Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life

by William Finnegan

Everything out there was disturbingly interlaced with everything else. Waves were the playing field. They were the goal. They were the object of your deepest desire and adoration. At the same time, they were your adversary, your nemesis, even your mortal enemy. The surf was your refuge, your happy hiding place, but it was also a hostile wilderness—a dynamic, indifferent world.

The ocean was like an uncaring God, endlessly dangerous, power beyond measure.

IN OLD HAWAII, before the arrival of Europeans, surfing had religious import. After prayers and offerings, master craftsmen made boards from sacred koa or wiliwili trees. Priests blessed swells, lashed the water with vines to raise swells, and some breaks had heiaus (temples) on the beach where devotees could pray for waves.

Postwar Southern California became the capital of the emerging surf industry largely because a local aerospace boom provided both new lightweight materials for board-building and an outsized generation of kids

Hawaii was different, though. At least it felt different to me. Surfing wasn’t subcultural or imported or oppositional—even though its survival represented enduring opposition to the Calvinist business values of Hiram Bingham. It felt deeply woven into the fabric of the place.

I no longer thought of waves being carved in celestial workshops. I was getting more hardheaded. Now I knew they originated in distant storms, which moved, as it were, upon the face of the deep. But my utter absorption in surfing had no rational content. It simply compelled me; there was a deep mine of beauty and wonder in it. Beyond that, I could not have explained why I did it. I knew vaguely that it filled a psychic cavity of some kind—connected, perhaps, with leaving the church, or with, more likely, the slow drift away from my family—and that it had replaced many things that came before it. I was a sunburnt pagan now. I felt privy to mysteries.

The rule of thumb is that it will break when the wave height reaches 80 percent of the water’s depth—an eight-foot wave will break in ten feet of water.

there were shallow reefs, at Kaisers and Threes and even Canoes,

that produced, particularly at low tide, hollow waves—waves

anyone they didn’t esteem was a “kook” (an insult usually reserved for an incompetent surfer—the term derives from kuk, a Hawaiian word for excrement).

Surfing is a secret garden, not easily entered. My memory of learning a spot, of coming to know and understand a wave, is usually inseparable from the friend with whom I tried to climb its walls.

surfing became an excellent refuge from the conflict—a consuming, physically exhausting, joy-drenched reason to live. It also, in its vaguely outlaw uselessness, its disengagement from productive labor, neatly expressed one’s disaffection.

It was nonsense, but I had this vague idea that I could be completely happy as an idler, even a beggar, around the water.

What could rightly have worried my dad about me and surfing was the special brand of monomania, antisocial and ill-balanced, that a serious commitment to surfing nearly always brought with it. Surfing was still something that one did—that I did—with friends, but the club thing, the organized-sports part, was fading fast. I no longer dreamed about winning contests, as I had dreamed about pitching for the Dodgers. The newly emerging ideal was solitude, purity, perfect waves far from civilization.

This was not the daydream of the happy idler. It went deeper than that. Chasing waves in a dedicated way was both profoundly egocentric and selfless, dynamic and ascetic, radical in its rejection of the values of duty and conventional achievement.

Caryn liked to say, quoting Walpole, that life is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel.

Malolo barrier reef, which protected the Mamanucas, on the southern edge of the Nadi Waters. The island was called Tavarua.

The closest village to Tavarua on Viti Levu was called Nabila.

It helped to paddle deep, stroke hard against the grain of the water drawing off the reef, and then angle left as the wave began to lift your board, digging extra-hard into the bottom of the face, jumping up early, finding the speed in the wave’s belly with a quick pump before picking a line—before setting, that is, an initial course, to be intricately adjusted as the wave unfurled.

What was consistent was a certain serenity that followed a rigorous session. It was physical, this postsurf mood, but it had a distinct emotionality too. Sometimes it was mild elation. Often it was a pleasant melancholy. After particularly intense tubes or wipeouts, I felt a charged and wild inclination to weep, which could last for hours. It was like the gamut of powerful feelings that can follow heartfelt sex.

“Radio Ethiopia”—that was an unlistenable Patti Smith song, some secondhand Rimbaud trope. But it stood for all faux-exotic hipster posing—names dropped in New York of places never visited, let alone lived through. We felt superior to, if also vaguely threatened by, all that. Those were the people getting on with careers in the arts, having what Bryan sometimes called Suckcess.

Kelly’s was the most popular spot along the whole of Ocean Beach, but even it was never crowded. Heading south, the next stretch, known as VFW’s, was a broader field, with bigger waves and a wide array of bars. VFW’s was off the west end of Golden Gate Park. A graffiti-covered seawall stood above the beach.

