And now to the particular physics of surf-riding.Get out on a flat board, six feet long, two feet wide, and roughly oval in shape.Lie down upon it like a small boy on a coaster and paddle with your hands out to deep water, where the waves begin to crest.Lie out there quietly on the board.Sea after sea breaks before, behind, and under and over you, and rushes in to shore, leaving you behind.
When a wave crests, it gets steeper.Imagine yourself, on your hoard, on the face of that steep slope.If it stood still, you would slide down just as a boy slides down a hill on his coaster.
"But," you object, "the wave doesn't stand still." Very true, but the water composing the wave stands still, and there you have the secret.If ever you start sliding down the face of that wave, you'll keep on sliding and you'll never reach the bottom.Please don't laugh.The face of that wave may be only six feet, yet you can slide down it a quarter of a mile, or half a mile, and not reach the bottom.For, see, since a wave is only a communicated agitation or impetus, and since the water that composes a wave is changing every instant, new water is rising into the wave as fast as the wave travels.You slide down this new water, and yet remain in your old position on the wave, sliding down the still newer water that is rising and forming the wave.You slide precisely as fast as the wave travels.If it travels fifteen miles an hour, you slide fifteen miles an hour.Between you and shore stretches a quarter of mile of water.As the wave travels, this water obligingly heaps itself into the wave, gravity does the rest, and down you go, sliding the whole length of it.If you still cherish the notion, while sliding, that the water is moving with you, thrust your arms into it and attempt to paddle; you will find that you have to be remarkably quick to get a stroke, for that water is dropping astern just as fast as you are rushing ahead.
And now for another phase of the physics of surf-riding.All rules have their exceptions.It is true that the water in a wave does not travel forward.But there is what may be called the send of the sea.The water in the overtoppling crest does move forward, as you will speedily realize if you are slapped in the face by it, or if you are caught under it and are pounded by one mighty blow down under the surface panting and gasping for half a minute.The water in the top of a wave rests upon the water in the bottom of the wave.
But when the bottom of the wave strikes the land, it stops, while the top goes on.It no longer has the bottom of the wave to hold it up.Where was solid water beneath it, is now air, and for the first time it feels the grip of gravity, and down it falls, at the same time being torn asunder from the lagging bottom of the wave and flung forward.And it is because of this that riding a surf-board is something more than a mere placid sliding down a hill.In truth, one is caught up and hurled shoreward as by some Titan's hand.
I deserted the cool shade, put on a swimming suit, and got hold of a surf-board.It was too small a board.But I didn't know, and nobody told me.I joined some little Kanaka boys in shallow water, where the breakers were well spent and small--a regular kindergarten school.I watched the little Kanaka boys.When a likely-looking breaker came along, they flopped upon their stomachs on their boards, kicked like mad with their feet, and rode the breaker in to the beach.I tried to emulate them.I watched them, tried to do everything that they did, and failed utterly.The breaker swept past, and I was not on it.I tried again and again.I kicked twice as madly as they did, and failed.Half a dozen would be around.We would all leap on our boards in front of a good breaker.Away our feet would churn like the stern-wheels of river steamboats, and away the little rascals would scoot while I remained in disgrace behind.
I tried for a solid hour, and not one wave could I persuade to boost me shoreward.And then arrived a friend, Alexander Hume Ford, a globe trotter by profession, bent ever on the pursuit of sensation.
And he had found it at Waikiki.Heading for Australia, he had stopped off for a week to find out if there were any thrills in surf-riding, and he had become wedded to it.He had been at it every day for a month and could not yet see any symptoms of the fascination lessening on him.He spoke with authority.
"Get off that board," he said."Chuck it away at once.Look at the way you're trying to ride it.If ever the nose of that board hits bottom, you'll be disembowelled.Here, take my board.It's a man's size."I am always humble when confronted by knowledge.Ford knew.He showed me how properly to mount his board.Then he waited for a good breaker, gave me a shove at the right moment, and started me in.Ah, delicious moment when I felt that breaker grip and fling me.
On I dashed, a hundred and fifty feet, and subsided with the breaker on the sand.From that moment I was lost.I waded back to Ford with his board.It was a large one, several inches thick, and weighed all of seventy-five pounds.He gave me advice, much of it.
He had had no one to teach him, and all that he had laboriously learned in several weeks he communicated to me in half an hour.Ireally learned by proxy.And inside of half an hour I was able to start myself and ride in.I did it time after time, and Ford applauded and advised.For instance, he told me to get just so far forward on the board and no farther.But I must have got some farther, for as I came charging in to land, that miserable board poked its nose down to bottom, stopped abruptly, and turned a somersault, at the same time violently severing our relations.Iwas tossed through the air like a chip and buried ignominiously under the downfalling breaker.And I realized that if it hadn't been for Ford, I'd have been disembowelled.That particular risk is part of the sport, Ford says.Maybe he'll have it happen to him before he leaves Waikiki, and then, I feel confident, his yearning for sensation will be satisfied for a time.