.  But my path was clear.  I would leave the church.  I would abide by Jesus’ Word, and find the Lord inside my closet.

It was a pitiable attempt.  Without the lights, the orchestral music, the gilded words of the pastor, and the giant flat-screened TVs, the Good Lord saw it unfit to attend my private service.

A Catholic friend of mine suggested it was not the church’s fault, but my own skepticism that prevented God from showing Himself.  He convinced me to travel with him to Tuscany, where on a cold, rainy night, he introduced me to the Virgin Mary.  After consuming two bottles of sacred wine, we fell to our knees before the statue of the Madonna in the town square.  We prayed and wept until daybreak.  Oh, Holy Mother of God, how can I ever thank you?  I would surely be dead or worse if you hadn’t cured me of the pneumonia I contracted that night!

I lay bedridden for two months, coughing and sweating, my feverish dreams haunted by your sad, porcelain face…  Sometimes even Saint Joseph, Saint Michael, and Saint Peter would appear before me… saints, angels, archangels… I saw them all!  My dreams were all rapture and confusion!  But when my sickness passed, for all that I remained a poor unbeliever.  Where among these faces was God?  He had yet to show up to the party!

My search did not end there.  Satisfied that Western religion could not summon Him up, I decided to seek out God in the East.  I moved to Marakesh, where I befriended the humble, honest man Fakhir al Hajid.  In a few short weeks, this fellow had converted me to Islam.  Yes, it was bad timing (only months after the September 11 attacks), but when I heard God was hiding out in a mosque, I could not, by rights, do without taking a peek inside.  I gave Islam my all for a few months, faithfully learning the Salah, praying five times a day to Allah, the most gracious, the most merciful… there was something about this vigorous ritual that elevated me into an altered state… at times, I thought I discerned the glow of holy light inside my eyelids… but the rugs in the mosque were musty, and held the vinegary odor of feet… bringing my face to these floors over and over again only sowed the seeds of doubt once more.

Desperate to escape the confinement of the more structured religions, I turned to the Far East, and Japan.  For one year, I studied under the tutelage of a Zen monk, who, though he never quite satisfied my thirst for God, taught me to envision myself as a leaf floating along a river.  He was a madman, to be sure.  Eventually, I became disenchanted with his riddles, and took to wandering the woods outside Kamakura, where I fell unkowingly into the ancient Shinto religion, ruminating on the spirit-essences of the trees, the wind, and the skies.

One day, while taking a drink from a limpid stream, I saw my own bearded reflection in the water.  I was thirty years old, on the brink of insanity, and still completely lost.  Perhaps God didn’t exist after all.  Hadn’t I been everywhere, hadn’t I tried everything to find him?  I resolved to move back to Florida, to start my life anew, without the bindings of religion to steer my way.

For a short while, I lived a life of blissful ignorance.  I married, took a job in biological research, converted to the Democratic party, and enjoyed a pleasant, Godless life.  Then it happened.  I tell you truly, it happened.  Perhaps you think I have stretched the truth a bit… I insist I will give everything back if you just believe this.

I was paddling out last Saturday morning, during the Hurricane Bill swell.  It was before sunrise, and I was alone at 11th street.  Just as I pushed over the last set wave, there He was… standing before me on the water!

Why should God appear to me then, at the very time I was learning to accept a life without Him?  I don’t know.  What I do know is that I felt His power, and understood Him in that moment… He is the connection between all things, like blood which courses to all extremities of the body…  no, no… He is more like wind, who touches everything yet remains invisible to all…

Then again, it is possible I had a grain of sand in my eye.  But no matter, no matter at all.  I have known people who have been saved by far less.

Florida summers are like molasses, thick, hot, dripping… The birds move with a certain languor, the yard is overgrown with wild, exotic grasses, the plumeria and mosquitoes swarm into full bloom, and a bright, lazy mist hangs over everything. It is stifling outside something terrible, your car feels like an oven, the sweat runs into your eyes, the sand burns your feet, the no-see-ums gnaw incessantly at your legs… In a sort of reverse-hibernatory instinct, you want to hide away, tuck yourself into the air conditioning during this hot spell and wait for the wretched thing to play itself out.

Summer days are slow and endless. They stretch out like taffy, pulling, lengthening, and give no hint of snapping. How to escape from this purgatory? Your only hope is to walk dazedly to the ocean and search for waves. Each time you ascend the dunes, a foolish hope swells up in your chest, but these are Atlantic doldrum days… Summer prevails yet again, and your dreams of surf melt like candlewax over the flat, oil-slick sea.

When was the last time you surfed? It might have been a week ago, maybe two… No, you remember it now — a low spun up the coast last month and sent some waves in, waist- to chest-high on the sets with light north winds. High tide was the call, with the lefts breaking nicely over the inside sandbar just south of O’Club, pushing through in cruising, barreling lines.

This is what life has come to now, remembering the old times. Ah, these slow, wistful, daydreamy days of summer… What else is there to do but to dream and remember? Come on, take a seat with me, up here on the crossover railing… I know it’s hot, but give in to it… Cast your eyes out over the water, gaze at the dark mirages on the horizon, and allow the scene to dissolve into blue. I’ll even raise a pensive, sweetly-contrived finger to my lips, à la one of those old Bruce Brown surf flicks, and add a voice over for effect:

“When it gets like this, it’s easy to see how the first Canadian explorers mistook the Atlantic for the last of the Great Lakes. Poor Dan… he’s stuck down here in flatsville while his buddies are catching a major south swell in Malibu. ‘Hey man, don’t worry!’ a local grom calls out cheerily, ‘They say it’s supposed to get up to shin-high tomorrow!’”

What else is there to do in such mournful times (as the German tourists slowly fill up the kiddie pool) but shake your head and hearken back to better days…

It was early last August, on a day not unlike this one, when Todd, my wild-eyed friend from New York City, called with some exciting news.

