Melvin Hangs Ten (Part 1)
I HAD SEEN HIM in the water before. It was hard to miss him, with his big wet snout, his prickly whiskers, and his fat black tummy gliding ever so gently across the ocean’s bright surface.
The name Melvin was my idea. My little sister, Elvira, would probably try to take credit for naming him, but the idea was mine. I thought that he looked like a “Melvin” because even for a sea lion, he looked pretty intelligent. He always had this regal look on his face, as if he were Prince of the Newport Beach River Jetties.
And the way Melvin would watch us on our surfboards was quite impressive. Sometimes he would just sit there, bobbing up and down in the water, with his whiskery snout pointing straight at us, and his big bulbous eyes fixed in an unbreakable gaze upon our surfboards. He was more than curious — he was obsessed with the way we sat on our boards in the water — obsessed with how we managed to paddle with our arms to catch a wave — obsessed with how we popped our feet up onto the surfboard and then balanced our tall skinny bodies as we slid down the face of the waves.
Every once in a while, if I caught a good wave on my surfboard, or if Elvira managed to catch a fun wave on her boogie board, Melvin would perk himself up in the water and clap his flippers together and give us some applause. I would always wave back, but Elvira would usually be a bit confused by the sea lion cheerleader making such a scene in the water.
But sometimes Melvin just seemed, well, down. He would try his best to catch waves next to us by bobbing his body up and down and flapping his flippers when a big wave came his way. He would sometimes manage to ride the wave for a few seconds, but once I would get up on my surfboard, Melvin could never keep up. He would just stick his head up out of the water, and watch me fly down the face of the wave and onto the sandy shore.
I would then look back at Melvin just floating there in the water, with an angry scowl on his face. His eyes would crinkle together, and his frown would turn super evil, as if he were plotting something big and important. When I would paddle back out on my surfboard, Melvin would just keep gazing at me, with a look on his face that would give me goosebumps from head to toe underneath my wetsuit.
* * *
I paddled out on my surfboard on a sunny Sunday morning in July. Elvira had tagged along with me, on her little foam surfboard. My parents made me bring her along, and I promised to keep an eye on her, which was difficult, because every time I looked back, Elvira was getting smacked in the face by a giant wall of whitewash. She would burst up through the ocean surface, spitting out sea foam and choking, as if she had been stuck in a chimney full of water all morning. But Elvira finally made it out with me to where the waves were breaking, and we both had managed to catch some good ones.
Melvin was there, too. He was huffing and puffing and flipping his tail, trying to catch a wave here or there, without much success. He was angrier than normal, grunting and yelling and splashing his dirty whiskers all over the place every time a wave would pass him by. Melvin’s temper tantrums were starting to get on my nerves, but I was also a little bit afraid that he was becoming dangerous. It was just a sense that I got from watching him.
I was sitting on my surfboard and waiting for a new set of waves to roll in, and talking to Elvira about whether she liked her new fourth-grade teacher. Then I heard the ROOOAR! The sound was actually more like a combination of a cannonball blasting up into the air, and the screeching of tires just before a car crash. I looked to my left, and saw Melvin flying out of the water and kicking and flapping every which way. I had seen him missing a bunch of waves earlier that morning, and I knew he was frustrated.
There was a group of surfers sitting on their boards about 50 feet away from me and Elvira. Melvin just kept staring at them. Then, he started to slowly circle around them, while always keeping one eye out of the water. The surfers must have thought that Melvin was looking at them, but I could tell that he was actually more interested in their surfboards. He just kept circling, circling, circling, first slowly, then faster and faster.
Then, Melvin disappeared. All of the surfers in the water were looking around for him, but he was nowhere to be found. No waves were coming in, and the water was so still and flat that the ocean was starting to look like a deserted pond in the middle of the forest.
I looked to my left, and far off in the distance, I saw some small ripples starting to grow out of the still water. The ripples were getting larger and larger, and were moving closer and closer to the pack of surfers by the pier. The surfers by the pier were talking to each other and were not paying any attention to the ripples in the water, but I could see them clearly.
Suddenly, Melvin’s slick snout shot out of the water like a Navy torpedo, and I saw Melvin’s fat sea lion body fly through the air. He looked like a wet, black potato shooting straight toward the group of surfers. The surfer closest to Melvin was a teenage boy with long brown hair. One of the boy’s friends pointed behind him, and as the long-haired boy had just started to turn his head, Melvin smacked right into his back, knocking him off of his surfboard.
The teenager’s surfboard shot straight into the air, before landing onto the ocean surface with an obnoxiously loud PLOP! We were all stunned, and no one knew what to do. The teenage boy seemed all right, as he paddled over to his friend’s surfboard, and hung on to the nose.
I could not believe what I was seeing. Melvin slithered his way over to the surfboard, wrapped his flippers around it like a clumsy child, then scooted his belly right along the top of it. He must have been watching us surfers for so many years, that he thought that he knew exactly what to do. I started to laugh out loud a little bit when I saw Melvin using his flippers to paddle in the water, while lying tummy-down on the surfboard.
Stay tuned for PART 2…
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