With evening closing it and a horrible onshore wind started picking up, I sat out in the water shivering up a storm from the cold and cursing everything; the foggy weather, my leaking surf booties, the awful, crumbling waves that refused to break, the polluted water and all of the heathens in L.A. who polluted it. I wondering why I was even out here in the first place.
Out of nowhere, a lone surfer paddles out looking perfectly comfortable in a pair of board shorts. What kind of a freak show was this? I wondered what sort of dark sorcery allowed him to tolerate such temperatures.
We talked a little and he informed me that he was on vacation and had come from Chicago. I had heard of Chicago before; a place filled with abandoned car factories and gangland mobsters somewhere in the middle of the country. They also have some sort of large lake which they enthusiastically refer to as “The Great Lake.” Funny people, those mid-westerners.
Out of nowhere, a lone surfer paddles out looking perfectly comfortable in a pair of board shorts. What kind of a freak show was this? I wondered what sort of dark sorcery allowed him to tolerate such temperatures.
We talked a little and he informed me that he was on vacation and had come from Chicago. I had heard of Chicago before; a place filled with abandoned car factories and gangland mobsters somewhere in the middle of the country. They also have some sort of large lake which they enthusiastically refer to as “The Great Lake.” Funny people, those mid-westerners.
I told him this, and he confirmed these rumors. Not only do they have one lake there, but they have several, which they collectively refer to as “The Great Lakes.” Since these lakes are so large, they are actually surf-able. I informed him that Californians do the same thing on our lakes, except we call it “wake boarding.” He assured me he wasn’t referring to wake boarding and that the waves were big enough that you could surf. I nodded, but secretly dismissed the idea. I’ve heard of people surfing outside of California, which may be possible of course, but to surf on a lake? I began to doubt the rest of his claims.
However, in the interests of personal safety and the likelyhood of ending up in the trunk of a Towncar, I did not offend my new-found companion by arguing with him. He might have been one of those Chicago gangsters for all I knew. He paddled away, noting that this was the warmest weather he had encountered while surfing.
Poor guy, must have been crazy.