I stare at the waves from the Pleasure Pier boardwalk, whose glittering Ferris wheel makes a quirky beachside town in Texas look a bit like Santa Monica, California. Galveston’s low-key surf is often described as “crumbly,” which sounds like a cookie to me. But it rained the previous day, and the waves are sudsy, like a giant washing machine spilling with foam.
Galveston is not the best place to surf (Hawaii, probably). And it’s not even the best place to surf in Texas (South Padre, probably). But its modest waves rolling to shore make it a decent place to learn. The surf spots, conveniently located off beaches along the Seawall, offer a good launching pad for a sport that lacks easy entry.
At 49, I’ve never surfed, but I’m surfing-curious—a dangerous thing for me. Surfing is man vs. nature distilled to its essence, even if that man happens to be a woman. The first time the writer Jack London spotted a human on a surfboard, in the aquamarine waves of Waikiki, Hawaii, he was taken by the elegant mastery. “Where but the moment before was only the wide desolation and invincible roar, is now a man, erect, full-statured,” he wrote in a story called “Surfing: A Royal Sport” that would kick-start the American love affair with finding the perfect wave. This was 1911, and the idea of riding the water on a slender slice of wood was inconceivable to London, a swashbuckler who worked the Klondike Gold Rush and sailed the globe during an era when most Americans still toiled on farms.
“Full-statured” sounds like a tall order for me. My main goal is avoiding humiliation. A handful of surfers dot the gulf at 8 a.m. as I watch from the pier, but those folks look like they know what they’re doing. Forty-nine is not the ideal age to learn to
