Geezer Surfing : The New Frontier : So we're staying at this place in Mexico... OK, the "place", is, in point of fact, a resort. It's the kind of resort where white men with brand new white shoes come to play golf. These men are in their fifties and older ("in their fifities" is a phrase I am learning to be somewhat careful with since some of my best friends are already there, and I'll be there not too long from now, and it appears that as long as one remains stoked and a little lucky, things don't have to slow down too much at all).

The white men are ferried from their hotel rooms to the bar in golf carts, with their wives. "Fragile" is a descriptive term for these wives, although they probably prefer something like "well preserved".

Anyway. That's where we're staying. Why? I hear you ask. Well, my little son Roy gets babysitting anytime he wants it, and is learning how to swim, and is charming yet another set of young women into having children. And there's a spa for Karen, and an empty beach, and several surf breaks within five minutes drive. Could be a lot worse.

But that is not the point. The point is surfing has straightened out, cleaned up, gone mainstream! Well, we all knew that, but this trip kind of put the capper on it for me.

Surf travel, until the last five years, was mostly the domain of the young and hardy. You flew to a remote third-world country, took a bus for days, got a local farmer to drive you down a dirt road based on a hint you heard from some Australian drug addict in a bar in Peru, then got a fisherman to take you out to an island in a boat full of holes and then you camped. Your tent got full of bugs, you ran out of food, you got the shits and your buddy got malaria. And then, one day, you woke up, looked out of the tent, and saw a beautiful, clean wave hammering down the reef, unmolested by yuppies, kooks, barnies and old farts. You surfed until your arms were like noodles, until your mind was an enormous blue vented space, until your board was more of a limb than your legs. And then you went home, with a deep, unfocussed look in your eyes, a look that said you had seen new things: wonderful things, different, pure, far beyond normal life.

Well, you can still do that (really you can). But you can also do this, which is different... So we got to the place (OK, resort), and the spa manager rings up ten minutes after we get into the room to ask if I want to go surfing. The spa manager! Well we're here for the service, so I say sure and go round to the lobby to wax my board and wait.

As I finish waxing the board, one of the porters (mid-20's, brisk haircut, impeccable English with pleasant Hispanic accent) comes briskly up, says "excuse me, sir", and takes the board out of my hands and puts it on the roof rack!! I'm still reeling from this, unable to figure out how to stop him when a second dude silently appears with a tray and three ice-cold bottles of water to take with me in the car... "Buenos tardes, Senior" he says... "have a pleasant trip".

Holey Moley. Luckily, I was still sitting down. Travel is known to produce new perspectives, but I wasn't expecting this one.

It appears that surfing is now accepted as a "resort activity". Something that happens in places where the "guests" wear white shoes and get shuffled around in golf carts. A pastime of aging yuppies. A hobby of stockbrokers of a certain age. A bit shocking, no?

And is this really "surfing"? I realize most people dont care. The question itself has a hint of geeky hysteria to it, as if reading an editorial in "Gardening Gazette" entitled "Was Lawn Care Ever an Art?". But there is a question to take a look at here. Surfing is both the sport itself, the physical business of riding waves, but also it's also The Life. The Life means a dedication to honing your skills so you can surf a hard, fast wave, even as your world becomes adult and complicated. The Life means giving up career, relationships, "sensible" opportunities so that water time can be hoarded. The Life means hardships, means following deadend roads, means dealing with the tedious hassles of tracking down hints and whispers of new breaks. And the point of the Life, the reason we do it, the payoff for all of the heart that goes into it, is to find those completely special moments when the universe opens to you and you only: gorgeous natural fragments of time, made personal by the act of being right there, in the moment itself, on the wave.

All of this is somewhat watered down when the spa manager and his (wonderful) staff are handling the whole business for you.

Ah well. "Something's lost, and something's gained, living every day". Joni Mitchell. Who is in her fifties, by the way.

So we went out, surfed a mushy, rather shifty reef break for an hour and had a good time. Nothing epic, but the water was warm, and the crowd small. Then the babysitter came and took Roy, and Karen and I had two martinis each in swift succession while watching the sea.