Hugh Shaw
“Hue” by Joan Noëldechen
I wrote this years ago. I like to remember this young man and his friend Chris.
I loved the beach. I was born a few blocks from the waterways leading to the surf and from the time I was small I would get excited about the weather becoming warmer so we could go on an all day picnic across the bridge. Later on I marveled at the ease of walking three blocks to the beach in Florida. It was the same Atlantic Ocean, but I could now go every day, including the winter months once I lived in St. Augustine. I remember a quiet, intelligent man in my English literature class. He was one of a group of tanned, fit surfers who lived apart from the rest of us. He was golden-haired and his best friend was dark. The surfers always impressed me as beautiful and magical people. I loved to see a few female surfers who could surf as well as the men. They were respected within the group and not at all like the projections of Gidget on a surf board. The men were always loyal and protective, but there was not a sexual stranglehold around them. It was almost as if they were like the men we read about who honored women from another time. These women stood with them behind their surf boards and sat around their fires at night. They communed with ancient island cultures. Surfing and those cans of sex wax set them apart from the rest of us. We were bland next to them. What was strange to me was that I was noticed once by a handsome surfer who thought I was cool because I was an actress. I was walking home from the theater at midnight and he cried out, “Hey, it’s the actress!” I yelled back, “Hey, man, how are ya?” I was sorry I didn’t know his name. He was one hot surfer dude. When I think back, the best dates I had came from surfers. I used to look behind me wondering why they liked me. I was an academic geek and they were tanned, fit folks, but I also aware they were impressed with my brains and my dark looks. It evened out. One morning something transpired I wasn’t prepared for. I came face to face with a group of surfers who were sobbing in the elevator to class. He was dead. He was dead. He didn’t whirl in the surf or on top of a curl or look like a tanned immortal in surf trunks. He was killed by a drunk driver. Would it have been more poetic to have drowned or a victim of a shark attack? How common was it for me to think of that? I was the outsider looking inward at a ring of surfers weeping on the morning after in class. I could think very clearly on my verses of English poetry. These joyous people were broken open. One man, a classmate of mine, was smashed up in the hospital. He had been thrown clear before the car hit a pole. So there we were in our youth facing death. The most beautiful one who stood days away from graduation was gone and my other buddy from class couldn’t walk. We didn’t know if he would how long it would take him or us to heal. The surfers held a private memorial on the beach at the water’s edge. I cried, too, buy it wasn’t the same, because I had not been part of the circle that had been broken.
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