High Up Diamond Head Road…

High Up Diamond Head Road 1.21.2024

Sitting on an irregular volcanic stone wall high up Diamond Head Road, scores of surfers drifting down below.

It’s Hawai’i, man.

I’m just sitting here, being here, flirting uncharacteristically with the possibility that this could be something approaching “enough.”

There is an incessant roar, which you almost don’t even notice, because it never ends, it never ends, it never ends…And cars come and go, surfers to assess the surfing conditions, the angles, the winds, whatever surfers assess, others to take photos of the scene below and of the surfers assessing the surfing conditions. I am here to make notes on life in Hawai’i, in Polynesia, here on the edge of one small silver dollar universe flung out into the infinitude of Oceania.

Right here, all thoughts of money, my psychology practice, my Schwab portfolio, almost even my age (bloop single past 70) and “what comes next” are curiously uninteresting…

It’s the siren song, the Aloha Spirit, the Be Here Now, the “this is the only moment there is” of living in Hawai’i, and intentionally spending Sunday morning right on the edge of it.

Surfers are languaging all around me.

“Dude, it looked so much bigger when I looked on the cameras!”

“Dude, I saw the energy…but it’s OK…it’s kinda crumbly….Did you see the first day of the Pipe Window?” (I seriously did not add the “Dudes”–they were spoken…)

And the scores of surfers are mostly…not surfing. And it has always been clear to me that most of surfing is not about surfing, exactly, but sitting out in the water, the way hunters crouch in the blind. They don’t fire two hundred shots an outing. Sometimes they fire none. Likewise, surfers do not seem to catch twenty-five waves an outing—Indeed, some seem to catch close to zero, and yet they are somehow, evidently, NOT missing the point, as one might have guessed.

There is another point altogether—that seems clear.

As a non-member of the surfer club, I am not privy to that point—I can only guess, and, after all, it doesn’t matter.

One surfer apologizes for interrupting my journaling. He knows I, too, have a point, and he respects it, whatever it is. He pats my shoulder. He’s just trying to decide whether the steep trek down Diamond Head is worth it today.

He assesses the situation.

“That’s the spot right there (pointing well to the north)…that’s catching the same angle, as this spot (pointing well to the south)—75 people over on that wave…the tide doesn’t impact it as much…see it kind of bending around? And that one just pushes, pushes…and bends this way? And out, rather than in…They know….They know…Hey, enjoy your week…” as he heads on down…)