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Teen culture: Surfing at the American Dream mall wasn’t what I expected.

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Surf travel—the hunt for a perfect wave—is a search for the sublime, a pursuit of fleeting transcendence, a journey into the fabled wilderness. The journey I took on a late February evening was no different. When I left my apartment in Brooklyn after work, backpack stuffed with wax, fins, and board shorts and my board tucked beneath my arm, it was bitterly cold, the temperature in the low 40s, raining and on the verge of sleeting. The wind was south-southeast, 17 mph, gusts at 24 onshore. The Long Branch buoys were reading 5.1 feet at 11 seconds, east-southeast. It had been dark for hours. These were abysmal conditions for surfing, as any semiexperienced East Coast surfer would attest. Luckily, the Skudin Surf wave pool was immune to such calculations. The water would be an amniotic 80-something degrees. The waves would be 2 or so feet high, pumped out mechanically in 30-second intervals. Beneath the climate-controlled dome, there would be no wind. I was going surfing in a mall. Millen

Aymann Ismail Copy Link Share Share Comment Gift Story Only Slate Plus members can gift Slate stories. Become a member to share 10 free articles a month. Surf travel—the hunt for a perfect wave—is a search for the sublime, a pursuit of fleeting transcendence, a journey into the fabled wilderness. The journey I took on a late February evening was no different. When I left my apartment in Brooklyn after work, backpack stuffed with wax, fins, and board shorts and my board tucked beneath my arm, it was bitterly cold, the temperature in the low 40s, raining and on the verge of sleeting. The wind wa

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