“Hey man! Montauk’s getting a swell in. Joel invited me to go surfing with him tommorow. It’s supposed to glass off in the afternoon.”

“Joel?”

“Yeah, he’s got plenty of boards up there.”

“Joel Tudor?”

“That’s what I said, bro. You should come up.”

“What, catch a plane?”

“Why not? There’s nothing going on in Florida.”

I explained to my wife that, for a longboarder, surfing with Joel Tudor would be akin to a golfer playing a round with Tiger Woods, or a cyclist riding with Lance Armstrong. She smiled with understanding and a bit of pity, booked me the first ticket out of Orlando, packed my wetsuit into an overnight bag, and kissed me goodbye; I flew up to LaGuardia that very night.

We met up at Penn Station the next morning and caught the Jitney out to Montauk. When I mentioned I was from Cocoa Beach, Joel related some stories about surfing Driftwood house with Sean Slater, and about getting chewed out by Kelly for not wearing a leash and fooling around during a Pipe contest. Toward the end of the ride, we opened the windows to taste the sea air. I felt impossibly light, almost as if I were not there at all, only floating above the surface of reality. The day took on the aspect of a dream. The Hamptons were a fairyland of flowers and sunlight and cool wind through the conifers. A beautiful, long-haired boy of 19 or 20 met us at the station, and drove us along the tree-lined avenues to a sprawling white house, surrounded by Japanese Snowbells, heavy with white flowers and wrapped with azaleas.

A commune of hippies had overrun the house for the summer, and they sunned their young bodies on the porch, played guitar, laughed, ate, smoked, or slept on the outdoor furniture. They were generally pleased to see us, but couldn’t care less who strolled in or out, so exhausted were they from partying and love-making and surfing all day. The boy who had driven us from the station brought us around to the back yard, where fifteen or so longboards lay on the grass, their rails glinting in the sun… McTavish, Takayama, Weber, Hap Jacobs, Yater, Hynson, and more…

Joel stepped lightly among the boards, lifting them up by the noses and trying to discern whose was whose. He set aside a 12-foot stand-up paddleboard for himself, picked out a big, blue soft-top for Todd, and handed me a 9’6” OP Joel Tudor model — “his board,” as he called it — for me.

We walked the quarter mile to the beach, whistling and humming along. The weather was ideal, with only the occasional high clouds accentuating the sky in random, painterly brushstrokes. Joel pointed out a run-down old van, and said it was Alan Weisbecker’s, the lunatic author of one of my favorite books, “In Search of Captain Zero.” We walked barefoot, with our wetsuit tops dangling from our waists. No one worried about a thing, no one cared, we were content and blissed out and alive and free.

If I never see Saint Peter pry open the gates of heaven for me, my first vision of the waves in Montauk will have to serve as a replacement, and I will hold it up as a respectable one at that. Long, long, long lefts were presenting themselves out by the rocks, wrapping around the point, bowling through, and sweeping all the way into the beach. A golden armada of longboarders patrolled the outside, carving fluid, drop-kneed bottom turns, stepping gracefully to the nose, slicing across the lapis waves, carving glorious turns, dancing upon the surface of the sea. One fellow was tandem surfing with his girlfriend, catching outside bombs. As he pumped down the line, the girl kneeled in front, laughing and screaming.

We stretched among the young, summering couples on the sand, and set out across the rocks into the cool bliss of the ocean. And what a session it was. I remember sitting on the outside, admiring the curve of the coastline, when a head-high A-frame caught me by surprise. I took off right, Todd went left… At the end of the ride, I looked down the beach to see we were nearly a half mile apart. As I paddled out, there was Joel, magically appearing on the outside in his baseball cap, riding a perfect wave, stepping to the nose, holding ten toes over, casually grasping the oar in one hand.

It was what summers were supposed to be — a mellow crowd, a classic swell, friends in the water. Now, as the music fades away and Joel’s slow-motion noseride dissolves into blue, I head back down the crossover, wiping the sweat from my eyes and needing a cold drink.

These are doldrum days, after all… There’s always the next tropical storm, I think — or anyway, like the grom said, it is supposed to get up to shin-high tomorrow.

Localism (definition from Webster’s New World College Dictionary)

lo•cal•ism

1.    a way of acting characteristic of one locality; local custom, practice, or mannerism
2.    a word, meaning, expression, pronunciation, etc. peculiar to one locality
3.    fondness for a particular locality
4.    narrow outlook; provincialism

Warning: this article is intended for locals only. If you don’t live beachside, or at any rate, within a 15-minute drive of the beach, you should stop reading now.

I’m serious. Just turn the page.

Or better yet, put down the paper, get in your car and drive yourself back to Orlando (or Ohio, or New Jersey, or wherever the hell you came from.)

Good. Now that we’ve disposed of the riff-raff… What’s that? You’re still here? Well, I guess I can’t force you to stop reading, but don’t say I didn’t warn you. And don’t go posting all kinds of disparaging comments on the website either… Kooks.

As for my fellow beachside residents, let’s get down to it. Summer is upon us, and with it, the regular influx of drunks, clunks, and punks who litter these streets with their interminable clatter of beer cans and plastic cups… The tourists, spring-breakers, and weekenders who customarily plug up the drive aisles at our local banks, flick swarms of cigarette butts out their car windows, brew up all sorts of hecticness and traffic jams, and who, with their white-rimmed sunglasses, shaved chests, and sideways baseball caps, generally lay seige to our otherwise peaceful oceanside villages.

Ah, summer weekends. There’s nothing quite like that helpless, closed-in feeling one gets when surrounded by inlanders. By one o’clock it’s impossible to find a parking space at your favorite café (even though the seats inside are empty) and when you decide to paddle out for a quick soul-session, it’s not uncommon to get dropped in on by a pasty New Jerseyite, who tilts his board into a weak turn, loses his balance and falls off, splashes back out to the lineup, puffing up as if he really owned that wave, and proceeds to give the stinkeye to everyone in his immediate vicinity.

