The secret language of surfers
Benjamin speaks mostly in pronouncements and requests. If you don’t know him well it can be hard to tell the difference between the two.
“Brown rice pasta,” he might say out of nowhere on the way home from school because this is what he wants for dinner.
“Brown rice pasta,” he’ll say after dinner, when you’ve asked him if he enjoyed his meal.
“Brown rice pasta,” he’ll say again in the morning, his way of discussing what he’s packed for lunch.
I wish he could tell me how he feels, about what brings him joy and what drives him crazy and why. This seems like it should be within reach, and it very well may be. There was a time when he couldn’t even imitate a simple, one-syllable sound. But whenever I wonder why he hasn’t yet graduated from this kind of Captain Obvious food report to communicating more complex thoughts, I remember something the psychologist who diagnosed him with autism told me.
“Imagine you went to Japan for the first time, alone, and you only knew a few words of Japanese,” the guy explained. He was red-headed and baby-faced and insisted we call him Braden. I did, once I’d mostly forgiven him for bulldozing my life. “You could be the smartest person on the planet—a Nobel Prize winner even—but you would be working so hard to get your needs met, you’d probably be too exhausted to try to talk about anything else.”
Benjamin has become a lot more comfortable in our world over the years but he’s still not nearly fluent enough to navigate it like a native.
Surfers Healing is a free surf camp for kids with autism. It was started by Izzy and Danielle Paskowitz who run Paskowitz Surf Camp in California. Their son Isaiah has autism. When he was small they saw the therapeutic benefits of surfing for him and his classmates and went on to launch this beautiful program. Isaiah is now in his 20s, and Surfers Healing holds events all over the world. (Full disclosure: It came to our city care of my husband Moshe who somehow has the energy for these things.)
They were here recently and we had the privilege of being a part of it once again. When it was Benjamin’s turn to surf I waited by the shore alongside other parents who had kids in the water. We all stood there squinting, trying to pick out our children. Many had been reluctant to go out—in some cases it had taken a posse of volunteers to drag them onto their boards—but from where we stood everyone seemed fine. I’d known they would be. It was my fifth year and I’d seen over and over again how each kid, to the one, rides back in happy and calm and proud.
It’s hard to tell why the campers all respond so well, but I’m sure it has something to do with the ultimate sensorial experience that is the ocean, and also because of the surfers themselves. They haven’t been formally trained to work with this population, but they understand, respect and push our kids better than most therapists.
In my opinion, though, the real magic lies in that when they’re out there it’s just waves and salt and balance and good energy. There is no language--at least not the spoken kind. In this wordless environment our kids can, for once, feel totally at home.
“How was it?” I asked Benjamin when he washed up at shore and slid off his board.
“Surf fun,” he said. Then he ran off dripping wet, kicking up sand onto everyone’s towels. Families like ours had taken over that whole stretch of beach, so nobody minded.
Benjamin and Josh
Moshe doing his thing
Izzy, the man behind the magic
View from above
Izzy and a camper heading out for an adventure
Shoreline spectators
Unstamped photographs by Bianca Senker