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Bodysurfing considered as a historical practice

June 18, 2017 by Steve Mentz 4 Comments

What a piece of work is a wave!

Last Wednesday in golden afternoon light, I spent a perfect hour bodysurfing the Jersey shore with my daughter. We’d swim into the curl and plunge down the face into white water that would carry us over the elongated beach of low tide. Sometimes — if we stayed with the wave til its end — we’d be brought up short by a final thump into broken shells and a more steeply slanting beach. We’d laugh, flip ourselves over, and head back out for the next wave.

My father taught me to bodysurf the beaches of Bay Head, NJ, when I was younger than Olivia is now. I’ve been splashing over the same sand since the 1970s, though this past week was my first trip back there since my prophetic parents sold the beach house two years before Hurricane Sandy tore up the shore.

End of the ride

Bodysurfing memories are mostly physical: the vast shudder with which the wave lifts you into itself, a sudden plunge down the face, the pressure on my hands when I hold them together in front of me, knifing through the white water. To keep from scraping my belly, I end each ride by jamming the heels of my hands down into the sand, arching myself up as the last inch of water surges past.

I’m a head-down bodysurfer, in a New Jersey style that almost broke my neck when I tried it at my college room-mate’s home in La Jolla, CA, in 1989.

Heading back out

“You hold your hands together in front of you,” I told Olivia last week, as my Dad told me four decades ago. “Your hands work like the prow of a boat. They hold you in the wave, while the wave pushes you forward. Between the two, you can ride all the way up to the beach.”

I’ve bodysurfed lots of other places. Coogee Beach in Sydney, in the last few months of 1989. Venice and Point Mugu on either side of LA, in the early ’90s. Carpenteria, CA. Jacksonville, FL, where my parents live now. Rhode Island. Portugal. I unlocked peak academic ocean-nerdiness one early morning at Hendry’s Beach in Santa Barbara, when I lured a bunch of professors and grad students into wetsuits for a pre-plenary bodysurfing session at BABEL 2014. One especially memorable afternoon in  July 1996 I bodysurfed the usually too-cold waters of Muir Beach, CA, the day before I got married.

But for me, and to my great good fortune also for Alinor and our two now-teenage kids, there’s no place that combines surf and history quite like the Jersey Shore.

What kind of human histories can waves tell? Stories that overflow with patterns and changes, without solidity, reforming themselves at each tide yet recognizable, familiar, even early in the season when the water is still cold.

On Saturday morning we needed to be out of our rental by 11 am, and two days of ocean breeze had churned up a surf a little bit, so I was the only one of the family to join the many surfers in the morning swell. I didn’t go all the way out for the bigger waves with the board-riders, but I caught a few nice ones.

I must be underwater somewhere

My favorite image — the first one in this post — shows me in the lower left walking slowing back out into the surf, through waist-high chop toward one small swell, a bigger one beyond it, and into currents of grey-green blending with fog and sky. I love the scale and density of this image. As somebody almost said, What a piece of work is a wave!

Photo credits Alinor Sterling 6/17/17

I can’t see my face, but I must be trying to read something.

 

 

Filed Under: Swimming, Uncategorized

Comments

  1. Frank Valentino says

    August 19, 2018 at 9:56 pm

    Great story!
    I’ve been Bodysurfing Monmouth County , NJ beaches for over 50 years. Really love the break at Deal Casino/Phillips Ave. Beach in Deal, has nice sandbar about 100 yards out that we stand on and jump into waves. We recently re-started The Long Branch Bodysurfing Club that began back at White Sands Beach Club in Long Branch in 1964.. If your are ever up our way email me and we can jump in water if tide is right.- – –
    See you in the waves
    Frank

    Reply
    • John says

      August 19, 2020 at 1:13 pm

      Is there a body surfing championship in south jersey?

      Reply
  2. Kris says

    November 7, 2019 at 2:20 pm

    My Dad taught me how to bodysurf head-down when I was about 8 years old back in the’70s. Every summer we’d go visit San Diego or Santa Barbara. Great times, great memories. Now as I look forward to retirement, my main focus will be to be near a beach that has decent bodysurfing!

    Reply
  3. Alan Vaks says

    November 28, 2020 at 10:40 pm

    I grew up bodysurfing Atlantic City, NJ. Later years I took up bodyboarding in California, Hawaii for a decade, back to Cali and norther Mexico. The last few years I started getting back into bodysurfing although a couple of mishaps have taken it’s toll on my body. I just moved to Lake Worth Florida and started getting serious about bodysurfing again. I started bodysurfing just before my 11th birthday spring 1952.

    Reply

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Steve Mentz
Professor of English
St. John’s University
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