On Monday morning, it’s us, the locals, who are left to pick up the trash from the dunes and curse the ignorant bastards who left it there. The more congested beaches, like the Pier, 2nd light, or the Boardwalk, still smell like ashtrays from the day before, and the amount of litter that visiting surfers leave in their wake (you would think surfers would have more respect) is astounding. Breakfast at Juice-N-Java reveals a parking lot glittering with broken glass and reeking like a urinal from the Inner Room’s debaucherous late-night runoff.

Is it just me, or is something wrong here? Would these guests act this way if we were Hawaiians instead of Brevardians? No… I can assure you if these kooks displayed this kind of behavior on the North Shore, they would be given a prompt lesson in the meaning of respect.

Respect. That’s what localism is all about, really. Respecting the beach, the ocean, the community, and the people who live here.

As permanent residents of this barrier island, we need to step up and protect our hometown. Don’t get me wrong; I’m not calling for a Cocoa Beach branch of Da Hui, or an Indialantic Wolfpak. Not every Orlando peacock who swaggers into town and acts like a dumbass deserves a punch in the jaw. There is a time and place for fighting, especially at life-threatening reef breaks like Pipe. In Florida, there are plenty of waves to go around, and if you get cut off in two-foot mush, it’s really not the end of the world. You won’t be walking around like Gerry Lopez, who, after getting dropped in on by a Haole, had to keep a colonoscopy bag in his pants for six months.

Rather, we need to force the respect issue without reverting to physical violence. The kind of localism we need here is what you see on the island of Kauai, a pride that the locals take in their home beach, an Aloha spirit coupled with a collective disdain for those who would despoil it. As residents here, we need to band together more often, to be more vocal when we see someone leaving their trash on the beach, or pissing in a parking lot, or sauntering across the street in the middle of traffic, or dropping in on someone, or simply being a loudmouthed jerk.

As far as car break-ins and stolen boards… well, that’s just crazy. In Kauai, you can leave your board on your car anywhere on the island, and it will never be touched. Why? Because the locals are watching you, and they won’t tolerate it. And if you get caught? You’re done. They’ll beat you senseless and drop you off in Lihue. Explain to me how cars get broken into at 2nd Light or the Pier, two of the most bustling parking lots around, with regularity? Because these fools have no fear. Locals: step up and enforce!

We need to take our beaches back. We are the ones who keep the public beaches accessible. We are the ones who voted for the open liquor policy. We pushed the issue of height restrictions for beachside development. Why did we do it? For us! Orlando doesn’t vote on these issues. And it’s not like the average Orange County fool is bringing a glut of business into town anyway. The drive isn’t long enough to melt ice, so the majority of them are packing up their beers and snacks in the morning, laying out all day, sucking down their Parliament lights, buying nothing while they’re here, and dumping their cans and wrappers for us to clean up when they leave. These kooks need to appreciate what they have here. They need to show some Respect.

As for the Orlando people who are still reading this, instead of getting offended, why don’t you step it up next time you’re on the beach? Pick up some trash, or get in the face of someone who’s disrespecting to the community? Remember, these kooks are representing all of you.

If you’re worried about confrontation, there are other, more civilized options. Take a picture of the offender and post it online, or just ask the person nicely to pick up their mess. Sometimes that’s all it takes. If nothing else works, go and find someone who’s willing to enforce the issue for you.

Although the term “localism” often gets a bad rap by associating itself with gangs of aggro, head-smacking surfers who try to thin out crowds at their point breaks, it’s not a term that should be used exclusively for surfers. No, I think the essence of localism is best captured by definition #3 above: “fondness for a particular locality.” Anyone who loves the open, endless horizon of our beaches, the coolness of the water when you first dip your shins into shorebreak, the sparkling sunrises, the whispering, starry nights, the tranquility of the river at dtheusk, or the calmness of a bike ride on the beach at low tide, should understand what I’m talking about.

This is a call to all surfers, fishermen, joggers, bikers, and snowbirds… To the local Surfrider branch, the City Commissioners, condo associations, shopkeepers, bartenders, waitresses, retirees, and even to those inlanders who cared enough to have kept reading this article. Let’s start treating this place with the same watchfulness and awe that the Hawaiians treat their own islands.

Locals, let’s start doing as Da Hui says: “Stick out your chests, and not your asses.”

With all this talk about going green lately, it’s tempting to think that we may finally be climbing out of the coal-caked chimneys of the Industrial Age and peeking our heads into a bright, clean future. But how realistic is the green movement? And if it succeeds, how much do we really gain?

Some pragmatists claim that a green Earth is inevitable. Hell, in 500,000 years, it’s very likely our cities will have crumbled to dust, our reign as the dominant species will be over, and, just as with every life form before us, our remains will be buried under strata of insects, dirt, and plants. Even if we were to cut down every last tree, completely annihilate the ozone layer, or plaster the globe beneath a five-foot layer of chemical waste, in time, the toxic shell would crack, the atmosphere would stabilize, weeds would creep through, and flowers would sprout up once more.

In the grand scheme of things, it wouldn’t have mattered that a bunch of monkeys ate all the bananas in the forest or burned up all the fossil fuels or practiced the silly ritual of killing each other.

Yes, despite our best efforts, despite our nuclear holocausts, our great gaseous spewings, and our complete mucking up of the planet, the armageddon will be 100% organic. No matter how we meet our doom, weeds will always creep up through our debris, and flowers will always bloom. As it is written, the meek shall inherit the earth.

So why make such an effort to go green?

Because we love to dream. And it is a beautiful dream, isn’t it? A return to Eden, a utopian society where people live in abundance and harmony with nature…

Or is it because the turn of the millenium has brought with it a collective desire for change, the lurking notion that the epoch of wastefulness and materialism is over, the idea that it’s time to move on, to evolve?

