Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life

by William Finnegan

“There was a joy of life in him and a kind of tenderness untainted by the merely gentle.” When I read that line, written by James Salter, many years later, I thought of Glenn.

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.