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I thrust myself deeper into the sea, pushing my board down and forward, escaping the pull of the wave surging above me. A trail of air bubbles streamed down the sides of my board and over my hands in a shimmering kaleidoscope of colors. Time slowed.
Just a few hours earlier, in the twilight of morning, I had taken my second dose of LSD. I was tripping hard. And I was paddling out at Lower Trestles—one of the most iconic surf breaks in Southern California. A place I had never surfed before.
It was unseasonably warm. Offshore winds groomed the ocean’s surface to a dark, oily sheen. The swell, large and clean from the south, had turned the sea into a theater of motion. Emerald peaks rose and fell like breath, folding into themselves and exploding on the black cobblestones. Ribbons of water peeled with machine precision. Sublime. Reverent. The kind of conditions that call surfers from a hundred miles in every direction.
The biggest sets pushed twelve feet from trough to crest. Not the heaviest waves I’d ever surfed, but serious. The crowd was dense. Stone-faced surfers sat shoulder to shoulder, bobbing in the lineup like Formula One race cars waiting on the grid. Everyone vying for communion before the winds shifted and the magic faded.
Trestles is an A-frame wave. The peak breaks both left and right, allowing two surfers to share the same wave—if they can decide who goes which way. It's chess with a dash of gladiator. Paddle wars, positioning, and split-second decisions rule the water. The unwritten rule: deepest surfer wins. Everyone else yields.
The rule forces risk. To gain priority, surfers sit deeper, closer to the collapsing part of the wave. That thin line between glory and wipeout becomes the proving ground. When two surfers try to split a peak, confusion is common. So are collisions. Egos get bruised. Boards get snapped. Sometimes, fists fly.
I never liked this part of surfing. The posturing. The hierarchy. The testosterone. But that morning, I was floating. LSD had opened something. I felt soft. Expansive. Connected. I was sitting shoulder to shoulder with strangers I didn’t know, in a lineup I didn’t belong to, and I was talking. Listening. Watching the light refract on the water, tracing fractals in the resin of my surfboard, feeling love for everything.
I was at peace.
Then the horizon lifted. A shadow swept across the sea. A set was coming.
The lineup came alive: paddling, positioning, judging. I saw a peak forming slightly north of the pack and arched my back. Started paddling. I was going for it. So were two others.
The wave rose like a moving wall of black-green glass. The three of us pivoted and sprinted shoreward. I was farthest to the right. If the surfer to my left went left, I was in the clear. He wasn’t looking at me—no steely eye contact, no silent command to back off. My green light. I paddled harder and dropped in.
The wave stood tall, nearly double overhead. I popped to my feet, gravity pulling me down the sheer face. Out of the corner of my eye—there he was. He’d taken the same line. I’d dropped in on him, and now we were both flying down the same wall.
I had just committed one of surfing’s cardinal sins, and if I stayed on this line, I’d make it worse — I’d hit him at full speed.
At the bottom of the wave, I squatted low and pivoted, driving my rear heel into the board and swinging back up the face to exit. My board carved hard, throwing a fan of water behind me. I was trying to yield, to correct the mistake. I shot upward.
Too fast.
I blasted past the lip of the wave, board nearly vertical, and launched into open air. I became inverted. Then I fell.
Back down the face of the wave.
Back onto the place where the surfer was.
Back into gravity.
I don’t remember impact. Just light. And foam. And the strange calm that came as I tumbled. I didn’t feel panic. I felt curious.
A few weeks later, I was handcuffed in the back of a police cruiser. Wire mesh cage in front of me. Shotgun mounted between the officers. They were driving me to the psychiatric hospital. The lockdown unit.
That was the real drop.
The one you don’t paddle into.
The one that takes you under whether you want it or not.
The wave had broken. And I was inside it.
Whoa! What a hook. Nice.
And so it begins.