Kieran saw the Surfabout listed on a flyer in the window of a coffee shop on Thursday and decided, with the full confidence of a man who has surfed twice, that this was the year.
"It's a community event," he said, like that answered something. "It's basically for everyone."
I want to be clear that it was raining. It was raining when we drove down, raining when we parked, raining in that specific Carmel way where the mist comes in sideways and gets into everything — your hood, your optimism, the gap between your jacket collar and your neck. The cypress trees smelled incredible, I'll give it that. The ocean looked like a painting of itself, all drama and gray-green light. It did not look like somewhere a person should voluntarily enter on a borrowed board with a wetsuit he'd borrowed from his roommate Seb, who is four inches shorter than him and built differently in every relevant dimension.
"It's going to be fine," Kieran said, pulling the wetsuit up with the focused energy of a man engaged in serious physical labor. "Wetsuits are supposed to be tight."
Not that tight. I didn't say that. I have learned when not to say things.
The Surfabout, for anyone who doesn't know, is a real competition with real surfers who have been doing this for years, who know each other, whose families are camped out on the sand with proper chairs and thermoses and the calm ease of people who belong somewhere completely. Kieran walked into this scene with a borrowed board under one arm, his wetsuit cutting off approximately twenty percent of his circulation, and the expression of a man arriving at a party he was definitely invited to.
He was not in the competition. He understood this, eventually, after a conversation with a very patient official who explained the registration situation with the gentle care you'd use on someone who had recently had a small shock. Kieran took this news, turned to me, and said: "That's fine, I'll just free surf next to it."
He did. For eleven minutes. The water was, as I could have told him, extremely cold. One of the actual competitors caught a wave directly past him and Kieran watched it go with an expression I have never seen on a human face before — somewhere between awe and personal reckoning.
He came out of the water shaking in a way that was genuinely concerning and also, I say this with love, extremely funny.
I had a towel. I had two towels, actually, because I know him. I also had a thermos of coffee from the place on the corner where we'd stopped, which smelled like wood smoke and cardamom and which he accepted with both hands like it was sacramental.
"That," he said, when he could speak again, "was incredible."
He was lavender-colored. He was vibrating slightly. He had sand in his ear and had lost one of Seb's fins somewhere in the break, a fact we agreed not to address until later.
"The energy out there," he continued, wrapping himself in both towels like a very ambitious burrito, "is completely different when you're actually in it."
I asked what he meant.
He thought about it seriously. The beach was still going around us — real surfers paddling back out, a kid running through the wet sand, someone's dog losing its mind over a piece of kelp. The town up the hill was probably getting ready for wine pairings and prix-fixe menus and the slow elegant machinery of Culinary Week. Down here it was just cold and real and smelled like the actual ocean.
"It's more," he said finally. "Everything is just more."
I looked at him. He was still the color of a stormy sky. He had a piece of something in his hair that I chose not to identify.
"Yeah," I said. "Okay."
He wants to come back next year. He's already mentioned maybe getting his own wetsuit, which is probably a conversation we'll need to revisit. He also mentioned, on the drive home, that he'd heard the Pub Crawl-by-the-Sea starts next week, and that he thought that one was "probably more his speed."
I'm putting that in writing now, for the record, so no one is surprised.