When In Doubt, Go Out

• Lori Palminteri
• Uncategorized
• May 11, 2014

(Mitch is the pretty one)

We spent our summers at Atlantique beach, Fire Island.  Our skin tanned from hours in the sun, often forgetting to reapply sunblock.  Or more likely, that we didn’t care to.  We hadn’t a care in the world.  It was summer vacation, and as far as we were concerned, summers were specifically for us, and no one else.

The summers of my adolescent years were spent on our boat.  These remain some of my fondest memories.

We felt like we owned that beach, the punks we were.  We trespassed the dunes like it was our own secret desert.  We disobeyed the lifeguards when they told us the waves were too big for us to go out.  We only heard our parents when they made us food on the barbeque.

Before we surfed, we were boogie boarders.  We went out in huge swell, undaunted by waves bigger than we were.  I remember one day when the surf and the rip were particuarly strong, and the life guards swam out to tell us to go in, and we refused (we were probably about twelve years old).

My brother and I learned to surf the same year, on the same board.  He was naturally better.  He had been able to pop up on a boogie board and surf it.  Mitch had inherently better balance and agility.

There’s a saying surfer’s use, it’s “when in doubt, don’t go out.”  People die from surfing.  Usually because they get caught in rips and drown.  When in doubt, don’t go out.  The motto can save your life.

I lived by this.  I’ve gotten to the beach with overhead monsters breaking in the ocean, and I’ve been in doubt, so I would respectfully sit on the beach and watch my more skilled brotheran.  I have come close to drowning more than once.  I love the ocean.  But I also respect it.  I know what it’s capable of.

My brother, Mitch, treated surfing with the exact opposite motto.  When in doubt, go out.  That’s his motto.  This is why he’s so good on a surfboard.  He jumps on every wave, he doesn’t think twice.  He’s not afraid.  I’ve pulled out of hundreds of waves.  I didn’t act in that very moment. That split second.  A moment of fear, of doubt, and I’m on the outside of the line-up watching my brother shred another one again.

Mitch lives the life you want to live, but lack the courage to.  And he lacks some thing we have.  That doubt.  The reason I’m afraid to drop in on certain waves. The reason you go to your shitty day job.  The reasons you obliged to societal rules, despite your growing hatred for institutions.

It’s true my brother is a college drop out.  It’s true he bounces from job to job.  It’s true he has dreadlocks.  On the surface, he seems to most as a ridiculously good looking stoner.  His lifestyle is feeding the id, with very little worrying about the future.

Only a surfer knows the feeling of riding a wave as much as only comics know the feeling of having a killer set with jokes you’ve worked really hard on.  Surfing is still my favorite past time.  I’m not great, and I never will be.  I’ll never rip like Mitch.  But I have fun doing it, and it relaxes me, and there are so few things in this world that make me feel that way.  I will still pull back on waves.  But maybe I can apply Mitchell’s outlook on life to other aspects of my life.  And then maybe, live a little freer.

When in doubt… Go out.