Blue Highway. Photo: Jimbo

In This Issue

The most meaningful surf trip of my life happened an hour inland at a dilapidated building on East Colonial Avenue in Elizabeth City, NC. It was a pretty unlikely place to find the waves of your dreams, you know, the kind that stoke the inner monologue: "Yeah bud, this is a spot that has your name all over it!" But the building's faded brick walls and chipped floorboards nonetheless served as the foundation for every surfing dream I would have over the next ten years. 

That trip was enough to erase everything that came before it, producing a blank chalkboard where I would scribble endless equations postulating how to get there, when to go there, and there, and there... Enough to send me scrambling to obscure points around the globe both near and far-flung, fun and scary, tropical and polar. All in the name of riding the folding, blue pieces of magic that break at each destination. Yet the individual hues of each place now run together with all the other colors to seem like one big chapter of my life, rather than singular moments of glory. A razor-perfect Samoan reef pass, a bowel-loosening Grajagan train ride, a feathering Canadian point, a beckoning Mexican A-frame -- all the details of which are blurred by age, experience, and changing expectations due to friends' and the media's portrayal. Only one thing can restart the game to produce new targets. A palpable promise, one that hits the snooze button to keep you dreaming of what else may be breaking over there, and there, and there... 

You can't stop evolution. The jump-first-and-worry-about-landing-later approach to searching for waves has been all but replaced by homogenized, prepackaged surf trips, camps, and charters of all sorts. And along the same lines of this need-it-yesterday climate, I no longer have to drive to that dilapidated building on East Colonial Avenue. All I have to do is go to the local CVS, get a 3 x 2-inch photo taken, and handle everything through the mail. Which is kinda sad. Because nothing in my life ever made me feel more like a surfer than taking that hot, stuffy drive to Elizabeth City and standing in those excruciating, DMV-like lines. By the end of that day, I hadn't caught the waves of my dreams. I had something better. 

A folding, blue piece of magic that, literally, had my name all over it. 

By Matt Pruett