Choose Your Own Adventure — Open Swim

By Paulette Perhach

You may have seen us, on a random weekday after work hours: Two adults, on Vilano Beach, riding the waves on body boards and yelling the kinds of things kids yell while waving their arms and running toward a playground.

It’s become a tradition we call Thursday Open Swim, though it can fall on any day of the week. And we never swim. We just ride our boards. Body boards. Sometimes, to my further embarrassment, I accidentally call it boogie boarding, like my mother.

“It’s body boarding,” cool people tell me.

Either way, it’s not surfing, which is what the cool kids do in this beach town. Body boarding is what the little kids do until they’re old enough to get a summer job and a surf board.

So it’s a little embarrassing when I’m on my board and a wave is shooting me right toward a couple walking by, holding hands and looking off into the horizon. Their ankles come right at my eye level as I nearly crash into them and ruin their long walk on the beach.

They see that I’m in my mid-20s before they have a chance to mutter “damn kids.”

Or worse, two people will be sitting right there, enjoying beverages, when a wall of whitewash rips away my board and rolls me up on the beach, my bikini pulled to parts it’s not supposed to cover and my bottoms carrying a load of sand that looks just wrong.

I always hope not to wash up to see someone I know in real adults-don’t-boogie-board-life.

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STUFF YOU NEED TO KNOW
Where: Anywhere the waves are crashing
Gear: Body board, available at fine surf shops, tourist traps and drug stores
Cash: $10 to $50 for a board. $3 for band-aids for the boo boos.
Top secret: Once there’s white on the wave, it’s too late to take it. Look for a well-formed crest, get in position and swim like crazy. Then hang on.

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The worst is when we come board-to-board with surfers. I’m standing there, pale, with my maybe-you-should-consider-a-one-piece belly, holding a piece of Styrofoam with a bottom cracked from too many slams into the bottom. My ponytail has been tussled and smushed to the side. Sometimes my knees are bleeding from getting dragged in the shells.The surfers always have their long, shiny boards hung under arms defined by a lifetime of surfboard pushups. We give them a nod as they walk by; maybe the same nod of a driver of a Mercedes gets from one in a Ford Taurus.

But we forget about them as soon as we get in the water. We dive in between the waves crashing on Vilano. Bad timing often tumbles me back to land as I search for my board and try again. But you always have to swim back out. That’s the rule.

When you catch a wave at the perfect moment, which is right before the top crumbles into white, you feel the energy lift you up on its back. Then it falls out from under you and the nose of your board tips like a rollercoaster over the drop into the smash of shells and surf. As you hold on to your board in the moment when you might be flung off, you can’t help but let out some kind of scream, even if there are cute surfers walking down the beach.

Of course, I usually catch waves wrong. They crumble into a ball and slam me into the ground with the same force that turns shells to sand. Then the wave rakes me against the sharp edges of the beach and deposits me on higher ground, receding its cover while I feel for where my bathing suit ended up. But somehow, even that’s become part of the fun now.

We end our swims out of breath, hands on hips looking back out at the ocean. We compare our raspberries and blood loss.

And when I’m back in my cubicle, the scabs remind me that I wasn’t at home watching TV the night before. I was outside embarrassing myself, and I couldn’t be prouder.

Infobox
Where: Anywhere the waves are crashing
Gear: Body board, available at fine surf shops, tourist traps and drug stores
Cash: $10 to $50 for a board. $3 for band-aids for the boo boos.
Top secret: Once there’s white on the wave, it’s too late to take it. Look for a well-formed crest, get in position and swim like crazy until it takes you. Then hang on.