If we just stick around, it’ll get better.

I went down to the beach to check the surf. The wind was already on it.

Too small. Wrong swell angle. Too much wind. Too much wrong.

I sat on a log and watched it a while, under the spell of that strange surfing delusion where we believe if we just stick around, it’ll get better.

I noticed that my toenails needed clipping. It did not get better.

My silly, frivolous town is shut down.

The succession of bars that lines the main street of town sits dark and empty. The wine people have left. Signs on the restaurant windows advertise take-out and toilet paper.

Normally, we have parades and parties for every possible occasion. If there isn’t an occasion, we make one up.

But all the parties are off now, for who knows how long.

People walk their dogs in the park and exchange gossip from a careful six-foot distance. Family-sized clusters dot the beach, passing carefully like ships in a dense fog.

I’ve seen more people outside in a day then I usually do in a week.

It’s a bizarre inverse of the evacuations. Everyone is still here, sheltered in place, stuck, as an invisible inferno passes over us.

We stand in line at the grocery store, which allows fifty households to enter at one time.

There’s not much to buy. I wander the aisles of empty shelves and wonder what everyone is doing with all that flour. Even if I could still buy dried beans, I wouldn’t know what to do with them. The pasta is long gone and forget about toilet paper.

There’s fresh-baked chocolate cake. So I buy that.

A few local restaurants sell groceries now. We’ll have eggs, pasta, bread, and milk for sale on Monday, they say. I ate my last slices of bread for lunch today. I consider going back to the grocery store for more chocolate cake. Instead, I ride to the deli and buy bread, pasta, cheese, a bottle of wine.

I wash my hands when I get back home and swipe my debit card with rubbing alchohol. Maybe it helps. Maybe it doesn’t.

There are, after all, limits to human agency.

I stand on the street corner and drink an espresso from a paper cup.

Cars roll by, desultory. The stores are closed.

Where is there to go? The coffee shop has stayed open, serving from a table set up at the front door.

I order espresso and tip ten dollars.

If we’ve learned anything here from the fires and the floods, it’s how to strive for kindness even when it all feels impossible.

The rain will come. The fires will go out. The waves will come. We’ll have jobs and parties and bars again someday.

Cling tightly to that optimism, and don’t let it go.

If we just stick around, it’ll get better.

I stand on the street corner with my paper cup and watch the clouds blow by.

I imagine a summer day at the beach, all of us there, just hanging around with nothing to do.

A surprise windswell brings us small, playful waves. Sometimes, the unexpected things are actually good.

I slide along through clear water and I watch as the rocks pass below my feet. Silver bait fish flash in the sun. Kelp waves lazily.

I get my share and lie in the warm sand.

Beers crack open. Someone hoots his friend down the line, as though the waves were twice the size.

The details don’t matter.

Just the bright sun and the cold beers and the good friends. The sun drops to the horizon. The water turns orange, then gray. Last call, the light fades.

I stand on the street corner, paper cup in hand, and dream of brighter days.

Surfboards hidden under blackberry bushes, being chased by unmarked cars, lineups patrolled by predatory carrion crows. Life as a lockdown runner in southwest France.

“With the money from her accident, She bought herself a mobile home,
So at least she could get some enjoyment, Out of being alone”

Malcom Gladwell claimed Billy Bragg’s “Levi Stubbs’ Tears” has “the most depressing opening couplet in the history of modern music.”

But rather than a criticism, it was admiration. Gladwell points out how easy it is to make someone laugh, compared with cry.

Meanwhile, with mainland Europe on lockdown, everyone is urging each other to stay positive.

Surf fit Facebook lives. Yoga for kids. Book recommendations. Wim Hof YouTubes. How to meditate.

Broadly, “We got this.”

Last Friday’s spring equinox was the fourth day of lockdown, confinement total in France.

The last time armed men imposed curfew here, the 3rd SS Panzer Division Totenkopf were patrolling Bayonne.

