Words Sam Eldredge Images by Keaton Hudson

Well, it’s finally summer. With that comes gloriously long days, board shorts that don’t fit quite right after a winter of hearty meals, and the call of water. Here in Minnesota, we’ve got lakes galore (way more than 10,000), but at the moment, I’m missing the tide. There’s something about the ocean.

Something about salty air and the endless horizon that has hooked men for thousands of years—it pulls us out into deep water to hunt for food, explore new lands, and test ourselves in an environment quite indifferent to our fate. Water so often symbolizes life. The ocean has the vastness of God about it.

I have always loved the sea, ever since I was a boy and could dash across the hot sand and play in waves that felt so big at the time. Now that I’m older, I’ve found that while I must go farther out to find the same rush of a quickly building crest looming above my head, the ocean still makes me feel small. It’s a wonderful feeling.

I learned the surfing basics in Hanalei Bay, on the north shore of Kaua’i. With a foam longboard and that special kind of humiliation a teenager feels while learning a new skill, I tasted for the first time something surfers have been feasting on for years.

Joy like the kind you felt when school let out and the whole of summer stretched before you, so you ran out of those classroom doors and didn’t look back. Of course, there’s a whole lot more to it than that, but that will get you going. 

On a surfboard, riding a wave, it’s amazing how connected I felt to the ocean.
What had only seconds before been a faceless force of nature quite suddenly wasn’t faceless anymore. It was like the sea was winking at me. It was as though I had finally gotten the punch line of a joke told long before I was born.