"Kim Stanley Robinson - Forty Signs of Rain" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Kim Stanley)

Diego, and he wanted to be in D.C. Something was wrong.

Part of it must have been the fact that he was not really back in his San Diego life, but only previewing it.
He didnтАЩt have a home, he was still on leave, his days were not quite full. That left him wandering a bit, as
he was now. And that was unlike him.

OkayтАФwhat would he do with free time if he lived here?

He would go surfing.

Good idea. His possessions were stowed in a storage unit in the commercial snarl behind Encinitas, so
he drove there and got his surfing gear, then returned to the parking lot at Cardiff Reef, at the south end
of Cardiff-by-the-Sea. A few minutesтАЩ observation while he pulled on his long-john wetsuit (getting too
small for him) revealed that an ebb tide and a south swell were combining for some good waves,
breaking at the outermost reef. There was a little crowd of surfers and body-boarders out there.

Happy at the sight, Frank walked into the water, which was very cool for midsummer, just as they all
said. It never got as warm as it used to. But it felt so good now that he ran out and dove through a
broken wave, whooping as he emerged. He sat in the water and floated, pulled on his booties, velcroed
the ankle strap of the board cord to him, then took off paddling. The ocean tasted like home.

The whole morning was good. Cardiff Reef was a very familiar break to him, and nothing had changed in
all the years he had come here. He had often surfed here with Marta, but that had little to do with it.
Although if he did run into her out here, it would be another chance to talk. Anyway the waves were
eternal, and Cardiff Reef with its simple point break was like an old friend who always said the same
things. He was home. This was what made San Diego his homeтАФnot the people or the jobs or the
unaffordable houses, but this experience of being in the ocean, which for so many years of his youth had
been the central experience of his life, everything else colorless by comparison, all the way up until he had
discovered climbing.

As he paddled, caught waves and rode the lefts in long ecstatic seconds, and then worked to get back
outside, he wondered again about this strangely powerful feeling of saltwater as home. There must be an
evolutionary reason for such joy at being cast forward by a wave. Perhaps there was a part of the brain
that predated the split with the aquatic mammals, some deep and fundamental part of mentation that
craved the experience. Certainly the cerebellum conserved very ancient brain workings. On the other
hand perhaps the moments of weightlessness, and the way one floated, mimicked the uterine months of
life, which were then called back to mind when one swam. Or maybe it was a very sophisticated
aesthetic response, an encounter with the sublime, as one was constantly falling and yet not dying or even
getting hurt, so that the discrepancy in information between the danger signals and the comfort signals
was experienced as a kind of triumph over reality.

Whatever; it was a lot of fun. And made him feel vastly better.

Then it was time to go. He took one last ride, and rather than kicking out when the fast part was over,
rode the broken wave straight in toward the shore.

He lay in the shallows and let the hissing whitewater shove him around. Back and forth, ebb and flow.
For a long time he lolled there. In his childhood and youth he had spent a fair bit of time at the end of
every ocean session doing this, тАЬgrunioningтАЭ he called it; and he had often thought that no matter how
much people worked to make more complicated sports in the ocean, grunioning was all you really