http://photography.nationalgeographic.com/photography/photo-of-the-day/surfing-underwater-waves/

Eryn was the last on duty when the bell sounded from down the beach. She rubbed her face and laboriously stood. With a creak, she pulled open the door of the wooden watch shack. Late afternoon sun poured onto her tanned skin and the beach beyond.

She dug her feet into the sand and looked out toward the water. Fifty, sixty yards out, the sea churned. The waterfolk wanted a word. With a sigh, she grabbed her board and marched into the warm surf.

This was the only good part. A job as messenger wasn’t glamorous, and the pay was unexceptionable. But it meant being paid to take her board out. And what other way could she come back in but by surfing?

When she’d started, Eryn’s trainer had 1001 tales about the waterfolk. Their scales, their fins, their fur, their teeth, their songs, and everything else that had ever been said about them. Foolishly, Eryn had believed the stories at the time.

As she paddled out, the waves grew larger. She couldn’t ride easily over them, so she began to dive beneath. Her world became a strange metronome. Above, below, above, below. On the surface, there was a cacophony; the roar of breaking waves, her own heavy breathing, the splash of her hands and feet propelling her forward. Beneath the surface, relative quiet.

There was a space between breakers that the waterfolk seemed to prefer. Further out, the sea had a gentle chaos over a shallow reef. But here, between the shallows of the shore and the reef, there was a little deep patch. It was here they spun their underwater storms.

Roiling white water sprouted beside her, and she had a moment of panic. Kicking powerfully, Eryn raced back to the surface. She burst into air with a slew of curses. She wasn’t actually mad, just rattled. They did this every time. They just wanted to get a rise out of her. She took a deep breath to steady herself.

“Just no poetry this time,” Eryn mumbled to herself while she paddled herself into position. Then she came around, kicked hard and dove. Into the swirling underwater cloud.

She surfaced later, in the haze that always came with a waterfolk conversation. No one knew how they communicated with humans. When messengers surfaced, it was always in a strange blur. As if the conversation had been held in a dream, watery and fluid and semi-real.

Eryn looked up and was thankful to see the sun had hardly moved. Sometimes the waterfolk kept people under for hours on end. She couldn’t have been down for more than 5 minutes, which was a relief. The message was benign anyway, another identification of local fishermen taking their catch from protected waters after dark. Waterfolk were allegedly a proud and ancient people, but they were eager tattlers which Eryn wasn’t entirely sure she appreciated. Conservationists, however, adored their vigilance.

A set of waves curled away toward the beach in front of her. Eryn sat up on her board to await the next set. The last of the day’s light flitted across the surface of the ocean in luminary, beautiful chaos. This wasn’t a bad way to spend down time on the job.

If surfing in to shore was the job’s best part, this was the worst. Upon surfacing with a message, she was desperate to deliver it as fast as humanly possible. She didn’t want the information to reside only in her head for a moment longer than absolutely necessary. Waiting for the set was an interminable burden, the notes and whispers and thoughts and concerns of the strange waterfolk rattling around in her head and hers alone. But the tide wasn’t right yet.

She wondered if all of life was like that. Waiting at the shack for a call to action then paddling out to sea. Dipping into the waterfolk’s tiny white storms then waiting to be released. Sitting on a board waiting for the tide, pulled by the moon, to deliver the next set of waves. Even the moon wasn’t immune, circling the earth at a pace dictated by gravity.

Life, she thought, might just be a series of personal actions followed by a huge tide of events uncontrolled. She had no influence over the next set of waves. It would come when it would come, and she could only drop in when the moment was right. She could only fulfill her role as messenger when the waterfolk appeared near the shore. The tides could only move when the moon tugged them just so.

This pattern was everywhere. Ubiquitous. Inescapable. Eryn thought that should worry her, should make her scared for life in a world over which she had such little control. But it didn’t. It was freeing, really. She couldn’t control when the waves came, only how hard she paddled to catch them. Maybe that frightened some people, and she wouldn’t blame them if it did. It didn’t scare her.

She could paddle pretty hard. Move pretty fast. And she was comforted in the knowledge that if she missed the first wave, there would be another. Always another, forming from the deep, giving her the chance to ride it safely back to shore.