No, I suppose our motivation is simpler than that. The colossal wheels of society are growing old and rusting, and we’re afraid that this terrible grinding sound coming from the depths of the machine is a sign that the wheels are about to seize up for good.

The 20th century brought with it some astounding advances in civilization: Modern medicine extended life spans, new transportation and communication methods connected all corners of the globe, and technology surpassed common sense like a draft car speeding around the final turn of the race. The upshot of this was a swelling of the human population from a modest 1.6 billion people in 1900 to nearly four times that number — over 6 billion — in 2000. To grasp the scope of just how quickly the world population is growing, consider that it’s increased by nearly another billion in this decade alone.

Strangely enough, the main contributing factor to this viral spreading of humanity was a high-yield, chemically-enhanced approach to agriculture which took hold around the middle part of the century, and which is ironically referred to as “The Green Revolution.”

So what now? If we’re to keep multiplying at epidemic rates (which, barring a plague or a rogue comet, is quite likely) we’ll need to be resourceful. The earth’s energy must be used to our advantage if we want to see 10, 12, or 15 billion people living here without eating each other. Oil and coal are useful (albeit controversial) commodities, but they will not be enough to sustain us. The bottom line: We must do away with luxuries like electricity, cars, and meat, or else find alternate energy and food sources.

When you consider the fact that one hundred years ago, the first mass-produced automobile, the Model T, could run on either ethanol or gasoline and had a fuel efficiency of nearly 20 miles per gallon, it’s evident that not much effort has been spent this past century on improving energy efficiency. For decades, corporate and government agendas have suffocated innovation for the sake of the bottom line.  Capitalism seems to have a problematic flaw: The less efficient product sometimes proves to be the most profitable.

Now, with necessity knocking on our door, technology is once again pushed to the forefront of our consciousness.

In March, a British man broke the landsailing speed record by driving his wind-powered vehicle 126 miles per hour on a dry lake in Nevada. The lightweight car looked like a combination between a maple seed and a sailboat, was made mostly of fiberglass, and was powered by air alone. It’s a fanciful thought, but imagine a fleet of these things cruising silently to Orlando on a revamped I-4 corridor, propelled onward by the seabreeze. True, we couldn’t always have the wind at our backs, but if it’s there, why not ride it?

Another fanciful thought:  Imagine New York City with a garden on every rooftop. From above, it would look like a 3-D grid of mottled farmland. If planted properly, the wider, taller buildings in midtown might produce enough tomatoes to feed, say, the entire Upper East Side. With such a canopy, the city’s temperature would likely cool 10 degrees in summertime and be 10 degrees warmer in winter, which would save a whole lot on central air and heating bills, and make the subways rides much more tolerable.

The possibilities for green speculation are endless. Why not harvest underwater plots of farmland for edible seaweed, a nutritious alternative to soy beans, in order to free up more dry land? What about the electric car? Sea turbines? Solar-powered water heaters?

In a sense, the new green revolution will be the anithesis of the assembly-line approach of the first. Technology will be forced to adapt to a variety of ecosystems… rain forests, deserts, and cities will have to be recognized as their own unique organisms, with their own specific needs and available resources. We’ll see a rise in permaculture, which strives to design permanent, self-sufficient human colonies, to retain food, materials, and waste products within a small, closed system, and which hinges on the principle that pollution is merely “energy in the wrong place.”

Maybe we’re chasing windmills, dreaming the impossible dream. In a sense, most of our dreams are pointless, impossible. The car, the airplane, the cell phone, the computer — none of these things really made life any easier, or any better, for that matter. But they gave us something to work on, something new to keep our minds occupied and focused, and for that they were good.

If nothing else, the new green revolution gives us reason to change our way of thinking, to grow, to hope, and to be inspired.  And after all, isn’t that what life is all about?

Florida swells are notoriously fleeting; they can come and go as quickly as the tides. When they do happen to stick around, the wind will usually blow in from the east, chop them into stacks of whitewater, and pile close-outs all up and down the beach. There are no channels here, no easy paddleouts through mid-break, no points to wrap these waves into workable lines, no reefs to hollow them out. Most of our beach breaks can’t hold a swell much larger than ten feet, and when it’s smaller than four, it doesn’t even break during high tide.

Surfers here are constantly waiting for the wind to shift, which it does (more often than not) in the dead of night, creating perfect conditions for a few lonely, dark hours, only to blow everything flat by daybreak. For those of us foolish enough to surf at night, alone, or at certain offshore holes, there are always the spinner sharks — hungry, invisible monsters lurking beneath our feet in the murky water. Florida is, regrettably, not the ideal place to be a surfer.

But we surf anyhow, whole mobs of us — shredders, kooks, longboarders, stand-up paddleboarders (sweepers), skimmers, spongers, progressive, retro-style, groms, old-timers, men, women, boys, girls… When the conditions line up properly, you can bet the water will be stuffed with people as far as the eye can see. If it happens to be a weekend or a holiday and the water is warm enough to skin it, the bobbing heads can form an unbroken line — thousands upon thousands of surfers, like a horde of river-fleas — extending from Playalinda all the way down to Reef Road.

What is it that attracts so many to this ancient pastime? I suppose we all have our own motivation for getting wet. Some of us grew up surfing; others, like me, didn’t start until their 20s, but have surfed nearly every day since that first joyous wave. Whether we surf professionally or for fun, with friends or solo, on longboards, shortboards, or anything in-between, all of us share a few common fascinations with the Polynesian sport of kings.

We surf because we love the feeling of motion. The push and pull of the sea, the breathless drop into the deep, round lean of a bottom turn; the speed of the high line, the glide along the shoulder; the transcendental, weightless discharge of the barrel — these things fill us with an animal joy. To fly, pelican-like, over the shimmering surface of the sea, to soar through section after section as the sky unfolds and the universe courses through our bodies is to feel as one with the whirling cosmos. The power of the ocean compels us onward. It is a bodily lightness, and yet a connection to the water at the same time. When we surf, we are literally pouring forward, a sensation that cannot be replicated on dry land.

