Indian Summer

Indian summer is the summer after summer. It’s that period of time – a few days or a few weeks – of warm air, wide open skies, and stillness, summer’s last stand before the chill of autumn sets in.

            Growing up, I always loved Indian summer. I still do. It feels like a secret. Regular summer is all loud and bro – high fives, keggers, and backwards caps. Indian summer is for introverts – long walks, long shadows, deep thoughts, and a tinge of melancholia. Its rewards are subtle, spiritual even.

            Is the phrase “Indian summer” racist? It might be. It’s hard to say. No one really knows how the term originated. Some sources suggest fairly innocuous origins. Others claim it’s a euphemism for “false” summer, as in shifty and deceitful, like “Indian giver” – a racist epithet for someone who gives you something and then takes it right back. Either way, naming a weather pattern after a category of human beings is probably ill-advised, or at least silly. Try these on – Irish Spring, Asian Autumn, Latvian Winter – and you quickly see how empty and meaningless they are. Even if the phrase Indian summer isn’t explicitly racist, it’s tainted by the slight possibility that it might be.

            And yet Indian summer lingers on.

            As a boy the whole idea of Indian summer captivated me. Like a lot of young white kids growing up in the United States, I fell in love with Native American culture, or rather, my image of it. I mean, these people were always camping. How cool was that? They hardly wore any clothes. They didn’t sit behind desks in stuffy classrooms. They didn’t have homework. They learned by doing stuff, not by reading about other people doing stuff. While my life seemed utterly constrained on all sides by social expectations nobody remembered creating, Indians roamed free through forest cathedrals, bathed in shafts of light, and drinking cool, clear water from unpolluted streams. But there was one problem. This was all a Romantic projection. I didn’t know much about real Native Americans. I’d seen some movies. I read a few books. I’d lingered for hours in front of the dioramas at the Santa Barbara Natural History Museum with their miniature depictions of Chumash life in prehistoric Ventura and Santa Barbara counties. I’d hiked the coastal foothills and come upon pictographs in caves and foot-holds carved into steep canyon walls from a time before the Rancheros. I felt their presence in dry stream beds beneath the sycamores and on the long curve of empty beaches at dawn. Even the California missions, in many ways their sepulchers, reminded me more of the Native people who built them than the padres who prayed inside of them. Though their time had come and gone, the First People felt more present to me than myself. Such is the dizzying confusion and wild imagination of adolescence.

            In the 18^th century, when Europeans were first learning about Native Americans, many of them fell under a similar spell. Influential writers and philosophers wrote glowingly of the “Noble savages” that roamed the untouched wilderness paradise of the Americas. For these European intellectuals the existence of Indians provided evidence for their assertion that “Natural man” was in every way superior to his European contemporaries. Society, Jean-Jacques Rousseau argued, turned us into phonies and fakes. Christianity compelled us into conformity, and polite society forced us all behind masks. In Native Americans many European elites saw the hope of humanity – that it was possible to return to what Rousseau called a “state of nature” and reclaim our original goodness.

            But the sad fact was, these Europeans didn’t know the first thing about Native Americans. It was all made up. They projected their own needs onto the Native people of the Americas without their knowledge or consent. In a very real sense, this phony affection was as racist as the genocidal hatred that followed.

            My captivation with Native American culture was all wrapped up in my dawning environmentalism. Moving into my teen years in the seventies, I grew increasingly aware of the terrible costs of industrial civilization – pollution, resource depletion, habitat destruction, and mass extinction. My already acute melancholia grew to alarming proportions. And so did my resentment. More and more it seemed to me that the Native Americans, and Original Peoples all over the earth, had it right, and that we ignored their wisdom at our own peril.

            All of this came to a head every Indian summer. When the hubbub of summer faded, when school was back in session, when the tourists packed up and left, my hometown of Ventura returned once again to its quiet, natural rhythms. The leaves began to lose their verdant urgency. A slow fade fell over everything. But the sun shone in the sky with a familiar ferocity. By October the ocean water got warmer – warmer than June, warmer than July, and warmer than September even. Surfing in the early evening after school, Venus rising in the twilight, the Channel Islands silhouetted against the darkening sky, I could almost hear the river-reed canoes of the Chumash oarsmen slapping the water as they plied the channel on their long journey home. But it was probably just my surfboard.

            Growing older means growing wiser. At least it’s supposed to. And as we all get better at examining our unconscious biases we feel freer and lighter with each passing year. There’s nothing better than finally admitting that you’ve been wrong all these years. It feels good to let go of bad old ideas. As the Zen saying goes, “How refreshing, the whiny of a pack horse unburdened of everything.” Maybe we can do without the phrase “Indian summer.” But if we all decide it isn’t harmful, maybe we can keep it. To me, language is poetry – all of it. Not always good poetry, but poetry none the less. And Indian summer is a two-word poem packed with deep meaning and beautiful power. It is a love-word, a word that at least tries to get at something real, something profound. Like all the best language, “Indian summer” tries and fails to express something that cannot be expressed.

            So in these long, last days of Indian summer, before all of the leaves fall and clatter down the street in colorful drifts, take a walk along the river or through the forest or down the streets where you live and let the ghosts of what was and what will be move through you like smoke from long-ago fires. Hear the voices of ancient songs in the wind, songs no one ever wrote down. Feel the warmth of the sun on your face. Move out of your knowing and into your being. Let your edges grow soft, your boundaries diaphanous. Let everything in and everything out. Know the whole of the world as yourself, and all sentient beings as expressions of the same spirit that animates you. Feel yourself disappear and surge forth all at the same time – a paradox your mind cannot grasp but your heart fully understands. These fleeting forms, this passing light, this glorious, ephemeral Indian summer – let it be the prayer you long to say, but never could. 

