Beginners by Tom Vanderbilt

Author:Tom Vanderbilt [Vanderbilt, Tom]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-01-05T00:00:00+00:00

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That evening, at the resort, the week’s guests gathered poolside with drinks on a set of low-slung couches for an introductory chat with Harry Knight, a tall, amiable Englishman who is one of Surf Simply’s founders.

Low lights shimmered in the humid night air, and soft music percolated in the background. People were casually but stylishly dressed, their faces warm with that glow of the tropics. The whole scene felt like a reality television show—maybe The Bachelor, given the roughly four-to-one female-to-male guest ratio.

We went around the circle. There was Danny, whom I had already met. He had a nervous energy—he always seemed to be scrounging for food—and a dry, unfiltered wit: the Jeff Goldblum character in our little Jurassic Park.

He joked that he was the poster boy for adult improvement, given that he was the very surfer depicted on the part of Surf Simply’s website that asks, “What Level Surfer Are You?” He is shown, wearing a hat for sun protection, riding “down the line” of a modest wave, competently if a bit stiffly. Behind him, meanwhile, a Surf Simply instructor, having executed a powerful “cutback,” is propelling up the face of the wave, his board already beginning to launch into the air.

It’s a dramatic illustration of how differently one wave can be surfed by two persons of varying skill level. “I could go down the line constantly and I’d be perfectly happy in life,” he said. “But people always tell me I should do something else.” He was there with his wife, Ellen, who had surfed years before, then given it up when she had kids. She wanted back in.

There was another couple, Michael and Shari, from Montana. Each of them picked a trip every year—hers tended toward surfing, his, mountain biking. Shari had been to Nosara twice; it was Michael’s first time. Tall and easygoing, Michael had surfed for seven or eight years while living in California. “I’ve always found it extremely challenging to progress,” he said, “more so than a lot of other sports I’ve done.”

Shari, easy to spot in the water with her ever-present trucker hat, was quick to note that she lived in Montana and “didn’t look anything like a surfer”—that is, not lithe and blond. Like me, she was, in part, trying to get over the fear factor. “There aren’t many situations where you quite deliberately put yourself in the way of a big moving chunk of water that’s coming after you at twenty miles per hour. It’s intimidating.”

Ulrike, my bungalow mate, was a pediatrician from Germany who lived in the Midwest. She’d long dreamed of surfing, and her first time had been at the camp the previous year. She joked that she didn’t even know then which foot to place forward on the board. (Knight had an easy trick for this: “If you close your eyes, and have someone push you from behind, which foot goes forward?”) “I learned a lot in my head,” she said, “but just couldn’t translate it into action.

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