We surf to maintain balance, both in our bodies and in our souls. Though it might seem a stretch to compare surfing to yoga or martial arts, the act of riding a wave, of paddling, duck-diving, even the simple feat of sitting on your board without tipping over requires a certain symmetry and stability that can only be trained, and which grows more natural with time. In fact, surfing is very similar to the martial arts, in that the masters of both display a sense of equilibrium, a consciousness of form, and a physical artistry seldom displayed in other sports.

On a spiritual level, we use surfing to balance our energies. If it is flat for weeks on end, or if we are locked inland, we seem to grow weaker, feel out-of-sorts, and begin searching for unnatural diversions. But when the waves are pumping, you will see surfers walking around town with what seems like a thin cushion of air beneath their feet, as if they are detached from all the worries of the world. There is no one quite so blissed out as a surfer after a three-hour session in clean, peeling waves.

We surf because we love to be outside. The sun on our backs, the wind in our hair, the pastel-colored sky shifting like an organic painting before us — the ocean only magnifies the beauty of the day, and the sounds of the waves and the gentle hush of the sea are so much finer than the buzz of fluorescent lights or the honking, hurrying, maddening drone of the land.

We surf to gain a sense of perspective. Separating yourself from your comfort zone, losing your connection to gravity or paddling out and just sitting there is akin to visiting another planet. For a few, escapist hours, you are no longer a human being walking on the earth. You are something else — a bird, a fish, a creature of the sea, a ghostly spirit — all at once. When you return to the ground, you bring this experience back with you, and it affects the way you see everything.

We surf because surfing is freedom. Because riding on the face of a wave is like dancing in-between the sea and the sky. Because when it all goes right, you are like the wind, unharnessed, loose, empty — completely free from the ties of the world.

We surf because, like the Florida swells, we are only here for a short time, which reminds me of a story from Mitch Albom’s book, “Tuesdays with Morrie.” It goes something like this: a little wave is cruising along without a care, enjoying the wind and the fresh air, until he sees that the waves in front of him are crashing against the shore. Suddenly fearful of his death, the little wave cries out to another wave, “All of us waves are going to be nothing! Isn’t it terrible?” The other wave responds, “No, you don’t understand. You’re not a wave. You’re part of the ocean.”

Hold on a second… I think the wind might be turning offshore… Yes, it is…

Sorry, but I’ve got to go now.

See you in the water.

(photo credit: Darran Franks, www.darranfranks.com)

My fascination with dolphins started on a small, sand-dredged mound of muck in the Mosquito Lagoon, somewhere off Canaveral National Seashore, where I camped the night of New Year’s Eve, 2000 along with twelve of my closest friends, a group of lonely wonderers in the dark, starlit river.

After shuttling back and forth over the slick stingray shallows in a canoe crammed full of burgers, beers, and blankets, we discovered that no one’s cell phone worked on the island, and we then resolved to be completely detached from society when the millenium began its slow, groaning turn.

Why should a huge pod of dolphins decide to gather around our island on that particular night? It’s still a mystery to me. It is possible, looking back, that the island was their home, and that they were actually wondering the same thing about us.

It was cold, and some of the boys got to drinking and foraging through the scrub brush. Before long, we had a glorious bonfire. I can’t say what else was burned that night, but it is worth mentioning that some of the group were not acting quite themselves. In truth, no one knew what was going to happen. It was a big moment for mankind, and it was a long time coming — two thousand years, to be exact. Some of us were afraid. Perhaps most of us, subconsciously, were afraid, although some of us had already lost the capacity for fear.

What happened that night? I don’t profess to know any more about it than anyone else, but some of the facts are intriguing. At around 11 o’clock (a most fashionable hour to appear at a New Year’s party), a pod of at least 30 dolphin came to the island, swimming right up to our muddy little banks. They seemed to be singing, whistling, breathing, or (depending on who you talked to) crying or laughing. As they circled the island, every one of us felt a connection to each other — an almost telepathic oneness. The dance proceeded through the sparkling night and onward into the orange glow of the morning. Not a soul slept.

When we returned to the mainland, we found it in much the same state as we had left it. Everyone had expected an explosion, a small revolution, or even a few house fires. It was a letdown in a mundane sort of way, but a great relief in another. The world would be okay (or so we thought), and we began to steel ourselves for a new beginning. Everyone took separate paths — one moved to Santa Monica, others to New York, Boston, Miami, San Diego, Costa Rica, or Australia. I packed my bags and moved across the country to Central Florida. We all agreed on one thing: the dolphin had changed us in a permanent way, though no one could explain what had happened in any intelligible manner. Of the thirteen people on the island that night, not one moved further than five miles from the ocean.

Research suggests that a dolphin’s brain contains a component the human brain never developed, something called the paralimbic lobe, which “might be used for sensory processing.” Scientists are not decided on the exact function of the paralimbic lobe; they still don’t seem to understand it fully. We know that dolphins have the uncanny ability to create sounds, and through the process of echolocation, can form a picture of an object in their minds. It is not quite the same as seeing something, however. Instead of a visual image, the dolphin perceives an “acoustical” picture of an object. Their sonar is cause for concern among the scientific community; no one can fully explain how dolphins separated by steel walls, in tanks 50 feet apart, can communicate with each other, as certain studies have shown them to do. Another curious fact: bottlenose dolphin have been heard mimicking human music and even creating their own songs in arrangements ranging from bass thrums and alto whistles to silent realms of high-frequency sonic vibrations — full, soaring symphonies played above the range of human hearing.

Though the dolphin’s brain is not as advanced in some areas as the human’s (for example, the area responsible for panic and anxiety), the dolphin’s frontal lobe, located directly behind the forehead, is the same size as a human’s. Dr. Andrew Newberg, a prominent neuroscientist and pioneer in the emerging field of “neurotheology,” suggests that this part of the brain helps to focus attention on prayer and meditation. It might stand to reason, then, that dolphins have at least the capacity for religious thought, if not in a strictly human sense, at least in an auditory one. While some humans think they know what God looks like, could it be conceivable that dolphins know what God sounds like?

