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Labor Day, ten o'clock. Bullfrog and I are walking across the parking lot, following the masses of people headed out to the Del Mar beach. We're feeling pretty cool, with our surfboards under our arms and a Weber grill rolling along behind us. We head north up the beach, and set up camp just inside the surf zone, at lifeguard tower #6. After one more trip back to the truck, we tear off our shirts and get the frisbee going, waiting for the girls to show up with the coolers.
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About a week before that, Janice and I head out on an all-day mission to buy me a surfboard. We start at the Clairemont surf shop, head to PB, hit Del Mar, and then follow the PCH up the coast, stopping at every surf shop on the way. I'm not quite sure what I'm looking for; at every shop I'm checking out both the used boards and the new ones. It's rather intimidating. The 'service' is always either a) nonexistant, or b) given by a doubtlessly awesome surfer who knows nothing about the finer points of customer service. There was a glimmer of hope at a small shop in Solana Beach, as the kid working there took the time to point out some used boards, and a few words about how they handled in the water. Problem was, he had this fragment of spinach or lettuce on his upper lip, and even after I recognized that, hey, I should either tell him or forget about it, it was rather distracting.
So we get to the Longboard Grotto in Leucadia. It's our ninth or tenth shop, and I buy Janni a cute dress there as kinda a prize for putting up with this for so long. The Longboard Grotto has lots of boards, hundreds of boards, but no one to help out. They even put a sign up that says something like this:
We might not have any service, but who needs service with prices this low?
Well, I do. So we head farther north down the PCH to the Leucadia Surf Shop. A half hour later, I'm down by the water, waxing up my brand new Leucadia Surf Shop 9'0" beauty. A great guy named Woody took me under his wing the second I walked into the store. I couldn't tell his boards from any others, but the service bowled me over. He asked what I was looking for, and when I told him, well, I had been using a friend's 9'2" for a few weeks and was looking for something of the same, he nodded sagely and browsed a rack of boards. He picked one out and laid it across a set of sawhorses, and told me all about it. Width, thickness, fins, why I wanted this one, what I was supposed to look for in a board. He was very attentive. This is starting to sound like an advertisement, but it was amazing after all the blow-offs I received everywhere else. Woody showed me how to wax it, threw in a leash and a sock-cover, and sent me merrily on my way.
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Janice and Kim show up at the beach. The cooler is pretty heavy, so Bullfrog and I help them out with it. It's chock full of sodas ("We know how to have fun without drinking!"), snacks, meat, and ice. Jeremy and I promptly head out in the water with our boards. I catch a few, one of them maybe the best ride I've had yet. I pearl hard on a couple, a problem that has gotten progressively worse as I practice. After a few hard thrashings, I head in and lay in the sun for awhile. Bullfrog stays out, even though I see him take a few hard ones. After an hour or so of reading and dozing, I head back out.
It was about the third wave I attempted to catch that messed me up. I remember thinking "here I go again" as I started to pearl. I just closed my eyes and tried to relax and let the wave take me for a ride, as I usually do. I felt some part of the board hit the middle of the inner side of my right foot, but it didn't hurt at all...more of a tap than a hard hit. As I surfaced, I felt a weird sensation where the board hit me....something wasn't right. I was in chest-high water, and held on to the board with one arm as I tried to lift my foot out of the water to get a good look at it. It just came out of the water for a half-second. Whoa. I remember thinking "that can't be right" as I got it out of the water for a second, longer look. I could see a good portion of my footbone, and most of the flesh on the side of my foot was peeled back on both sides. Damn, the fin had caught me. The weird thing was, since the water was kind of cold, my foot was a waxy white and the gash wasn't bleeding...much. Still, the thought of sharks and things inspired me to make tracks for the shore.
Limping up onto the beach, a lot of people were staring at me, aware that something had happened. I woke Janni up with "Janice, I have to get to a hospital." She was sort of freaked out, being woke up by that. A man in his late forties that had been out surfing with us came over and helped me out of my wetsuit and into a chair. My friends and this guy were pouring bottled water onto my wound when a lifeguard came over with a smallish, beat-up plastic box that no doubt held gauze and maybe an Ace bandage. "This ain't no band-aid, dude," I said, to the amusement of Bullfrog, who was looking with grim interest at my foot. I found out later that it was this kid's first day as a lifeguard, and it showed; he was trembling pretty hard. They cleaned it out the best they could, and several more lifeguards showed up from other towers and from a Jeep that came down the beach. The gash still didn't hurt much, and I was feeling relatively OK. The lifeguards, however, were treating me like I was about to faint. I guess they're probably trained to do that. Regardless, they did a hell of a job cleaning it out and bandaging it up for the trip to the hospital.
I was in and out of Scripps Memorial in about two hours. The pain really started to set in, and I was happy when the doc shot me up with local anesthetic. I could feel him doing stuff down there, but it felt like I had a great big shoe on, or maybe one of those moonboots that we used to wear as kids in the winter, and the doctor was merely brushing about the outside of it. Janice watched the whole process with some kind of amazement, whereas I was content to block it from view and take their word for it. The patient in the next curtained alcove was an eighteen-year-old who was thrown out his window by his friend. His whole family was the same sort of Jerry Springer show, with his anorexic mother screaming about the police and a trashy girlfriend hovering in the background. When my stitches were all done, another patient came in....some guy had jumped from a dock into five feet of water, breaking both tibias and both fibulas, plus and ankle and a couple metatarsels to boot.
So, there it is, fourteen stitches. It was kind of a puzzle to put back together, and I was given a lot of Keflex antibiotic to take over the next ten days. It was very sore at first, but I went back to work four days after it happened, and just took the stitches out myself the other day. If you really want to see what it looks like, here it is. Remember that this is three weeks after the fact.
What was the worst part about the whole ordeal? The fact that I've been staring at my new board out on the patio for the last three weeks. I can't wait to get back in the water.
