There are two things you realize if you stay on the far West Coast of Canada for any length of time. The first is that, while summer and sun are fantastically beautiful, it's better in the rain and the fog and the wind in winter. The second is that surfing on Long Beach in Pacific Rim National Park is something you should have given your life to.
Luckily, Jenny Hudnall, a helium voiced Disney character from the Annette Funicello days of Beach Blanket Bingo, can help, because her mission is to put as many women on surfboards as possible.
It doesn't matter how old you are, she will make you look awesome. Or at least think, one day, awesome might be possible, if you can stop swallowing half the ocean when you pitch forward off the board for the 40th time in a row.
Jenny, 28, started Surf Sisters four years ago and her business has quadrupled every year since. She runs the only surfing school for women in Canada, "unless there's somewhere on the East Coast I haven't heard about." Producers brought Jenny and her gang to the Blue Crush premiere in Vancouver and she signed autographs.
Her mission is gaining ground. This year, there are about 3,500 more women surfing on Long Beach than were surfing last year.
Surfing is the prevailing coolest thing to do in Pacific Rim National Park, a narrow strip of impossible beauty flung at the farthest end of the country. There are tourists, of course, about 500,000 a year who flow through the cabins and campgrounds and B&B's. Many go whale watching and kayaking or hang out with the thousands of kids; some of whom happen to be theirs, who run back and forth, across the beaches like tribes of dazed, hyperactive waterbugs. These are, without question, the most spectacular beaches in Canada, backed up against an old-growth rain forest. There are, equally beautiful, four-star hotels like the Wickaninnish Inn and Long Beach Lodge, which hew closely to the West Coast aesthetic, while providing wonderful food and careful service, and the benchmark cheer that comes with every staff member having an extreme sport to practice out there where you can touch the wilderness. No one is oppressed, living in grisly staff quarters, envying the rich. The rich, if they have any sense at all, envy them, and they know it.
That's because, on surfing lessons, the real energy, the kick, comes from the surfers and the surf shops, and from Jenny and her henchwomen.
"I broke up with my last boyfriend because he didn't realize that surfing comes first," says Jenny, who is now married to a surfer. She points with her thumb over her shoulder. "Yup. Out the door, Mac, surfing comes first. I told you that."
We all nod sagely insofar as we can, ignominiously lying on sand outlines of our surfboards, ready to pick up our first pointers. Her assistant, Nadia, 23, nods. "Yup, I met my boyfriend in the parking lot and he had two surfboards on his car and I had two kayaks on my car, and I sold my kayaks and bought surfboards and, a month later, we were in Central and South America finding the best waves."
There are three of us in the lesson today: myself, Eliza and Pilar, two new friends of mine who said, "You're going surfing? We're coming too," and flew in from Williams Lake through the thick fog. The fog lifts on and off during the afternoon, and there are blue skies and sun to be seen, but essentially what we see is mist, mist off the water, mist closing in from the sky. August in Pacific Rim National Park is called "Fogust" and we are told that joke about a dozen times a day. We are also in four-millimetre-thick wetsuits, because the water near Tofino is about 13°C.
So we're all lying face-down in the sand, in our wetsuits, which frankly aren't that attractive, learning how to "pop up," which is the last and crucial move in surfing. Timing your pop-up is difficult, because you are lying flat on your board, in the water, craning your neck to look behind so you can catch the wave. When you have caught it, and just about when it's crested over you, right then, at that very minute, you leap up from a prone position, and without getting on your knees, adopt the surfer's stance, feet at right angles to the nose of the board, in a low crouch, arms straight out.
Hahahaha! I can tell Pilar and Eliza have done a lot of sports and are athletes. I equally know that I am not, but what I am, conveniently, is short. They are model-tall, so tucking their stork legs under them and leaping on to the balls of their feet means they have to manoeuvre quite a lot of leg underneath them. I do not. Popping up is almost doable. On land.
Jenny and Nadia spend quite a lot of time with us on the sand, teaching us how to avoid being bonked on the head with a nine-foot-long surfboard traveling at 60 knots through surf, and how to come up through the surf, always, always protecting your face. We are women, after all. They say, most men just throw you out there beyond the break and let you find your skill level, watching with a mocking grin on their faces.
Here, before you step foot in the water, you11 know how to be safe. Jenny, despite looking like an adorable spun-sugared, pigtailed cartoon character, is very serious when it comes to paddling out beyond the break before you're ready and getting caught in a riptide.
They teach us some surfing lingo, which we promptly forget, there is some more joking at the expense of male surfers who try so very hard to be extremely cool, and are therefore, apparently, worth hours and hours of derisive laughter, and we hit the water.
We get why people love this so much in about three minutes. All of us have wide grins plastered on our faces; as Jenny and Nadia steer our boards, over and over and over again, position us in the water, and shove us off crying, "Paddle-paddle-paddle! OK, pop-up-pop-up-pop-up!"
Despite the water being freezing, we are not, and once Jenny forces us to get our hair wet, the threat of cold recedes entirely, and it seems a lark to pitch off a surfboard into two feet of icy water, again and again and again.
By the end, we have all stood up, at least once, and felt what it might be like to be actually good. It's the surge that is the great pleasure, and conquering that surge that is the elusive big hit of surfing. The ocean out here is immensely powerful, grey, and thick with salt and, on this section of coast, called the Graveyard of the Pacific.
Even waist-deep in the water, you can feel that power. Climbing on top of it, preposterous as it may seem, and standing for even a moment or two is better than sex. I swear. Try it. You'll see why in the recent scholarly translation of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, it is only the surfers of the third millennium who are deemed to live life as the gods live.