If dolphins can hear God, is it possible, then, that their society may be more advanced than we are led to believe? After all, dolphins, like humans, exist in a world without natural predators in which food is harvested with ease and where there is no shortage of any of life’s necessities. Instead of working most of their days for brief respites of leisure, like humans, the vast majority of a dolphin’s day is spent playing, singing, hunting, or exploring the wide seas. When you bear in mind that dolphins have no borders, no great wars, and no politicians, is it not completely foolish to consider that their society may even be superior to ours?

Living beachside, we are fortunate enough to share some of our finest moments with these magical creatures. Some of us may have encountered the ocean-going breed while out surfing. Funny how they always seem to appear to us on the glassiest days, when the water is clearest and the vibe is at its most mellow. They emerge from the oil-slick surface like a band of mermaids, surfing set waves with unimaginable speed, or performing graceful aerial maneuvers in the rainbow spray behind the billowy crests. You might see the smaller, grayer variety of bottlenose dolphin in the river playing against the pastel backdrop of the sunset as you haul your trout or redfish into to the boat. Dolphins are always an omen of good tidings as the water is most likely clean where they are, the fish plentiful, and the energy serene.

Why did dolphins, once a land-dwelling animal like us, decide to evolve into the water? Was it global warming or global cooling, or was it something else, something borne not from necessity, but from desire alone? Perhaps the better question is why, given the extraordinary abilities of our own species, we haven’t evolved into something more harmonious with our own nature, something flowing, crafted of pure song, beauty, and light, like the dolphins?

Dolphins remain a mystery to Man, but they appear to those who look for them — those who might, when they see them, comment how beautiful, how majestic an animal the dolphin is, or who might even momentarily fall into a trance, as if in the presence of angels; those who seldom stop to think that the dolphin might actually be trying to tell them something terribly important.

In those frontier days, the river was as clear as glass, and when the winds were calm you could see for miles across the flats — sixty-pound redfish in schools of a hundred or more, sleek pods of mermaid-like dolphins, their coats all a healthy sheen of silver, and great flocks of birds, each taller than a man, who sailed across the sky like so many angels. It was a pristine beauty, untouched by civilization.

Perhaps the Legend is older than that… Some say Ponce de Leon made his first mainland landfall on this same beach, where he encountered the Ais Indians, who spoke of a fountain with magical powers and stoked the fire of the Spaniard’s imagination. The Ais were an ancient people living among the white mangroves, cultivating a mystical energy, an energy that lives beneath the very sands upon which Cocoa Beach is built.

While the people came and went, the energy remained. During the Depression years it might be said that the Legend was in remission, a dormant root system waiting underground for the right moment to sprout to life once again. All such energy works in cycles, retreating, then advancing again like the tides. In the late ’50s and early ’60s, the Legend emerged again in the form of the Mercury Program. Fighter jocks, cowboy heroes of the New Age, came here to push the barrier of what was possible, virtually daring the heavens to stop them. Trailing them like a comet’s tail was an influx of bright, energetic faces, people from all over the country: New York, California, Nevada, Texas, Virginia… The population boom was like a giant swell pushing over the dunes, washing over the stony-faced Baptist settlers and bringing this tiny seaside town to the forefront of the nation’s consciousness. It was the dawn of a new era, the era of the hot rod, of drive-in movies, of free love. And towns like Cocoa Beach, low-lying strip towns with walk-right-in-your-room motels, did more to usher in the sexual revolution, as Tom Wolfe put it, than the pill.

And yes, on many summer nights in the early ’60s, there was more sex and more love in this little beach village than anywhere else in the country. The Legend was here all right, with rock-star astronauts like Al Shepherd and Gus Grissom sipping cocktails in Ramon’s Rainbow Room with the prettiest young girls, buxom movie starlet-types, draped all over them. Ramon’s Rainbow Room sat atop the Glass Bank, that now-broken-down symbol of a bygone age. But she was quite a building in her time, the Glass Bank. On some nights you could even see her lights from across the river. Ah, the energy was here, for a hot blink in American history, shining like a beacon.

But after every surge, there is a pulling back. The Ais knew this instinctively. One of their long-forgotten Legends told of a time when the Banana and Indian Rivers flowed with fresh water, before the ocean rose up and washed over the whole of the island, spilling salt water into the lagoon. When the flood waters receded, the island was a different place, a land of magic, and of secrets usually hidden away under the ocean.

In the ’70s and ’80s, the allure of the space program met the fate of all things beachside, even those things once thought untarnishable: It began to rust. A tornado ripped through town, screaming down A1A, taking out many of the motels, and doing serious damage to the Glass Bank as well. But Cocoa Beach continued its ramshackle, love-making ways. Glory-boys pounded drinks at the Holiday Inn or Tinker-by-the-Sea, and parties raged late into the night at the Thirsty Turtle, with the girls from the Inner Room frolicking in after work to drink fresh-squeezed orange juice and vodka. But the town was not the same as it was in the ‘60’s; it just wasn’t as electric. Then, in 1986, the Challenger explosion brought the eyes of the nation upon this tiny town yet again.

But the energy was still at work. Soon the Legend would rise again, only it would be a Legend of a different sort. When he was growing up here in the ’80s, Kelly Slater channeled this same energy, although he might not have known it at the time. How else could the boy learn to do things on waist-high mushy waves that nobody had ever done or even tried before? As Kelly’s mother says, “He could surf on nothing because he knew how to make his own power.” Sure, he had help. Guys like Matt Kechele were there to show him a thing or two when he was coming up, but what elevated Slater to the stuff of Legend?  From where did he draw such power?

