Ngor, just beyond a little channel whose twin openings to the sea permit the
force of the Atlantic to pour forth in wavelets that meet in the middle in a
chaos of interference: it's an easy traverse by wooden pirogue, ending at the
little island that makes for joyful Saturday beach excursions.  But speckled
with boats at anchor, protected by the worst of the sea's excesses, it makes a
nice paddling excursion, too.  So starting in late fall of last year, I made a
habit of putting my surfboard in at day's end and paddling out across the
current to Ngor and back.  

It was a good workout for the arms and shoulders and therefore probably good
for my surfing.  It was also an exercise in Senegalese ecology, as the traverse
sent me across a channel that, at its deepest, was probably only about ten or
twelve feet in depth.  That's deep enough to drown in, and many Senegalese have
drowned there due to careless pirogue captains overloading their vessels and
racing back and forth in reckless competition with their colleagues.  But,
except for an instant when, as the tide turns and the sea begins to pull and
the ships turn on their moorings, it was no stress for a competent swimmer on a
fiberglass longboard.  One evening I got a late start, and the sun set while I
was paddling.  From the water's edge, because on a surfboard your chin is at
sealevel, I watched the sea turn molten, then dissolve into ink, as the Ngor
village shoreline turned to silhouette, and then shadow.  This, I thought, is
awesome: I am one with the earth.

I had forgotten that between the earth and my chin lies a nation of Senegalese.
The last time I made the traverse, the wind had turned after a storm, and the
current carried the flotsam of the Senegalese Atlantic shoreline: bits of
plastic, garbage, shreds of plastic bag, wrappers, the everlasting scum of a
nation rich enough to consume junk, but too poor to bother dealing with its
solid waste.  "If someone asked me what it's like to surf in Senegal," I
thought, "I'd tell them to empty their paper pail into the toilet, and then
swirl their head in it as they flush it."

I go back, but rarely.  The surfing beaches are slowly growing polluted too:
Virage has a now-uncovered pipeline carrying sewage into the sea; the whole
stretch of Yoff carries the runoff from the Parselles Assainies, and along the
western flank of Senegal's Presqu'Ile, nobody goes in the water south of about
Mosquee de la Divinite because of the sewage.  So goes any hope of a tourist
industry based on beaches and sun - Dakar's two most easily exploited
resources.

That's the traverse, because you are human: can you make it across and back?
Can you make it without being consumed by the sea?  But can you also slip
across the sea leaving little more than the slit traced by the surfboard's fin
and the divots where your arms penetrated the sea's surface?  Because if you
can't do it without leaving a trace, it can't last.