In the Sunset, they were named in alphabetical order, from north to south: Irving, Judah, Kirkham, Lawton, Moraga, Noriega, Ortega, Pacheco, Quintara, Rivera, Santiago, Taraval, Ulloa, Vicente, Wawona, and then the oddball, Sloat.

worked better after surfing, though. The icy water, the exertion, then thawing under a hot shower, left me physically quiet, able to sit without fidgeting at my desk. I slept better too. This was before the first big winter swells.

Buzzy Trent, an old-time big-wave rider, allegedly said, “Big waves are not measured in feet, but in increments of fear.”

“I know why you had to go around the world,” he said while I studied the photo. “It was because you couldn’t find enough things to be miserable about in this country.”

For me, and not only for me, surfing harbors this paradox: a desire to be alone with waves fused to an equal desire to be watched, to perform.

Peewee disagreed about the long-term benefits of the surfing life. As he put it, “The biggest locals can be the biggest derelicts.” We were sitting in a Chinese restaurant near his house, with Peewee warily watching me take notes. “It’s such a great sport it corrupts people,” he said. “It’s like drug addiction. You just don’t want to do anything else. You don’t want to go to work. If you do, it’s always ‘You really missed it’ when you get off.”

The science of surfers is not pure, obviously, but heavily applied. The goal is to understand, for the purpose of riding them, what the waves are doing, and especially what they are likely to do next. But waves dance to an infinitely complex tune. To a surfer sitting in the lineup trying to decipher the structure of a swell, the problem can indeed present itself musically. Are these waves approaching in 13/8 time, perhaps, with seven sets an hour, and the third wave of every set swinging wide in a sort of dissonant crescendo? Or is this swell one of God’s jazz solos, whose structure is beyond our understanding?

I always feel a ferocious ambivalence: I want to be nowhere else; I want to be anywhere else. I want to drift and gaze, drinking it in, except maximum vigilance, a hyperalertness to what the ocean is doing, cannot be relaxed. Big surf (the term is relative, of course—what I find life-threatening, the next hellman may find entirely manageable) is a force field that dwarfs you, and you survive your time there only by reading those forces carefully and well.

But the main wave region was the southwest coast, where northwest swells swept around the island’s western end and were smoothed into long, orderly lines. From our surf-mag source, we knew where to look. There was a village called Jardim do Mar—the Garden of the Sea.

there was a solid swell hitting at Paul do Mar, and the first rule of chasing waves is never to drive away from surf, so I didn’t go.

How did she put up with my absences, not just when I chased waves without her but, even more frequent and protracted, when I went off reporting? The answer changed as we changed. Caroline sometimes left for weeks herself, to visit friends and family in Zimbabwe, and the separations did us good, I thought, at least in our early years. We needed the breaks. Later, it got more difficult to be apart. Caroline retained a firm vein of self-reliance, though. She was unusually good at being alone.

Chicks had to realize, he said, that when they married a surfer, they married surfing. They had to either adapt or split. “It’s like if you or I hooked up with a fanatical shopper,” he said. “I mean a total fanatic. You’d have to accept that your entire life would be traveling around to malls. Or, really, more like waiting for malls to open.”

As the Manhattan skyline lifts into view across the salt marshes and docklands of Newark Bay, Selya says, “Look at that. It’s like a giant reef. The rock and coral sticking up, all the sea life down in the cracks.”

PEOPLE I KNOW in New York are incessantly on the point of going back where they came from to write a book, or of staying on and writing a book about back where

they came from.” Thus A. J. Liebling, in “Apology for Breathing,” a short, terrific essay. Liebling was pretending to apologize for being from New York, a city he loved lavishly and precisely. Now I’m one of those New Yorkers incessantly on the point of going back where I came from. But with me it’s not a matter of packing up or staying on, but rather of being always half poised to flee my desk and ditch engagements in order to throw myself into some nearby patch of ocean at the moment when the waves and wind and tide might conspire to produce something ridable. That cracking, fugitive patch is where I come from.

I liked the idea of growing old gracefully. The alternative was, after all, mortifying. But I rarely gave my age a conscious thought. I just couldn’t seem to pass up even a slim chance of getting a great wave. Was this some backward, death-scorning way to grieve? I didn’t think so.

“What are they doing this for? It’s just pure. You’re alone. That wave is so much bigger and stronger than you. You’re always outnumbered. They always can crush you. And yet you’re going to accept that and turn it into a little, brief, meaningless art form.”

“We will not fear, though the earth give way and the mountains fall into the heart of the sea, though its waters roar and foam.”