Kitesurfing and healing at Nauset Beach

I was hungover, so I wasn’t even sure that I wanted to go to the beach. When Zoe suggested staying home and watching a movie, I was almost convinced.

In the end we drove to Nauset beach – my sister Emily, our friends Zoe, Sophie and Sarah, and I. Two other friends had been there since earlier in the morning. It was easy to spot Henry and Nate some way away, preparing to surf: two super skinny boys looking even skinnier in their black wet suits and, at a distance, swallowed up by the huge plains of the beach. They looked tiny from far away. Only a few others were out, dotted along the beach, shirts flapping, braving the wind.

We trudged towards them and got a bit colder as we went. I hadn’t thought to bring a sweatshirt and I regretted it. It was a cold, damp wind, unbreaking, coming from the north. We laid our towels near them and huddled while they did dry demos in the sand. Henry was showing Nate how to get up on the board, one knee first, then the other. They looked funny, lying on their boards in the sand, with the huge creature of the waves rising up behind them. It looked menacing. They looked nervous.

As they surfed – actually, as they tried and failed to get out past the break – we waited and watched.

It was the most alive I had felt in a long time. Dark gray clouds were gathering and swirling over the ocean, which was dark blue with bits of gray. The waves were big and frequent, crashing down on all the surfers desperately trying to get out past them. Seals bobbed their heads up and out of the water, and away again, and we couldn’t tell the surfers from the seals sometimes. Sophie talked about shark attacks and secretly hoped we would see one (not so our friends would die, just for the thrill of seeing a shark).

A kite surfer came soaring in from the left side of our panorama. He started from the shore, skimming his board over just a few inches of water, and sped past the break out so far we could barely see him. A tiny black figure buoyed along by a green kite, swooping and swirling in the gray sky.

His feet weren’t attached to his board – why, we wondered? – but he somehow climbed and danced and leapt in the waves, the board always landing perfectly beneath him. He was moving faster than a bike racer. I could picture the salt air slapping his face, and I wondered how alive he must have felt. I wondered what does the quality of your aliveness taste like, in this moment?

And I wished I knew how to kite surf.

He reached the right side of our panorama without stopping or falling and seamlessly turned back the other way. We whooped and shouted. We were gleeful. Our voices were whipped away south by the wind.

We were just a little bit too chilly even with all our layers and with huddling together. I was wearing two thin shirts, had draped a towel over my bare legs, but it was getting damp from the sea spray. Sarah, also hungover, was half sleeping with her head in Emily’s lap. But when we whooped, she would sit up and look.

We couldn’t believe he was heading back north, when the wind was whipping so quickly against him. Must have had something to do with the kite angle. I just didn’t know you could kite surf in both directions on a windy day.

Another one came, with a red kite, soaring from the left where the other one had started. Out past the first wave, over, over again, and through the break and he looked like he was flying.

They skated and surfed past each other smoothly, back and forth, though from our angle it looked like their lines might get tangled because they were so close. But they seemed to have an unspoken code with each other.

And so it went, and they flew, and we watched. Green guy, red guy. The other girls lost interest eventually, began chatting idly, but I was riveted and could not look away. I sipped my lukewarm coffee I’d brought from the house and tried to remember to drink water, because of the hangover.

The red guy, when he fell, fell spectacularly.

He swung towards his kite, then away, almost flipped, airborne for seconds before he fell back into the waves. He looked like a puppet on a string. We realized at this point that that’s why they can’t be connected to their boards. Because the double connection, kite and board, could pull them in different directions when they fell. So red guy just had to float in towards the shore to catch up with his board, bobbing along ahead of him, out of reach until he made it all the way to the sand.

Nate and Henry never made it out past the break – they just got pummeled over and over again. They were starving and exhausted later, so they ate barbecued meat and brisket, had beers and fell asleep on the couch. I’d liked to have joined them for their adventurous day, had I gotten up earlier.

But I still seemed to gain some life force from just sitting on the beach. I felt the wild energy of the ocean drip slowly back into me – I swear I could feel it drip, dripping into my veins as if through an IV – and the salty air invigorated my lungs. I could feel I was flying again, recovering from the past months of being a zombie.

And I wished my colleagues, Salma and Tareq and everyone, all of them just as beat down and exhausted from our workload as I was, could spend an afternoon like this too, sitting on Nauset beach by the dark sea.