This is Outside In. I'm Sam Evans Brown. To me, the thing I always noticed first is the

colors. You know, on certain days, if it's a cloudless sky, the ocean is this incredibly

dark blue, almost like a sapphire. And that's Diane Cardwell, standing on the beach at Rockaway,

in February of 2021. FYI, it was still coronavirus winter in New York at the time, so

double masks. The sounds a little bit muffled. I don't know what it is about a beach in winter,

but there's something that I find truly magical. I mean, there's something so in Congress

about snow on the beach, but I think that's only because that's not how we are used to using it.

It's like it's always here, right? It's comforting, isn't it? To think that the beach in the ocean

are always there. Diane is a writer and she started spending a lot of time at Rockaway

after what you might call a midlife crisis. She had just gone through a divorce

and dealing with fears that she would never be happy again. But long story short, she discovered

surfing. And I was terrible. Just terrible still. I'm not very good, but I loved it. I

managed it to my feet for just a few seconds and I just was so in love with that feeling,

you know, just gliding across the water as if you're some kind of magical creature, right?

Like the board sort of disappears and you become part of the ocean and part of this kind of

cosmic force that is energy in water making waves.

Diane fell so in love with surfing that she ended up moving to Rockaway. And in 2020,

published a memoir titled Rockaway, surfing headlong into a new life. Rockaway, by the way,

is in Queens, on a peninsula at the western edge of Long Island. And it's famously a surf town.

People come in from Brooklyn or the city for the day to surf, hang out, watch the waves. And

there's also a solid local year round community. All that on a spit of sand on the edge of the

Atlantic Ocean, a very tenuous spit of sand. Just how tenuous came into sharp relief just a few

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