Posted by:
Misfit
(
)
Date: May 01, 2011 10:01AM
So I went to a funeral of a surfing buddy yesterday. Here, I will call him Rob. He was a fixture every morning at a particular surfing beach in Southern California, and whenever I surfed at this place, there was Rob, with a smile on his face and a story to tell. He surfed at this beach every morning during what we call the Dawn Patrol, which means paddling out at the first hint of twilight and being one of the first in the water that day. Rob always sat farther out than anybody else, and waited for the biggest waves.
Well, a few of Rob's buddies decided to have a paddle-out for him at his favorite beach. For the uninitiated, a paddle-out for a deceased surfer is when everybody paddles out on their surfboards, and joins hands in the water to form a big circle. They throw flowers in the middle, and sometimes there will be someone there to say something, and everyone will pray or whatever.
We thought it was just going to be a few of us. Well, there was easily over 100 people there, including his wife, his family, both immediate and extended, and alot of his friends. What was originally intended to be an informal gathering of a few ended up being the primary memorial service for his departure. The sun was out, the waves were up, there was an aromatic mixture of low tide and suntan lotion in the air. And here we were, gathered under a large picnic shelter to remember our friend at his favorite surfing beach. It was great. Rob's BIL brought a bible and said a few words. For one brief moment, that picnic shelter became a church, and that was perfectly OK. It was the best church I had ever been in. It had no walls, and a great view of the surf.
After the service, about 50 of us paddled out. When we got past the whitewater, someone said we were still too far in, so we paddled way further out, past the breakline, to be in calmer water for the main event. After several minutes, we finally managed to form a complete circle. We threw flowers into the circle, raised our joined hands, shouted his name several times over and over, and then splashed water in the into the air as a sort of aquatic grand finale. Just as soon as we had finished, someone yelled "Outside!", the common signal of the approach of a big wave. Sure enough, I turned around, and a big wave, bigger than all the rest that day, started cresting outside of us. We scattered, and a few of the guys that were in the right spot paddled for it and caught it, for our friend. People were saying that when that wave came, they knew that Rob was there with us, and that was his wave.
And now, to turn the story somewhat on topic, I immediately remarked to a nevermo atheist friend of mine, who knows about my disaffection from the mormon church, that I knew it was a coincidence, but it was almost enough to make me believe in god again. He simply remarked, "Thats why there is belief." His point being that belief helps people explain things and make sense of random events in our environment. Its human nature to put order to things that have no order. This tendency is what helped our earliest ancestors survive. I've surfed long enough to know that on any given day, there will always be one wave bigger than all the rest every so often. I know that if we'd held hands in that circle long enough, eventually a big wave would have come in. This one just happened to come in at the right time, gave comfort to everyone there, and made them believe, at that moment in time, that our lost friend was still with us. And that's perfectly fine. He was really there with us, he was there in our hearts and in our minds, and that wave gave shape to our collective thoughts.