The waves pumped for the first few days, pretty much as good as it gets. Offshore winds puffed lovingly all day, air temps soared around the low twenties, moderate tides kept everything right on the button.

Meanwhile, near total silence prevailed. Birdsong dominates the soundscape, with the recent arrivals from Africa, the hoopoes, bolding heralding the glorious arrival of spring.

Hours after the lockdown came in, an Aussie friend surfed perfect La Graviere with nobody out.

Not a soul.

Surely not performed since Dora or Maurice pretty much had free run of the joint.

He boasted his exploits on a surfboard factory’s WhatApp group. He got roundly chastised by colleagues – core surfers all –for playing fast and loose with pensioners’ lives.

Initially, there was some ambiguity as to whether or not surfing was actually allowed. President Macron said we could leave home briefly to do sport on our own.

So… surf alone?

Great.

As the lockdown came into force at noon last Tuesday, Gendarmes cleared the busy lineup at Capbreton and told the unlucky shredders that because of all the people in the lineup, surfing wasn’t an individual sport.

So then, if you paddled out and claimed a peak, would it therefore be illegal for anyone to paddle out and nause you?

Legally enforced lineup exclusivity, kind of Cloudbreak pre 2010, only without the predatory capitalist-backed thuggery?

Alas, not so.

Surfing was officially forbidden a couple of days later, along with beach going of any kind.

Fines of €135 euro were dished out to everyone in a wetsuit in the car park at Les Bourdaines. There were rumours of a San Sebastian local over the border in Spain copping a whopping €1000 for surfing Playa Gros.

If you’ve ever seen the quality of the waves at Playa Gros, a tenner would be considered steep.

But the main deterrent isn’t so much the criminal justice system, but the court of social media and its nurses crying after finishing a forty-eight-hour shift and not being able to buy pasta or wipe their bums.

The guy from the surfboard factory even left the WhatsApp group. Things were getting ugly alright.

Another friend was undeterred.

He got up early, biked into the woods and surfed himself silly in a hissing four-to-six left shories. Hid the five-eleven under a blackberry bush, biked back through the woods without seeing a soul.

The next day he went a bit earlier to avoid the street lights, which come on at six am for an hour before sun up, and got into the woods unlit, using backroads.

At one point, a car turned in a cul-de-sac and chased him.

He sprinted, made a few rapid turns, then lost them down an alley, schoolboy style.

What a rush.

The third day of lockdown was a darker night.

All alone in the woods, he started to think about wild boars. He’d seen them on this trail a few times, and a week earlier a friendly old madame, warned of a mother with litter nearby. When they charge you, their tusks can sever the femoral artery. Word is, if you get between momma and little uns…

“One dark night he came home from the sea,
And put a hole in her body where no hole should be…”

Day four was six-to-eight, offshore all day. Ruler edged north-west swell, thick lines to the horizon.

With empty peaks everywhere, he reckoned he saw more empties spit that day than ever in his born days. Carrion crows lined the beach, more so than usual. A truly magnificent bird, underrated because of abundance, they’re so intelligent they can recognise human and crow faces.

There’s no way they didn’t know something was amiss.

As my friend got out the water, one was eyeing him up.

“If he rolls an ankle in the ferocious shorey and can’t make it up the steep berm…” it almost certainly thought, calculating which eyeball to peck out first for breakfast.

“When the world falls apart, some things stay in place,
Levi Stubbs’ tears run down his face.”

The wind arrived yesterday, the swell finally relented.

Someone is flying a drone over my neighbourhood, I’m middle fingering it.

Rumours are that the lockdown will be extended to forty-five days and the army will be deployed to patrol the streets.

The surfing fine is going up to a grand, someone said.

Someone else said three.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, turns out the Venice canal dolphins were fake news.

The Totenkopf SS blew up twenty ships in the Adour and shot three people with machine guns as they beat their retreat. They also blew up the Pont Lajus bridge in Capbreton that goes from town to the beach for good measure.

But they never did find the cases of 1928 Lafite Rothschild hidden in the cellar at Cafe de la Gare.

Every cloud, etc.