The biggest ocean waves I’ve ever seen with my own eyes were off the California coast. I think it was Point Reyes, but it might have been some other gorgeous windswept piece of northern California. I was on vacation there with Michele, Jarrett, and Melina ten years ago, and we were driving from San Francisco north, to the Redwoods. We stopped at Point Reyes for the view, and for a half hour we just ate a snack and watched huge waves break offshore and send spray and rumbles of sound up the grassy cliffs towards us. The “dangerous waves” signs posted were the least necessary objects I’ve ever encountered in my life. You couldn’t have dragged me any closer to the ocean with a tractor. 

Despite the fact that the North Shore of Oahu has some of the biggest, most famous surfing waves in the world, they gain their epic size in winter storms, and I was there in summer. The biggest waves I’ve ever willing been in, and tossed around by, were when Jim tried to teach me to surf while he lived in Hawaii. The four-foot surf on the military base beaches barely constituted “waves” by Hawaii standard, but it was where Jim was learning, and he tried to teach me. I couldn’t even paddle the board out over the incoming crests without getting thrown back and tumbling over again and again. We tried for the better part of an hour, until my shoulders were burning from fatigue. Jim went out to catch a couple of actual waves, while I built a sand-castle, or something equally pitiful. I felt weak and wounded, and my spirit was temporarily as bruised as my body. 

One weekend night later that summer, I had gone out to a local bar with Jim and friends, and while the night cranked up for most, my mood didn’t match it. I took the walk a couple of blocks to the beach (there was always a beach a couple blocks away – unless you were already on a beach) to be alone to indulge my mood. It takes a special cocktail of narcissism, homesickness, and twenty-year-old male hormones to be sad on a moonlit beach in Hawaii, but I achieved it. I’d also had a couple of actual cocktails. I don’t think there was a good reason to feel sad that day. It was Hawaii, for free, living with my brother, my idol. I was just sad for a bit. When I got to the beach, I walked along the water’s edge until the lamps and signs from the road dimmed. I sat down in knee deep water, womb warm. The waves came up to my shoulders and for a while I just waited, feeling the water pull sand from beneath my heels and buttocks, wondering how floating away would feel. The waves rocked me back and forth in that lulling rhythm that soothes a baby, and it did the same for me. I looked out at the deep dark ocean in front of me embodying how small my problems felt, thankfully not how small I felt, while the white noise of the beach floated me above my self-pity. The moonlight was bright, like it is tonight, and lit me up a little. I don’t remember how long I was there. It was more than a millisecond, and less than a thousand years.