Tim Geithner, the stressed-out Secretary of the Treasury. Photo by Saul Loeb.
The blonde surf instructor clinched the deal with an offhand comment. We stood outside her shack a few blocks from the beach in Rincon, Puerto Rico, just after New Year’s Day, as I sized up a surfboard I might rent. “Tim Geithner rode this board just yesterday,” she said casually.
The United States Secretary of the Treasury rented this thing, seriously? The board, a nine-foot-four Greg Taylor in pale blue with lightning bolts down the rails, suddenly became an object of fascination. The man at the reins of our creaking economy, whose signature is on every freakin’ dollar bill, had spent New Year’s…surfing?
This comes as a surprise if you know anything about surfing and have ever seen a picture of Tim Geithner. The man approaches his job with a deep, abiding and un-surfer-like sense of worry. It is written all over his face.
At his best he looks wary and at his worst he looks hunted, like a man who might at any moment turn a corridor and face an angry mob of Occupy Wall Streeters with torches and pitchforks. This is not an unreasonable fear. In 2008 President Obama tapped Geithner as the point man to pull the United States back from the lip of economic Armageddon, and things haven’t gotten much easier since.
He took hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars to steer us out of the worst economic calamity since the Great Depression — and failed — and worst of all, did so without exhibiting Obama’s Hawaiian sense of cool. The middle-manager tension in his jaw has made it all the easier for the Left to brand him as a tool of our corporate overlords and the Right as the tax commissar of our Socialist-in-Chief. Naturally such a man would want to flee Washington for the tropics.
But as Treasury Secretary one’s options for a tropical vacation are severely circumscribed. Imagine if your choice to take a holiday in Acapulco prompted an indignant senator to declare on C-SPAN that you are exhibiting a dangerous allegiance to the peso. And so it was that over New Year’s the hunted Tim Geithner found himself vacationing in a corner of Puerto Rico, a U.S. territory where people use both Spanish and twenty-dollar bills, seeking anonymity and a brief sojourn as a surfer.
I pondered Geithner’s Yankee burden as I held his board under my arm and surveyed the waves at a serene palm-lined beach called Domes. Would the Secretary’s distress stick to me like a toxic asset, or would it dilute in the warm Caribbean water like so many shares of Citibank?
Only one way to find out.
Paddling out through frothy whitewater, I immediately encountered that bane of surfing: other surfers. Even in laid-back Puerto Rico a surf lineup bears some similarity to official Washington. A scramble for scarce resources. There is only one wave at a time and twelve guys who want ride it, just like there is only one tranche of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act at one time and two hundred lobbyists who want a piece.
We surfers waited for the next swell and eyed each other.
I played it cool, waiting to see how much skill and machismo existed out here on the reef. Took a position on the outside where I wouldn’t draw much attention. I stroked for a little wave that no one seemed to want and, to my great surprise, the Secretary’s board was stable as a barge. I popped up with ease and rode it almost all the way into the beach.
When I paddled back out to the lineup I could tell from the wordless glances of our Bermuda-shorts flotilla that this performance had promoted me from Beta to Alpha. I was welcome to park myself at the peak, where the best appointments — uh, I mean waves — were for the taking.
Not that I am some badass surfer. There was what in Washington they call a mitigating factor.
That factor is that the waves were totally sucky. Over New Year’s week the swell was small and pathetic, waist-high at best, the kind of conditions where only the rankest amateurs or desperate tourists with a departing plane ticket would bother getting wet. The really big investors — er, I mean surfers — stayed out of the water in anticipation of a better day.
Me with the Secretary's surfboard. Photo by Anjali Kumar
Word was that the waves had been awesome a while back, and that a good swell might hit sometime soon. But right now it was almost flat. The ocean’s pulse was weak, flirting with recession, and you could pray to the sea gods or scrape together a few billion in stimulus funds, but really there was not a damn thing anyone could do.
As I bobbed out there on the blue I put my ear to the Secretary’s board and listened, listened to learn what it is like to be the Secretary of the Treasury on a surf vacation. This is what I heard:
The waves are small but you don’t really care because life has suddenly become so simple. Belly-deep in ocean and a blue horizon touched by a few clouds. No one recognizes you now that your Kennedyesque bouffant has been flattened by seawater and a layer of zinc sunscreen disguises your sharp nose. No one even seems to notice you except for that Brazilian surfer girl in a bathing suit so small that just a glance causes your interest rates to surge.
Your mind wanders, and in the next moment you’re back to fretting like you usually do. Durable-goods orders are down and that the trade balance is a friggin’ disaster, and you’re wondering what the hell you’ll say to the Chinese finance minister when you’re in Beijing next week to discuss sanctions against Iran. Before you know it, while you were preoccupied, a good wave has come through. Some grinning German with shoulders as broad as Angela Merkel’s is cruising by on a wave that should have been yours.
But, hey. Oh well. Even a bad day of surf beats a good day testifying before the House Financial Services Committee.
A swell bears down and you decide to go for it. The board picks up speed, you struggle to a standing position, and then it happens: You are surfing, riding your sky-blue board toward shore, looking down past the nose at a calm sine wave of water. It shimmers with the kind of transparency that any regulator would admire. Eventually the wave peters out and you bellyflop into the shallows with a boyish splash. You pop up to the surface and let out a whoop.
You put your belly to the board again and point your nose back toward the lineup, and realize, hey, maybe I need to hang loose, man. Maybe I’ve been a little too uptight. Maybe all the worry in the world won’t hurry up a recovery. Maybe just for today, before I return to the buzzards, I’ll enjoy a swell ride.
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