Surfing

            I grew up in Ventura, California, a small, sleepy beach town an hour north of Los Angeles. There wasn’t much to do. But there were miles of beautiful, empty beaches. The Pacific Ocean pulled us toward her like iron filings to a magnet.

            Perched out on the horizon were the Channel Islands, uninhabited chunks of California that seemingly broke off the mainland and drifted out to sea. I can’t tell you how many hours I stared at those mysterious alien lands and wondered just how terrifying it must have been for the Chumash to paddle their river reed canoes over the open maw of the sea to fish her coves and sleep exhausted on her sandy leeward beaches.

            All summer long someone’s mom would drop us off at the beach with our Styrofoam boards and small inflated rafts. All day long we’d ride the waves on our bellies, learning how to read the shifting plane of the water, an energy field without beginning or end. The feel of hot sand under bare feet, the smell of Coppertone, and the taste of fifty cent grilled cheese sandwiches from the State Beach snack bar are embedded deep in my amygdala. And the never-the-same-twice shifting face of the sea and sky. I didn’t know it then, but I was learning the lesson of impermanence, and how the beauty of the world lives not in its surface forms, but in the mystery hidden just beneath them.

            At the rocky points and deep water reef breaks we saw the older guys surfing, riding hard boards made of fiberglass and resin, daring to stand as equals with waves as big as houses. Because we loved the sea and knew her so well it was the next logical step – to leave the safety of the shore, to go deeper, and commit completely.

            My mom bought me my first surfboard at a neighborhood garage sale. I immediately broke the fin standing on it on the lawn. She brought home a swath of fiberglass and a can of resin from the hardware store. “There,” she said, “now you can fix it.”

            I spent that summer learning how to stand up on my board, surfing small beach breaks near the pier. Late one August afternoon after the dry Santa Anas softened and the air hung thick and hot, I caught a long left in the evening glass. I rode that wave for what seemed like ages. It just kept rising up to meet me, its concave face reflecting the fiery sunset above, like I were engulfed in flame. My breath caught in my throat. A feeling of belonging swept through me so overwhelming I nearly wept. I felt at once deeply at home in this strange world, and deeply at home in my own skin. For an awkward adolescent this was a revelation – to no longer feel like a stranger in a strange land.

            That Christmas I got my first O’Neil wetsuit. It cost a lot. It was a big sacrifice for my working class mom and dad. They knew I was serious. And the fact that they took me seriously was empowering. It helps when the people who love you believe you are capable of things before you are. It carries you through the difficulties ahead.

            There were many dark mornings paddling out before high school in the freezing winter air. There were big winter swells that churned the water and turned your stomach. But the challenge pulled you forward. You knew this sea, you knew this break, even if each looming wave on the horizon was a treacherous stranger. Facing them, you face yourself.

            Everything changed when we got our own cars. My first car was a 1954 Studebaker Champion station wagon, rescued from Mr. Steinberg’s garage across the street where it had languished abandoned and broken for decades. My oldest brother Eric, ten years my senior, eager for yet another automotive restoration project, hauled that rusted hulk into our family garage and together (o.k., mostly him) we stripped it down and rebuilt it. Once it was operational I mounted surf racks on the roof. Now me and my friends could range much farther up and down the coast, no longer beholden to mom’s ride or the contraption we’d rigged up to haul our boards to the beach behind our bikes.

            My next car was a 1968 Datsun 510 wagon, a far more trustworthy and reliable transport. Teenagers with cars. You know the rest. You know the trouble I got into in that car. The bong hidden under the seat, the girls, parking at the beach at night, but not for the surfing.

            Every chance we got my best friend Steve and I would load our boards onto the roof and head up the coast checking every break between Ventura and Rincon Point. The best days were when the beach breaks broke into perfect, clean lefts and rights and the sun came out from behind the overcast and the water sparkled under your board as you flew up and down laughing, breathing hard, feeling alive and free because the sea does that to you – it strips away everything that’s unessential leaving you awake and aloft in the heart of your own best life.

            Maybe I liked surfing because it was an essentially solitary sport. You paddled out with a friend, but often spent the day out of range of each other, both on your own lonely hunt for the next wave. Unlike most sports, there was no clock – no beginning, no end. No one was keeping score. No one had to lose so that you could win. You simply abandoned yourself to the will of nature, and did what you could to quiet yourself and move into accord with it. You cannot impose your will upon the sea – instead, you must relinquish your will and slip into deep cooperation with her vast and enigmatic design. Surfing teaches you to wait. It teaches you how to align your energies with the energies of the cosmos moving around you. It teaches you to stop interfering and start cooperating.

            When I began studying the world’s wisdom traditions in Professor Barret Culmback’s philosophy classes at Ventura College, I had years of lived experience in the sea to frame and contextualize the insights his lectures and readings afforded. The real revelation came when I read the Daodejing, the 6^th century B.C.E. book of Chinese wisdom by Laozi. I immediately understood what Laozi meant by wu wei, or effortless effort – that the best action is natural, spontaneous, creative, and unforced action in harmony with current conditions. When we blindly impose our arbitrary preferences and plans onto the fluid reality around us we fail. When we move with the current, on the other hand, we amplify our effort and achieve more by doing less.

            In the end it isn’t books, lectures, or teachers, no matter how profound, that awaken us to our own best life. It is the lived experience of our days. If we pay attention. It is of course possible to live one’s entire life and never realize a thing. But every life offers a sea of opportunity to awaken to the wisdom we see, feel, and are. If we’re curious, brave, open-minded, open-hearted, and willing to take risks, the waves of life become our teacher.