Endless Summer

Afew years ago, Thad Ziolkowski crashed into middle age jobless and out of shape. “I had an armchair slouch,” the poet and onetime surfer admits in his debut, “On a Wave.” “My hair, once bright, was a lank dishwater blond; teeth yellow from Camel Lights; pad of fat around my waist, care of Guinness.”

Fed up with this crummy existence, Ziolkowski headed to Queens’ Far Rockaway Beach one day, thinking a glimpse of a wave, however oily and small, might rejuvenate him. He strolled into a surf shop and inhaled the odors of neoprene and resin. All at once, memories of his childhood came flooding back.

Thus begins Ziolkowski’s evocative memoir of growing up in the late 1960s, when surfing was his religion and the ocean his “pagan cathedral.” The book proper begins in 1968, when Thad is 8 and his family moves from Alabama to Florida’s eastern shoreline. Although his mother and her moody boyfriend, Pat, are excited by this fresh start, Thad isn’t too thrilled. He enrolls in Apollo Elementary; pale and pudgy in a land of bronzed skin, he is taunted by other students.

Due to this snubbing, Thad gravitates toward the beach, where older teenagers suck down joints before paddling out into the waves. For months, Thad begs his mother to buy him a board so he too can surf. On his 10th birthday, he finally gets one, and through steady emulation, learns to stand up on it. Soon he is throwing in twists, leaping off the lip of waves and riding all the way to shore.

As his skills progress, surfing becomes Thad’s obsession, and Ziolkowski beautifully captures the way the sport defined his life. It’s an occult world with free-love undertones. Every day, Thad rubs Sex Wax on his Plastic Fantastic, zips into a wetsuit and surfs until his eyeballs bleed. When he and his friends ride bicycles, they imagine they’re on their boards, tracing miniature S-shapes on the pavement. At night they fall asleep in their swimming trunks, “whispering about waves and surf stars.”

Like Daniel Duane’s 1996 memoir “Caught Inside,” “On a Wave” goes beyond the lore of the sport and brings to life its natural venue. At first, the beach seems a strange and dangerous place to Thad. “It’s littered with Portuguese man-of-wars, electric-blue tentacles snarled on the sand. The flotillas writhe and stretch, gleaming like internal organs.” Over time, though, it evolves into a place of holy tranquillity. One morning, the sky is an “Arctic blue, so high and stretched so thin that it seems on the verge of vanishing, of revealing all.”

Though Ziolkowski’s language is as brisk and frothy as Hawaiian surf, what makes this memoir so affecting is how he mines his emotional life as a child. At first surfing is a way for Thad to duck Pat’s volcanic mood swings. Yet after Pat and his mother marry, Thad dedicates himself to developing a keener understanding of the man. After all, Pat is the one who comes with him to buy the first board; later, when Thad spills, Pat is there to patch him up.

As Thad nears the end of high school, his surfing nearly becomes his occupation. If he keeps going, he’s looking at a pro career. But before Thad can make a decision that might change his life forever, Pat gets a job in Wichita, Kan., and the family abruptly abandons the beach for a landof silos and endless horizons.

This may sound like a pretty standard turning point of adolescence--forfeiting that which one has known for something new--but given how effectively Ziolkowski conjures his boyhood world, it’s hard not to wince at this leave-taking. It’s also easy to understand why, from a distance of nearly 30 years, Ziolkowski sat down and put pen to paper to bring it all back again.

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From ‘On a Wave’

I wrapped the leash around my ankle, peeled off my shirt and ran down the sand. The man and two kids stopped digging to watch me plunge into the shallows like a horse.

The warm foamy water splattered my thighs and baggies. I held the board out in front of me and leapt, floating briefly, and when I came down and started paddling, a deep Ahhhh! rose from me like a vapor, all the toxins of New York, the cigarette smoke and second-guessing, alcohol and elbow-throwing and worry about work. Every cell in my body opened its mouth in astonishment and sang with happiness.

This truly was the same Atlantic I’d grown up in. The rhythm of the water, the way the waves mobbed through the bluish later afternoon light--it was like opening a book to a poem I’d memorized in childhood.

After a minute, a wedge-shaped peak lurched up in front of me. I turned and paddled for shore. I noticed the pressure of my chest on the board, the spray in my face, a blade of light on the glassy surface below.

Then, as it gathered me up, I hopped to my feet. It was going to be a short ride. Sucking everything up into itself, the wave prepared to close out in shallow, sand-choked water.

My mind went blank; I leaned into a turn and rose back up the face of the wave. Then, without really deciding to, I attempted an off-the-lip--which was a bit like climbing on a bike for the first time in forever and trying to pop a wheelie.

But I did it. Or rather, it did itself: the nose of the board punched through the crest of the wave and snapped back around and at the bottom I stayed on my feet, bouncing up and down in knee-high white water before flopping off the board.

When I surfaced, another jet was bearing down on Queens. I’d forgotten where I was.

I looked back at the beach--at the housing projects, the man and kids. It was all still there, of course, but I was seeing it as through a membrane. Land no longer seemed real.

The ocean did, though. Even here at the foot of a crumbling Babylon, it was alive and well.