The silver surfer

HAMPTON BEACH, N.H. -- The Eastern Surfing Association's Northeast Region championships were getting underway. Kitty Pechet finished her warm-up rides and headed for the officials' tent. The tournament was running late because of stormy weather. Pechet, who'd been trying out a new surfboard, wanted to find out when her heat was starting.

To her surprise, ESA officials notified Pechet she'd already won. The one other entrant in the Grand Legends division, a 65-year-old New Jersey man, had decided not to surf. Some guessed it was more than the 47-degree water that had kept him on the beach.

"The waves are small today, and I'm a woman," Pechet said over lunch later that afternoon in mid-May, after changing from a full-body wet suit into a black Surf Diva sweater. "So I probably had the advantage going in."

ESA official Peter Panagiotis raised the gender issue more bluntly. "Men don't want to get beaten by the women," he said, sitting in his car parked beachside. "It was funny, because the guy got a good tongue-lashing before he left."

Thus did Pechet (pronounced PECK-et) add another trophy to the collection she already owns. If they were all she had to show for her wave-riding skills, her story would be inspiring enough. For Pechet is one of only about a dozen East Coast surfers, mostly men, who compete regularly in the 65-plus division, often in conditions that would daunt surfers half their age.

Says ESA executive director Debbie Hodges , "Kitty has helped countless women -- and men -- who think they can't surf anymore get on a board and try."

Pechet, who turned 70 this year and has four grandchildren, is more than a minor New England surfing legend, though.

Petite (she stands barely 5 feet tall) and self-effacing ("I'm a terrible surfer"), a serious artist who challenged gender barriers at Harvard University in the pre-feminist era, Pechet shied away from sports until she took up running at 40. She never touched a surfboard until paddling past age 50, when one of her sons caught the surfing bug and needed a lift to the beach.

Until then, Pechet had embraced many roles -- wife, mother, artist, teacher -- but none resembling Gidget Goes Harvard Square.

Lately, though, it's as if she'd been determined to prove the fountain of youth can kick up a few waves, too. And in doing so transform every aspect of a woman's life, from artistic sensibility to sense of place in the natural world.

"Surfing has become a metaphor for life, my life" Pechet says during an interview at her spacious home in Cambridge, which she shares with her husband, Harvard University professor Dr. Maurice Pechet, a member of the medical school's Board of Fellows . "You paddle out, turn around, choose a wave, and miss it or catch it. When you get up, you finish, fall off, turn around, and paddle out again."

Surfing "is a survival skill for the body and the soul," she continues, surrounded by her painting and calligraphy, examples of which cover the studio walls. "Surfing and art have kept me healthy, physically, emotionally, artistically, and spiritually." If not surfing, Pechet adds, "I believe there's something out there for each of us, waiting to make us smile."

Her story begins in Bermuda, where Pechet grew up. It was an era of limited choices for women, no matter how prosperous or educated, she recalls. Much of her childhood was spent "trying to fit the mold of others' expectations." Torn between teaching and nursing as a career, Pechet arrived in Cambridge in 1958 to study at Harvard's Graduate School of Education. She soon met, and married, Lowell House senior tutor Maurice Pechet, becoming the first woman to take up official residency in a Harvard undergraduate house. Even so, Pechet says, he harbored Old World notions of homemaking and child-rearing and did not even want his wife to drive a car.

"I got used to walking five steps behind my Harvard husband," says Pechet. "No one asked me at cocktail parties what I did. If they did, I'd say, 'I'm an administrator.' They never asked, 'Of what?' "

When the first of their five children was born, in 1962, she continues, "I was either going to be a mother or a painter, so I put away my paints." Later she taught herself calligraphy and started getting commissioned work. She also taught a calligraphy course at Buckingham Browne & Nichols School and, at 40, bought herself a pair of running shoes and embarked upon a fitness regimen.

During summers in Bermuda, Pechet also tried windsurfing and found she liked it. When her youngest son, Tamin, got hooked on board surfing, Pechet started driving him to competitions up and down the Northeast. One day in Narragansett, R.I., a women entered in the tournament urged Pechet to pick up a board and offered to show her how to catch a wave.

"My part of the deal was to enter the competition," Pechet says. "And I beat her. I'd never won anything in my life. I was psyched."

Now 29 and studying at the Harvard Business School, Tamin Pechet says it was totally unexpected for his mother to take up the sport. And totally cool she excelled at it, after supporting his own surfing passion all those years.

"To see this switch flip and surfing become important to her was amazing," he says. "People couldn't quite grasp that a woman in her 50s was surfing in New England during the winter. They thought she was nuts."

The more Pechet surfed, the better and more confident she got. The better she got, the greater the spillover effect on her art was. Paintings once rendered in tight, calligraphic brushstrokes began exploding with energy and color. Small graph-paper squares gave way to sprawling canvases. Her paintings became both more personal and more political. "It was like they'd been waiting all their lives to be painted," says Pechet, who studies and teaches at Watertown's Turtle Studios, an artist-run educational and cultural collaborative. She also teaches art classes at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education and Harvard Neighbors program.

Held over Mother's Day weekend, the ESA tournament is an emotionally difficult time for Pechet, marking as it does the anniversary of her only daughter's death, in 1993. "Every year on Mother's Day, I am isolated in the sand," Pechet wrote in one autobiographical essay. The main reason she enjoys surfing competitively, she says, is the social companionship it provides. That, she says, and "the safety aspect. Because frankly as I get older, I like having someone out there in the water watching me."

On hand to lend his support this year was Maurice Pechet, an infrequent attendee at such events. Twenty years older than Pechet, bundled up to protect against the chill and fog, he sat beside his wife during lunch while she tenderly stroked his arm.

"I'm not surprised at anything she does," he said when asked about her late-blooming surfing career. Outside the hotel, Kitty Pechet kissed him and thanked him for coming. Then she checked the wax on her surfboard, got in her car, and drove back to the beach.

Joseph P. Kahn can be reached at jkahn@globe.com.