Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life

by William Finnegan

I was shaken to the core by the sound of the waves detonating a few yards behind me. I was convinced that if I had been caught inside, I would have died. This conviction was a first for me. This was the fear line that made surfing different, here underscored extra-heavily. I felt like Pip, the cabin boy in Moby-Dick who falls overboard and is rescued but loses his mind, undone by visions of the ocean’s infinite malice and indifference.

Vivid

Koufax and Drysdale were in their primes, striking out the world, and we thought that was normal.

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.

Defeats, humiliations—craven avoidance—burn into memory so much more deeply, at least for me, than their opposites.

I had set off from the United States with an ignorant ambition to see more of the world before it all turned into Los Angeles. There was no danger of that happening, of course, but fetching up in rural Polynesia caused my vague discontent with industrial civilization to snap into sharper focus.