Chapter One: Surfing Is for LunaticsCHAPTER ONE Surfing Is for Lunatics MATTHEW KAPPLER IS MY BROTHER-IN-LAW, and we''re very different, and one of the biggest differences between us is that if I lived like him I would die. Matt owns two motorcycles. The first is a Kawasaki for racing, the second a Harley for roaring down the Garden State Parkway at speeds he once described as "only" a hundred miles per hour. He''s an electrician, and a good one, in part because of how seriously he takes his work, and in part because of how casually he takes the prospect of violent shocks. Matt once threw out his back training to be a mixed martial arts fighter. I once threw out my back lifting a bag of cat litter. We met in the summer of 2012. I''d been dating his older sister, Jacqui, for about a year, and she and I had driven up from Washington, DC, to visit her parents in New Jersey.
At the time I was a twenty-five-year-old speechwriter for Barack Obama, with sensibly parted hair, an ergonomic keyboard, and a strong preference for the half-Windsor tie knot over the more conventional four-in-hand. Matt was living at home. He was twenty-two years old, on the tail end of a rebel-without-a-cause phase that had begun, as far as I could tell, at birth. Because I was busy trying to impress Jacqui''s parents during that initial visit, I didn''t pay much attention to her brother. Matt first appears in my memory not as a person but as a muscle shirt-wearing specter, floating silently to the kitchen to blend a protein shake before disappearing into the garage to jam on his electric guitar. But more trips followed; my future in-laws lived minutes from the Jersey Shore, so Jacqui and I started coming up for beach weekends each summer. Matt and I thus got to know each other a little better, and the better we got to know each other, the clearer it became that we had absolutely nothing in common. My professional life revolved around politics; he had never registered to vote.
Matt played in a locally famous ska band; I played in a co-ed recreational Ultimate Frisbee league. My idea of a perfect meal was a bowl of homemade knife-cut noodles, studded with bits of pork and drenched in chili oil, from a hole-in-the-wall restaurant near the university where I studied on a summer fellowship that sent Ivy League undergraduates to Beijing. His was chicken tenders. I didn''t dislike Matt. I found him quite interesting, in the way all men who need two computer monitors for work find all men who need a pickup truck for work quite interesting. But we never became anything like friends. The closest we got to bonding were the times when, in a spirit of anthropological curiosity, I asked him about small details of his life. The tattoo covering his left shoulder, for instance.
It depicted a giant robotic claw reaching across his collarbone, slicing his flesh with metal talons, and ripping back his skin to reveal a bloody mess of muscle and machine parts. "So, Matt," I once asked, in my best NPR voice, "what made you decide to get that tattoo?" He thought for a second, then shrugged contentedly. "I dunno." I tried conjuring a follow-up and couldn''t. I''ve been told that one of my first words was ambivalent . To permanently brand oneself with any image, of any size, struck me as an inconceivably risky invitation to regret. And to pick an image that was huge, gruesome, and highly visible, for basically no reason? I was left gasping in confusion like a goldfish plucked from its bowl. Which is all to say that when, five years after we met, Matt bought a beat-up used surfboard, I did not think, At last, a healthful pastime that might bring me closer to my future brother-in-law! I thought, Surfing is for lunatics.
Nothing in the years that followed changed my view. On one occasion, Matt arrived at a family gathering wild-eyed, his light-brown hair not so much tousled as beaten. He''d woken at dawn, he explained as though this were normal, and spent his morning being pummeled against rocks and slammed into the seabed. I would have found this alarming at any time of year, even summer, when the Jersey Shore is packed with beachgoers. But this was Christmas Day. "Aren''t you worried about, you know, drowning?" "Neh," he replied, in his slightly pinched Jersey accent. I waited for him to elaborate. He didn''t.
"Okay. What about freezing to death?" "The best waves are in winter," he said, in what I could not help but notice was not an answer to my question. "You should try it." I declined his offer, not so much verbally as through my very existence. It was true that once, on a family trip to Mexico, I''d taken something described as a "surf lesson," during which I knelt on a plank for an hour while a teenager rolled his eyes and pushed me toward a beach. But surfing--really surfing--was clearly different. Along with absurd levels of fitness and dexterity, it required a near-total lack of common sense. It also seemed like a waste of time.