For a town of about 12,000 people — a town the same size as Leeds, Alabama, or, to put it in a better perspective, only 1/10th the size of Olathe, Kansas — the amount of sheer greatness that comes out of here is remarkable. It seems that the Legend rises out of this tiny strip of sand at least once every generation; it takes off from out of nowhere, like a rocket launching into the night sky.

Local wizards and sages know the energy well, and they can tap into it. Al Neuharth sits in his treehouse behind the Pumpkin Center, typing away madly, overlooking the sea as glistening, hollow A-frames pound away under the full moon.

There is something special about this place…

The “I Dream of Jeannie” days are long gone, and our world’s greatest surfer has become the consummate traveler, spending precious little time in these beach breaks, but the energy remains, driving the Legend onward. What will come next? Who will be next to rise from the sands to conquer the world? Wait and see.

A friend once told me that his goal in life was to “maximize his moments of beauty.” “I do this,” he explained, “by living in the now, and by seeking out those things around me which please me most.”

This friend’s idea seemed naïve at the time, but over the next few years, I found myself seeking out beauty at the most unexpected moments. Sometimes, even under the glow of the fluorescent lights, my office would transform into a painting… my co-worker’s red tie would shimmer like a ribbon, my computer keys would blur together and glisten like pebbles in a river. More and more my thoughts veered off the course of the workaday life. My hands relaxed at my sides and my eyes drifted upwards, seeking out some hidden, mysterious beauty. Soon, the cubist world became too confined for me, and I quit my job.

Yes, I would change my course in life. I would work outside as much as possible. I would allow my beauty-seeking eyes the natural light of the sun. And I would move to Cocoa Beach.

On my very first day in this seaside village, I set off on a “truth journey,” crossing over the dunes at 15th Street and venturing south along the beach. It was a bright day, early spring, and the air was still cool with the last of the winter winds. The beach was empty, surreal, infinitely long and white. When I came to the Driftwood House, I saw an old man sitting cross-legged on the sand, some sort of a white-bearded shaman, his face angled to the sun, his hands held over his head, palms open to the sea. The wind died, and the sun seemed to expand, to take over the whole of the sky, or else time momentarily stopped. I looked out over the water, and saw two silhouettes of dolphins playing on the waves, their fins rising and falling as if in slow-motion.

When I turned back, the old man was gone.

In recent years I’ve gained new insight into my friend’s theory. As the beauty of a moment grows, the moment itself is allowed to grow. The now becomes greater, and so the process of time slows down. In fact, I believe that you can actually live longer by maximizing your moments of beauty.

I have lived in Cocoa Beach six years now (although these six seem to stretch out longer than the whole of the other twenty-five), and become familiar with the faces, the secret pockets of sun and shadow, and the palms, rivers, canals and homes. And I must say that the most beautiful way to seek out beauty here is by bicycle.

If you cruise at just the right speed, there are paper-thin yellow butterflies that will appear from out of nowhere and dance about your head. If the wind is at your back, you can stop pedaling and these fairies will flicker like music against the whispering backdrop of the poinciana trees with the leaves like green butterflies themselves. Every day, without fail, at least one pelican will soar across the sky. If you’re lucky, one will dip a wing to you, as if to acknowledge you as a kindred spirit. On the bicycle, you can hear the sighs of the ocean even over the rush of the cars. And at low tide, as you pedal just along the water’s edge, a swell is coming in, and the ocean begins to sing.
In terms of sheer magnitude, there is no greater moment of beauty than surfing a wave. It is an ephemeral beauty, wispy but somehow heavy, the essence of liquid, ever-changing. And the beauty of surfing a Cocoa Beach wave is a different beauty than you might find at the rivermouth near Playa Grande, or at Little Dume, California, where you can ride with your mouth hanging open as you gaze at vistas of emerald mountains, waterfalls, rainbows, or sunsets lighting up the jagged cliffs so that they literally glow with fire. No, the beauty of surfing Cocoa Beach is less visual. It is the beauty of infinity, a beach stretching from left to right forever, fish-eyeing so that the horizon seems to bend around you like the curved landscape of a Rick Piper painting, with no mountains or cliffs breaking up the skyline in any direction.

The beauty of surfing Cocoa Beach is something you can appreciate even with your eyes closed. It is the hot flow of blood to your heart when the wind blows from the west, or the crisp, crashing sound of those long, angled lines as they break clean over the outer sandbar. It is knowing that you are alone at this break, that the whole world is somewhere else at this very moment, and for now it is just the sun, the pelicans, the dolphins, the waves, your soul.
Only yesterday, while walking home from the beach, an unexpected blow of beauty stopped me as if I had walked into a wall. The sunset exploded into the sky in a giant, three-dimensional filigree of pink light, as if a lattice of flame were billowing up from the river. I found myself standing in the middle of the road, enraptured, oblivious, still breathing heavily from my last wave, dripping wet and awestruck.

More and more, I am drawn to artists and madmen, to those strange souls whose quest for beauty skews their sense of time and isolates them from this TV society. I find myself pulled away even from my current job (a fine, stimulating job, where I can work outside in the sun and be productive with my hands) as the quest for beauty calls me off track once again… I feel another change coming (is it a sign of the times?). I decide I will write these moments as best as I can. I will do my best to put them down in such a way so that others can, if only for a moment, see the beauty in them.

The latest swell is fading away. Who knows how many days of flatness lie ahead? I paddle out again, drift away on a rolling sea, and wait for the last set to come in. To the south, high thunderclouds rumble over a blue-charcoal dusk. A lilac haze rises from the eastern ocean, like smoke. I am part of this painting, part of this dance, me, sitting on my board with my legs in the water. Two seagulls shoot across the low strip of blue. A single white cloud reaches forward with wispy fingers, gently touching the surface of the sea. The water is molten, shining in a million shades like a sea of gemstones.

