Endless Early Spring

By Regina Coll
Web Exclusive, March 20, 2006

My boys are 14 and 16 years old, which means that many years ago I literally had to carry them on my hip if I wanted to get anywhere. I still spend a great deal of time directing their activity, and driving—always driving—but their own legs manage to keep them upright on land, and on water. We live outside Washington D.C., which is not a town readily associated with surfing. Yet a trip to Hawaii four years ago deeply branded my children with the experience of wave riding. In Lahina, this seemed charming, allowing me to boast and shower friends with Gidget-y pictures of novice riders. But now the waves are bigger, and they go out farther, making me wish sometimes they were still riding on my hip.

This year I had the opportunity to spend a few days with my teenage sons on what I can only call my first road trip. We had been planning a family getaway for spring break since the winter holidays ended, and this year it happened that their spring break fell over a period of two weeks in March after an early Easter. When my husband Rob and I examined our various schedules, we were left with only a 5-day vacation window—not enough time for a fly-away vacation, and too long to visit relatives. Instead we came up with the prefect getaway—a surfing road trip. I had no clue that it would turn out to be the dearest, most revitalizing vacation I had ever had, as well as present my children to me as young men of passion and determination. These qualities often lie dormant in their everyday suburban mumble-shuffle, but for five days, the boys were positively ignited by music, water and fiberglass.

My elder son, Opie (short for Owen Patrick), is the surf-pusher in our house. He subscribes to surfing magazines, papers his bedroom walls with exploding curls or flowing mountains, and wakes most mornings to the soft glow of the sun coming up over Ocean City on the beach web cam. We have many surfing videos in the house, most of which are modeled after Bruce Brown's surfing travelogue "Endless Summer" which follows two intrepid surfers across the globe in search of waves. Opie's brother Tommy also surfs, but with a sensibility about him—unlike his brother—that allows him other urban interests like soccer and baseball. However, Tommy has an equally unbalanced fixation; his is with music. Recorded, live, original, covers, old, new, jazz, classic, metal, R&B—I think he has woven it all into his heart.

Finally there's water. As a family, we are preoccupied with this element. Two natal water signs, dreams of water, blue rooms, birdbaths, pool memberships, a sailboat—even a wet basement - water rules our family. We often drive six hours in a single day in order to spend five hours at the Delaware beaches.

But last March the water was still too cold for the boys to surf Delaware with their lightweight wet suits, so we spent some time on the web reviewing the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration's data maps for water temperature and storm activity in the Atlantic. After a thorough review, and disappointment over the fact that there were NO storms anywhere in the Atlantic (storms churn up the surf), we settled on South Carolina's Charleston area for this trip. I thought that if the weather was bad or the water was flat, we could at least sneak in a bit of culture.

We invited Opie's lifelong friend Isiah to ride along and left at 2:30 am with three surfboards carefully strapped to the top of the van. As morning broke on the interstate, I was surprised at the lack of other van-vacationers on the road, and realized that I hadn't seen anyone else on the highways with boards. Where were all the other surfing families on Spring Break going? Did they ship their boards ahead of them? Where they going to rent boards when they got to the beach? Our trip started out with a lot of questions - in retrospect, a road trip hallmark.