For most of my life, I’ve had a recurring nightmare. It’s dusk, the light is fast fading from the day, and I’m headed to the ocean to surf. I arrive to find that the waves are perfect; head high, clean, a good tide, and all my friends are out. There’s a rush of excitement, met immediately with the realization that I don’t have any of my surf gear.
My heart begins to race, and a fist clenches in my stomach. There’s barely enough light left in the day for me to get my gear and make it back before it’s dark. But I run home, grab the things I need, and rush back to the beach. I race to get ready, only to find I’ve forgotten another essential piece of equipment. The sky has grown darker, the day slips further away, the fist clenches tighter. I’m frantic. I run home and back to the beach again and again, until the light is gone. I never make it into the water. I never have all the things I need, and I am flooded with an urgency and stress that stays in my body long after I wake.
At the end of a short January day, as the sun is dipping into the ice-rimmed salt marsh, Eli and I pull up to a favorite surf spot on the New Hampshire coast near where she lives. We walk out onto the cobbles and look into the dusk. Dark lines of swell are wrapping around a rocky point and rolling into a sheltered cove. Smooth waist-high waves break pristinely over a shallow reef that sits just below the calm surface of the water. I look west. The sun is gone. Can we make it out in time to surf? A surge of urgency rises in my belly, the memory of the nightmare heavy and alive.
We run toward the orange and yellow sky, back to the truck, and take out our boards. We pull on wetsuits as fast as we can, glancing up at the sky through naked trees as we wax our boards, then scramble over slippery cobblestones and out onto the broad beach. We run over firm, wet sand, the light of the sunset at our backs, toward a dark ocean and slate sky.
We paddle out and find our spot on the reef where the wave stands and breaks over the shallow pile of tumbled stones. Even though the sun is below the horizon, the sky is still full of light in the west. In the east, the sky is dark purple, fading overhead into a lighter blue.
Some days, the sun dips below the horizon, and the world turns suddenly ink black. Tonight, the sky holds the memory of the sun for as long as it can, and dusk spreads for a slow hour; day and night seem to linger, sharing a long moment together at the door as one leaves and the other arrives.
The water, too, seems in no hurry to be anywhere. Waves roll in patiently, building as they stand over the reef, letting us in with just a few paddles, and then hollowing, stretching into long clean walls running into the cove. I catch one, crouch low, nearly sitting on my board, riding far back in the curling pocket of the wave, resting my hand against the glassy face of the wave. My gaze rests a few feet further out along the wave’s building edge. As the wave stands, it finds the light of the western sky and wears all its color on its surface.
The water is smooth as oil, so free of ripples and texture that even as the wave breaks there is no way to tell it’s in motion. Only the sense in my body, the gentle push of water against my hand and the cool breeze on my face tell me I’m flying.
I’m in a trance, my eyelids so heavy and soft they nearly close. I feel none of the urgency of my nightmares. There is no pain in the loss of light, no sense of suffering in the slipping away, and no fight in me. My body is calm and warm. I’m fully present, deep in this moment, immersed in the transition, a part of the fading. It’s a sunset as surreal and spacious as a dream.