You realize something, sitting on the outside at 13th Street, studying the colors, floating in the music of the waves. It is so simple. The beauty is something that is always there; has always been there. It is you who chooses to see it or not. It is you who controls this moment.

But the wine was heavenly. The reds were light, fragrant, and left no aftertaste on the tongue. After a long day of riding, we could share a bottle out on the terrace, in the courtyard, wherever, and it would fill our bodies with that warm love, that slow and deepening love which sprouted like vines from us in the dusklight, reaching out to touch the stone streets, to play in the cypress, grow wild upon the winds, refract the crimson light of the setting sun, and fill up the sky.

Yes, there was much glory in the Châteuneuf-du-Pape reds, but they held nothing against the rosés. In fact, there is no wine, none in this world so far as I know, that comes close to a Provence rosé, if it is enjoyed properly, on a bright, dry day in early summertime, shared with someone you love wholly and completely.

I suppose the Provence rosé tastes of the whimsy and freedom that comes at the very end of one’s youth.  There is a light berry in all the variations, perhaps a hint of strawberry.  Some are sweeter, some are tart, with the faintest tinge of raspberry. Some have tiny bubbles which collect at the bottom of the glass and float up slowly, as in a sparkling champagne rosewater, while some are smoother, peach-colored, and taste of the wind and the sunlight and of the stone streets themselves.

Some taste faintly of lemons, some like a familiar woman who you cannot remember, perhaps a friend of your mother’s or a schoolteacher from grade school, but the best of them taste like nothing at all. That is to say, they do not taste like water, or air… when you drink the best wines, you transcend the realm of touch and taste, on to some higher place.

The wind blew at our backs on the way down to Saint-Rémy. We felt invincible, immortal, flying through the fields, pedaling once every hundred yards, leaning back, speaking in soft voices. The cherry trees grew alongside the path, and we stopped to taste them. They were white, cool, and impossibly sweet.

It was our grand farewell to childhood, a three-month voyage which began in Cocoa Beach and took us up the east coast to New York. We walked in Central Park, shopped Midtown, and stopped to relax at the cafés of Gramercy. Our nights in Manhattan were dedicated to the Village, Arturo’s Pizzeria, Sway Lounge or rooftop parties, where old friends came out of their underground hiding spots to play with us.

New York was always pleasant, but we had grand plans. I had arranged for a bicycle trip in the south of France, and after a week in the city we took the long flight across the Atlantic, stopping over in Berlin, then spending a few days in Rome before embarking upon our week-long tour de vélo of Provence, where we discovered the finest wines on earth.

After the trip, tanned and relaxed, we took the train to Paris, where we rented a low-ceilinged apartment without air conditioning in the sixth arrondisement. Paris was all the requisites — the Luxembourg Gardens, the great elms along the banks of the Seine, the smoke-filled magnificence of the Closerie de Lilas, the marble and pastels of the Musée D’Orsay, an abundance of cafés, white-shirted waiters serving sandwiche mixtes and bottles of wine. Paris was as beautiful and perfect as I remembered it, and probably even more so for Brittany, who saw it for the first time.

Looking back, I realize we left something behind in Paris, something we could never retrieve again. We were under the spell of motion, giddy with adventure, and we did not know that we were coming into something new, something bright and sad and wonderful in its own way.

The second half of our trip took us west, across the cool, sunny countryside of the Great Lakes. We tasted the ice wines of Niagara-by-the-Lake, drank beer in a bar outside Wrigley Field, made love at the Talbott Hotel, then again in a La Quinta somewhere in Wisconsin, and then again in Keystone, South Dakota, with the yellow-lit profile of George Washington watching over us from the nearby mountaintop. We made love almost every night on the American road, and most nights it was twice or even three times.

We did not make love in the mountains of Wyoming. It was her first time camping in a real pine forest, and she was worried about the bears smelling us inside the tent. I showed her how to collect the wood for the fire and we cooked buffalo burgers and beans, stayed up late to watch the stars, shared a bottle of red wine from Provence, and mused about the telepathy of birds and dolphins as the dusklight turned the mountains into impressionist paintings.

Once the fire had gone out, I swaddled her in the tent and we drifted off to sleep. A coyote howled in the distance. I squeezed her, felt her shivering. She laughed and kissed me, and I knew that this was making love too, and that it was perfect.

There is no better place to fall in love than the road.  Love on the road gains momentum, builds in speed and intensity as the miles run beneath the wheels. Our conversations taught us new and surprising things about each other as the Rockies swept by in a blurred tapestry of pine and silver. We sat side-by-side, but we were dancing with the countryside, dancing with the wind, with the music of the road.

As we crossed over the Canadian border into Vancouver, our love ripened, our song crescendoed… and something happened that had never happened before.

It happened in a room in the Hotel Opus. That day we had strolled through the fairyland trails of Stanley Park, kissing on benches overlooking the sea. After a fine dinner we had returned to the hotel, drunk and euphoric, and had fallen together onto the bed.

It was the last time we would make love as young and naïve children, clumsy, happy, careless, and completely free. It was the best it ever was that night in the Hotel Opus, something different and altogether new.

Afterwards she sat up against the headboard.  “Couldn’t you have stopped?” she asked me.

“I don’t know what happened.”

“What are we going to do?”
I did not know what to say. My mind was a clean blue canvas, my thoughts high above the cloud-line. Something else was controlling the forces of time and place at that moment, leading us somewhere unknown.

“There’s only one way to be sure,” I said.

“What do you mean?”

I looked her hard in the eyes.
“We should do it again.”

Now her heart was beating across the bed, just as it had on that day I had asked her to marry me, standing atop Mount Royal with the city below us.

Again we lay down, and now there was nothing to hold us back. Now it was better, even better than before, more heavenly, more surreal, more shining, more divine.

Author’s note: Aubrey Lynn Reiter was born thirty-eight weeks later, at the Cape Canaveral Hospital.  It was just after sunrise, and a few high pink clouds reflected in the river outside.  It was the first day of spring.