Bien Olas

One of the greatest tragedies of getting to live on the coast for 3 years, is experiencing the pleasure of learning how to surf and then moving away. To begin to finally understand what poets, writers, and beach bums have been prophesizing about. There are very few activities outside of illegal substances that will cause members of society to simply leave it all for a sand crusted existence. Its not easy to give it all up just for the surf. The cost of living in the best surf towns is unattainable for even the most wealthy. The surfers are left to living the “van life” or bumming on peoples couches. Stacked four to a room in a shared house, splitting a 5k monthly rent between the 7 of them. Rotating between temporary jobs that leave enough time for surfing and are not draining enough to leave you exhausted. If you cant make it in the US there are plenty of cheap beach towns across the world that surfers flock to. Living in an affordable home with no wifi and little contact with the world but all the waves you could ever want.

There is very little I enjoyed while living in Corpus Christi Texas. A town built in-between the fermenting shores of a salt marsh and a barrier island. Its a perfect place for industry and shipping, yet not so perfect to live. The entire city was constructed along a highway without a single tree in sight. A familiar Friday night activity is rotating between the Applebees or Chilis and maybe seeing a movie. If you can manage to make it to the beach, you might find it a rather harsh experience. The summers are brutally hot with a near constant onshore wind of 10mph. Not a single thing you set down will stay there as the water, sand or wind will take it away. People are allowed to park on the beach, turning the only positive attribute of the city into a parking lot. However, once the busy season cools and the tourists all head home, something very interesting happens. The Texas surfers emerge. With their shorty wetsuits and longboards they brave the whitewash and head to the sandbars to surf. The tiny Texas surfing community is as old as Corpus itself but almost completely unknown to the other coasts of the USA. When I tell people I learned to surf in Texas, many people respond with “they have beaches in Texas?”

The surf is mushy, the waves are weak and the weather is temperamental. It took me almost a year to stand up on the board successfully but once I did I was hooked. I got a surfoboard for chirstmas and later on a wetsuit to extend my season. My husband and I would go out in February when the air was almost 50 degrees and not another person was on the beach. We would spend most of the time paddling and eventually catch some good waves. By the time we made it home our lips were blue and we could hardly unzip our wetsuits. Its all we could think about. I started smelling like surf wax, and would begin every morning by checking the webcams and surf reports. You start to learn the rhythm of the ocean and be able to read the swells. Surfing gets easier because your timing gets better. You can predict when the wave will break and how much you need to paddle. You also start to notice the seasonal changes in the ocean. When are the mullet jumping, when are the turtles popping up. When are the dolphins close to shore. The locals start to look familiar and so do their boards. You can spot a few people from far away on your paddle out and can tell what kind of day its going to be. Afterwards when you are cleaning out surfwax from under your fingernails, sometimes they come by to chat or just say hi.

When my husband and I moved back to Austin for work, and friends, we kept our surfboards for almost a year. We hung them on the wall of our tiny west campus apartment. We kept saying we would go back regularly, maybe once a month and surf. But we couldn’t. We started to realize that if you were going to travel to go surfing, you might as well travel somewhere nicer than Corpus. We went to Costa Rica, California, and Florida. However, we never really got over the pain of missing the beach and the surf.

in 2017 Nland surf park opened in Austin as a waterpark esque adventure. Boasting some of the best manmade waves in the US, we had to go check it out. Could this be the thing we were looking for? The place to cure the hole in our hearts where surfing once was? The now bankrupt surf park was a magnet for all the landlocked surfers that moved to Austin for work. It felt like the park was made for people like us. Our first indication that things wouldn’t live up to our expectations happened right when we set foot in the water. The bottom of the man made lagoon was white plastic with razor sharp seams where the pieces were melted together. The water was brown, a result of using recycled rainwater for their park. We paddled out in groups of 5 with a “coach” who yelled instructions at us as we lined up along the wave. A loud mechanical sound initiated the beginning of our surf session as the mechanism zoomed past to push the water into the perfect wave. I caught the first wave and sat down on my board at the end of the lake, my coach yelling at me to hustle back to the beginning. It felt sterile, rushed, and absent of any feelings I experienced on the ocean.

Part of surfing is slowing down. Its not a sport for people in a hurry, people who need to be somewhere at 9am. I rented a board from a surfer in Costa Rica and he said I could have it for a couple hours. I asked him “when would you like me to bring it back” he responded “Qualquiera”, or whatever whenever you want. That’s the essence of surfing. You cant predict what the ocean will do or how you will feel. You paddle out with no expectations and see where the experience takes you. You cant manufacture that in a lagoon in the middle of Texas.