Spiritual Tube Riding

turn – or you didn’t. If you made it and were a little lucky you could speed down the tunnel created by the collapsing wave and get spit out and over at the other end. If you didn’t make it you could get a good pounding followed by a long swim, but making it was well worth the risk. These tubes were so good that the cost of the ticket was easily worth the price.

There wasn’t much talk in the water. Maybe it was the strange conditions, but conversation was limited and conducted in hushed, almost reverent tones. There wasn’t any contention or fighting for waves. Cooperation seemed natural. It was like one of those temporary “brotherhoods” that coalesce spontaneously in intense situations, bound by a shared experience without so much as knowing each other’s names.

We were paddling around on a sheet of warm glass, enveloped in a hazy yellow fog that damped down sound and limited visibility to twenty or thirty yards in either direction. We couldn’t see the shore and we couldn’t see waves coming in. Even after pulling out of a wave we couldn’t see the beach through the fog. For a couple of hours our world consisted exclusively in the wave riding zone and everything else ceased to exist. There was no shore and no far horizon – only the corridor of perfect waves.

While in this weird world between worlds, I dropped in on one, hit the bottom hard and pulled up under the lip. As it threw out over me and came crashing down something strange happened. I was deep in the tube, hurtling across the wave just trying to stay on and make it out when suddenly everything slowed down until it was as if I were in a slow motion film. The wave overhead, the spray, me – everything slowed – I could actually see the

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