[Non-fiction] Far From Any Coast by Joe Cusick

Far From Any Coast

Joe Cusick

The surfer lives an enticing lifestyle. I remember as a kid watching clips of cheeky dudes and beautiful women partying on ocean beaches. Cameras capturing shots of young people emerging from tropical warm water and running barefoot down a sandy shore. Or a gaggle of surfers straddling their boards, suspended at sea, waiting for the next glossy set as the sun rises.         

But a landlocked state creates limitations for this lifestyle. Namely, the lack of ocean. So, when I heard through a long chain of mutual friends about river surfing, my eagerness to indulge was overwhelming.

In some ways it makes sense why river surfing attracted me. I am not a wavy-haired, bloodshot-eyed, shirtless and shoeless, Sean Penn–esque, go-with-the-flow type of guy. River surfing attracted me because I didn’t have to fit this persona, living in some laid-back beach town with sun-toned skin and puka shell necklace. The endless, stationary river waves also piqued my interest. There’s no waiting for a perfect swell. The wave is just there, waiting for you to jump in and hopefully catch it. When you do, no need for quick pop-ups, no crashing into other surfers. Just indefinite riding.

The first day I tried surfing the river, I went with a friend, John, who was also grieving a lack of ocean upbringing. We went to the Yellowstone River in June. The river then was frigid from snowmelt in the high mountains. There’s an irrigation pump there that creates a wave in the muddy spring waters. A cement wall with a manually turned wheel adjusts the gauge, although it's always locked in place, and some unseen mechanism washed out below the water’s surface creates a hydraulic jump. A wave that can only be reached from a slick dirt road, which crosses private ranch land and a railroad, the owners of which only recently allowed public access after consistent surfer inquiry.

On this first attempt, the water was around 40 or 50 degrees Fahrenheit. I had my dad’s windsurfing half suit from the ’90s. It was neon pink, yellow, and orange and fit like a crusty sock after decades of collecting dust in the garage.

John and I shared a windsurfing board that day—excluding the sail—which we could barely hold under our arms. The one other surfer there had stared at us slack-jawed, his zinc-covered face awestruck. He must have thought we were insane. And given that he was also surfing among the farmland, ruminating on the scent of cow pie, alone, his threshold for insanity must’ve been high. We didn’t surf that day, let alone catch the wave. We were mostly swept downriver, lugging back that heavy board along the bank through dense willow and grasses.

Years later I am still surfing in the river. I pop up from my knees. I am sluggish. I have poor posture. I carve slowly. Still, I miraculously learned to stand up on a board here, in the middle of Montana.

Now, my frontal lobe is, to the best of my knowledge, fully developed. I can better assess risk. Many times I’ve waited in line for a wave while a gaggle of surfers yells, “Log!” The rider pulls back and swims downstream, narrowly avoiding being struck by a large fallen tree. I can’t help but imagine my own body being towed behind a piece of wood, bouncing along the rocky river bottom like a kite in dull wind.

So, surfing never instilled in me much confidence; it only humbled. Some days I’ll arrive at the wave feeling like an athlete. My legs limber, my arms strong, I’ll feel right in the pocket, ready to catch limitless waves. A few moments later I’ll be struggling for breath after several long swims downstream. I lost my board once when my leash cord broke. I thrashed in a frantic swim downriver to retrieve it while my knees bonked on submerged boulders. I’ve missed countless eddy swims back upstream. I’ve torn my wetsuit falling on my ass walking down a rocky shore. I’ve dinged my board while tripping in the same way.

 When there’s more than one person on a wave, you will be watched. You aren’t paddling around a break looking for a wave, with constant movement and adjustment.

On the river you are getting ready to jump in, standing and waiting your turn in line. There’s only one person in the wave with everyone else hawkishly observing. To watch is to get pointers on surfing approaches from the current surfer, an analysis of their failures and successes. This increases the potential for performance anxiety. I am nervously aware of all spectators, oftentimes flopping when I launch onto my surfboard on my belly. The rapid thrashing of my arms through the water proves futile, and suddenly I’m too far back and am pulled out on a lonely downriver swim.

