All I really need to know, I learned on a rubber raft

“What’s it like to ride a wave?” asked the Missoula, Montana native with whom I fly-fished, side by side in the Blackfoot River. “Were you a surfer?”

I stifled a chuckle to recall the only time I’d taken a stab at the sport: Having snagged first prize—a long board—in a 1965 KRLA radio contest, I couldn’t even balance on it in my own swimming pool. Hang ten wasn’t happening.

“I tried body surfing for awhile,” I boasted, concealing the truth of the matter: I had risked life and limb one Corona del Mar summer to impress a young paramour and, after losing a bikini and the boyfriend, called it quits.

“I really liked to ride a raft,” I told her, intentionally skimming over the earlier grade school era during which my mother took me to the Goodyear Tire warehouse on Arroyo Pkwy in Pasadena to purchase black rubber inner tubes manufactured from automobile tires—my presence necessary to ensure proper fit. No colorful, flimsy, Balboa Island toy-store inflatable for this daughter! These tight-waisted donuts were as durable as a station wagon wheel—and needless to say, far from the envy of any boss Balboa beachgoer. I bobbed—surfing you couldn’t really call it.

Somewhere around age 45, emblematic of a mid-life mortality crisis, the shore break off Newport seemed suddenly far too daunting (had it always crashed so unforgivingly?) But in my youth? Ahhhhh….in my youth…then I was a creature of the sea. I was paddling in it by dawn and had to be dragged from it at dinner by the worrier woman who bore me, then spent every single summer day pacing parallel to the pounding surf off 10th Street, bellowing against the breeze and wildly gesturing with the wave of an arm to “Get back over here!”

No need to fret: My rubber platform provided stable ground on which to chisel through whitewater and slide up safely on the sand. Not a moment’s rest and I was back out again, stroking like some aquiline goddess, hair dripping with seaweed, out to where it was all about the drift, out past the waves where the current carried you down the beach until the umbrella you’d identified “home base” couldn’t be seen with binoculars.

As with most undertakings that I wrestled to the ground like a Sumo before ever really consulting any rubric, I learned about rescue the hard way. At a high school Laguna Beach party I no sooner spread towel on sand than I grabbed my raft and paddled out toward the endless summer—which it nearly was when a rip current got hold of me and within moments the shore and everyone on it was a distant dream.

“Don’t fight it!” I heard faintly from the cupped hands of the on-duty, adorable lifeguard who subsequently tore through the shallow ripples, orange life buoy tucked under one arm, His perfect physique slapped into the five-foot surf and swam to me like Shamu-superman. My classmates convened on dry land to gawk in horror. Can I admit now that secretly I loved the attention?

“Don’t swim straight; the rip’s too strong—go sideways! “ he pointed with the neon preserver once he reached my side, “out of the rip tide and then into the safety of shore. It may be the long way around, but at least you’ll get there.” Indeed, one of life’s valuable lessons.

“In fact,” I told my Montana fishing companion where we stood unscathed, only knee-high in calm water, “I learned a lot from those splendid summers when I spilled from raft to ruin and was often churned like dough and hairballs in a high-speed blender.” These things cannot be gleaned on stiller shores.

Paddle hard, but keep home base within reach. If you find yourself getting carried away, back up, swim sideways—even if you have to forgo the shorter route. You’re never too old for an inner tube, and there is no shame in clinging to your raft to avoid peril to limb and …life? Well, life, as we already know, is a beach.