What's there to say about this season that hasn't already been expressed by creative types going back a few thousand years?
The wealth of spring poems out there--the odes, the sonnets, the frantic pleas to virgins--tend to be of a similar ilk. You've got your daisies pied and violets blue (Shakespeare), your calls to Sound the Flute! (Blake), and your frenetic fears of missing out on the whole thing, as evidenced by a histrionic D.H. Lawrence, who writes: I tremble so much to hear it, that even now, on the threshold of spring, I fear I shall die!
I like Rimbaud, a volatile self-examiner who wrote an ode to spring called A Season in Hell. In it, he claims that spring imbued him with, "the frightening laugh of the idiot."
Sound familiar, surfers?
Up here NOTB, spring brings strong(er) northwest winds, cold(er) water temps, and shitti(er) waves. Desperate locals threaten to move, quit altogether or, worse, take up kiteboarding. Claritin flows like wine, wine flows like water, and water gives us the frightening laugh of the idiot.
Ah, Spring!
As I've speculated before here, surfers are subconciously prone to order boards to match the season. During a particularly wet week this part February, I got TWO orders for gray boards, one from a local, and one from a guy in the PNW--neither strangers to inclement weather.Spring orders usually feature bursts of color. None more so than this 8ft., 2+1 BroadSword for Santa Cruz lovely lass Kaelyn, who designed the spring-y artwork for the bottom with her special guy friend, Will.
See, the artwork resembles a seed pod.Ah, Spring!
The talented Leslie Anderson taped-off the design on the foam, then 'stained' it with pigmented resin. The result, aside from being bitchin', looks not unlike the work of children's book genius Eric Carle, of The Very Hungry Caterpillar fame.
Closeup of board.
Cover of The Mixed-Up Chameleon, which my two-year-old daughter calls, The Messy Lion.Ah, Spring!