And as mentioned earlier, rivers here are cold. Butthole-puckering cold. A few surfers I know here have had to get ear surgery because the cold water causes an inner ear bone spur. Additionally, surfers in Hawaii don’t find themselves pulling on a full-body diaper before a session. They also probably aren’t excited when they urinate themselves for the burst of warmth in the pelvic region, luckily an act fully hidden from surrounding surfers. To the point of frontal lobe development, this full-body wetsuit-diaper phenomenon points to a Freudian complex.

All the odds of the river surfer are stacked against them. It’s freshwater, meaning it’s less buoyant and harder to catch. The waves are violent and thick. There are always, eventually, hazards downstream. Fallen trees, rocky rapids, bridge pylons. And the flows dictate whether the waves will even be surfable, often for only a few months out of the year. And with a rapidly changing climate, the threats of drought and rising temperatures seem to be shortening this surfing window.

So why do it?

A few years back I took a haphazard road trip from Montana to Mexico with a few rapscallion friends. In between drunken margarita nights at a local bar and a vendor convincing us to buy overpriced sombreros after feeding us shots of tequila, my friend Casey and I tried our hands in some ocean surfing. Casey, being from San Francisco, knows how to surf the ocean and proved to be a valuable resource for me in understanding the water—understanding the peaks, paddle timing, direction—this was all very foreign and difficult. We were out on our boards a few hours every day for a week with sunburned noses and retinas. My cheap foam board and poor coordination led to very few waves. But despite the surfing challenges, I found the ocean incredibly freeing. I was young, careless, and naive, wanting to create a memory of surfing in Mexico during my youth—looking forward to a time in the future when Mexico was a rosebud to a life of surfing. I’d tell my kids, “There I was, learning to sit on my board in the water of northern Baja, feeling the salt crisp my hair and face.”

I try to apply this feeling of freedom that the ocean gave me to the rivers. After all, the cycles of precipitation mean that all this water is the same.

Now, seven years later, Casey and I are still surf friends, but here, in Montana. He surfs his winters in California but comes back to the river for summer. I am still hanging on to my home. I surf here because I want the open ranges, vivid winters, vast mountain ranges, fly-fishing, and the quiet west.

I asked Casey which he prefers, river or ocean surfing. He said that ocean surfing was better, but the river had an edge. An incongruous appeal. Casey agreed that river surfing made no sense. There you are, standing in a river, feeling like you’re flying forward while stationary; the treadmill of surfing. Around you aren’t potential sharks, coral, or urchins, but bears, trout, mountain lions, and forest. An immense sense of accomplishment arises. An attitude of “Forget your coastline; I’ll surf where I want, damn it, even if that means tumbling through a freezing white water wave train. Even if that means I have to wait eight months out of the year to surf at all. Even if that means riding flat waves if that’s what the conditions allow. I’m a river surfer because it’s ridiculous.”

I am writing this now while camping alone in the farthest inland rainforest of the US, in northern Idaho. There’s crashing water reverberating against green and misty canyon walls. Around me are unseen wild animals, and the nearest towns potentially harbor conspiracy theorists, neo-Nazis, and evangelicals. I am in an unsettling part of the country during a tumultuous time. And I’m here in solidarity of all the stubborn river surfers who do this because it’s weird. Because they want to embrace this obscure, niche, and strange sport, to increase the accessibility of surfing beyond the coastlines of the world. Even in unusual places like northern Idaho.

And I think about the contentment of being in that ice water. The wave crashing and billowing behind that large submerged rock. Without sound, its unpredictable nature takes the form of a bedsheet wafting in the wind. The glassy clear water melted from the mountain peaks. The mossy ground and dripping ferns. The “What?” you yell above the sound of the raging river, wondering what the surfer behind you asked. Feeling the water’s calm current when washed out in an eddy, bobbing around with your toes and belly to the sky. All surfers search for this attitude in the water, and their similarities transcend geography. Surfing is an act of acceptance, a subservience to the life force of water. And like the ocean, the river sustains this feeling and is a place of openness, falling, sacrifice, and peace.