Physics and nerve:
This child of the Midwest never surfed.
If—if—the waves got big enough on Lake Michigan, one might have some fun body-surfing, and I have some hazy memory of someone sometime with a board somewhere on the beach, but as big a lake as Lake Michigan is, it ain’t the ocean.
Now, water skiing, that I could do, though usually on one of the smaller (and warmer) lakes in the area. And I’ve gone jet skiing, which (like snowmobiling) is stupid and polluting and a lot of fun.
Anyway, I always thought of surfing as tossing oneself into a tidal wave like this, and I wondered how the hell anyone could do that. It was as if the waves were magic and the surfers, magicians.
I never considered that most surfers are not sliding down forty-foot walls of water, but are happily dinking about in six or ten foot waves, working themselves up to 15 or maybe 20 foot waves. Maybe they get a chance to crouch through a tube, but most are probably just trying to let it ride.
I could do that. Hell, there are places to surf in parts of Queens and out on Long Island, with waves big enough to get up and small enough for an old newby like me to give ‘er a try.
I just might. Maybe. Y’know, someday.
Could be fun.
h/t The Daily What, Chris Bryan film
AbsurdBeats 
you should definitely give it a go, windsurfing on LI is quite actually pretty good
oops pardon my early morning too many nights in a hotel (for a bloody worthless conference in topeka ks which is a wasteland) grammar.
Ohh, Topeka. I’m sorry. Perhaps it’s lovely in the spring. . . ?
I have the book, Precarious Life. Most of it is quite good, but there are some bits where I just go, “huh?”
I have lived in 3 red states (including KS a while back) now, all bragging about their low taxes and how they should be a model for the rest of the country and all literally falling apart. We need to do better in early ed on the civics front of this is how taxes work in relations to infrastructure and such. yep judith is often working on the right topics but always makes these leaps and swerves that may be a kind of pomo style but leaves me minding the gaps rather than taking the leap.