18580 waves

2 december

I knew I wanted to surf when I started seeing people surfing. It wasn’t TV shows or photos or not even the obvious difficulty of the whole enterprise. It just looked great, as great as skating downhill. And skating downhill I did, so, how difficult could this surf thing be? A wave, at least in the beaches I learned, would hardly be bigger than a person. One and a half meter the bigger ones, perhaps? And that at about 50, 100 at most, meters from the sand. I could swim ten times as much without effort, so what could possibly go wrong? And indeed, I never had a problem to go back to shore, neither it was too difficult to learn to stand in a board accelerating down a wave. It wasn’t even scary. I remember it as riding the tail of a tiger for about 20 seconds: The excitement and the pleasure was too great and too short to realize that it was a tiger what you had grabbed. Every time, before realizing the craziness of the whole thing it was already over, and I was happily sliding, pushed by friendly foam, into the beach.

The really scary part was to wait for the right wave, and catch it.

I know. From the shore it looks like the surfers are just there, sitting in their boards and bobbing with the waves without a concern in the world, just waiting for the right one as a zen monk waits for enlightenment. It might even be that some surfers are like that. But not me, not ever. To be out there, drifting on top of a flimsy concoction of fiberglass and foam, having lost any meaningful contact with all of what I am, was always terrifying. The sea is immense, and those waves, those little things that haven’t even begun to form and that from the shore looked like small humps in a otherwise flat road, those are a whole different thing out there. I loosed all my references only few minutes after having crossed the breakers, so I only had left the staying in the flow of the beast, that sea that rationally I knew was small, that rationally I knew to be just 50, 70 meters away from the sand, that rationally I knew to lack any rip or otherwise dangerous current. All these I knew, and every time I was alone and scared, riding an animal that was or indifferent or foreign to me.

And all these comes to my mind now when I read the number 18580.

Since 2014, 18580 persons have died crossing the Mediterranean. And I think in their boats, in the wooden planks that forms them, in the persons sitting on those planks, and looking at the expanse, at the endless and scary expanse. Knowing that they might have a chance, a flimsy chance, at escaping years of famine and hunger and rape and death. They made it! They are in the boat that will land them in the sands of Italy, in the prodigious Europe where people works and live and dream. When their kids will have a chance at studying something, at growing a family, at growing old. I see this person sliding his tired hand to touch the head of his daughter, at the head of her son. They will have a future.

But they won’t.

Because they will not make it. Because they are in the hands of Our Sea, as the romans named it, and we do not want them. The mediterranean is not the sea of Africa, isn’t it? The mediterranean is the sea of Europe and we do what we want with it. First we depleted it, we overfished it and drag it and polluted it. And now, now we had made it the biggest wall that Trump could possibly dream with. We have let that beautiful expanse of water become the graveyard of 18580 persons (since 2014) Those will never saw land. Those kids and their mothers and their fathers only saw waves, waves and waves only. Because they lost references, and finally the boat collapsed, and they swam for a while too, like the boat, but they collapsed too, like the boat, and they died. There won’t be a surfboard to bring them anywhere. They will have no dreams no more.