My adult life had been defined by a line from Barack Obama''s first presidential campaign: "In the face of impossible odds, people who love this country can change it." Even after leaving the White House, I''d remained a proudly earnest workaholic. I filled my days, along with most nights and weekends, with productivity. Writing books and TV pilots. Working on speeches for private clients. Volunteering for campaigns. While each project was different, when you zoomed out far enough the goal was always the same: to change the world. Matt seemed to surf for no higher purpose whatsoever.
He did it simply because he enjoyed it. That made no sense to me. In 2018, Jacqui and I got married in Asbury Park, a Jersey Shore town best known as the spot where Bruce Springsteen got his start. The following year we bought a small vacation house there. It was listed, optimistically, as a "Victorian cottage," and located a half mile from the beach. Sometimes while strolling the boardwalk, I''d see a gaggle of wetsuit-clad figures bobbing like apples in the sea. Every so often, one would turn, stand, and cruise toward shore. It was noteworthy: these individuals were not my brother-in-law, yet they surfed.
Still, nothing could change what was, in my opinion, the most relevant fact about Matt''s favorite hobby. If it was for people like him, it wasn''t for people like me. Besides, I was an adult now, with a wife and a mortgage and two cats and intermittent back pain and a determination to make the most of my limited time on earth. To the extent I looked toward the ocean and thought, I wish I''d tried it , surfing was just another scribble on the map of roads not taken that people in their early thirties can''t help but draw. I should have seen Tom Petty in concert. I should have made out with Leah Franklin at that party freshman year. I should have learned to surf. Who cares? The answer, as it turned out, was me.
Enormously. And all it took to realize it was the worst year of my life. When I was four years old, I was terrified--absolutely terrified--that Saddam Hussein would emerge from my toilet and strangle me. This was during the first Gulf War, so my fear was rational, assuming you knew, as I did, the rules governing Saddam''s behavior. First, he lurked in the pipes. Second, he could travel instantly between rooms and even buildings, so long as he remained submerged. Third, while Saddam could overpower any child whose bathroom he invaded, he couldn''t escape the plumbing on his own. Only the emptying of a toilet bowl would release him.
I never told an adult about the danger. Even at age four, I understood grown-ups were unlikely to believe me. Nor did I stop flushing; I gathered adults would frown upon that, too. Instead, for the duration of the war, and (to be on the safe side) for several months after it ended, I did what any reasonable person would do. I flushed and ran. This all took place decades ago, but I bring it up now for context: I have always taken current events a bit personally. For most of my childhood, that was a good thing. Born halfway through the 1980s, I formed my first memories as the Berlin Wall fell and spent my youth as a fortunate son of the world''s sole superpower.
Growing up, I knew--and everyone I knew knew--that America was good and getting better and everywhere else was getting more like America. Demographers call us the millennials. In truth, I belong to the greatest-expectations generation. We flew closest to the sun. And then? September 11th; the Great Recession; the Trump era; a million smaller yet previously unimaginable crises in between. A towering lasagna of calamity. As people my age entered our thirties, the problems we were supposed to be on our way to solving--mass shootings, income inequality, racial prejudice, climate change--all seemed to be getting worse instead of better. Rather than staying vanquished, the villains of the twentieth century, Nazis and white supremacists and Russian tyrants, returned with a vengeance.
As if this weren''t brutal enough, for us, young adulthood did not recede gradually, like a hairline. It was snatched away by the worst pandemic in one hundred years. By the standards of people living through a global catastrophe, Jacqui and I were lucky when Covid hit. Health intact. Family safe. Jobs that could be done remotely. No children to enroll in Zoom school. We even had a refuge from the heat and humidity of DC, where we were living at the time.
The first summer after buying our Asbury Park cottage, we''d rented it to vacationers from New.