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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.
I did not consider, even passingly, that I had a choice when it came to surfing. My enchantment would take me where it chose.
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.
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.
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.
I didn’t share my father’s passion for sailing, but I did love the water, and even saw it, from an early age, as my own medium of escape from dull striving, from landlocked drudgery.
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.
The newly emerging ideal was solitude, purity, perfect waves far from civilization.
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.
In truth, difficult as it was, pulling up stakes was in many ways easier than staying.
I might even become another person—someone more to my liking—in
Being rich white Americans in dirt-poor places where many people, especially the young, yearned openly for the life, the comforts, the very opportunities that we, at least for the seemingly endless moment, had turned our backs on—well, it would simply never be okay.
This was a regular chafing point between us. I thought he worried too much. He thought I took stupid risks. Neither of us was wrong.
The truth was, we were wandering now through a world that would never be part of any correspondent’s beat (let alone George Will’s purview). It was full of news, but all of it was oblique, mysterious, important only if you listened and watched and felt its weight.
This was what I was chasing: not the exotic, but a broad-beamed understanding of what is what.
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.
Buzzy Trent, an old-time big-wave rider, allegedly said, “Big waves are not measured in feet, but in increments of fear.” If he said that, he got it right. The power of a breaking wave does not increase fractionally with height, but as the square of its height. Thus a ten-foot wave is not slightly more powerful than an eight-foot wave—because the leap is not from eight to ten but from sixty-four to a hundred, making it over 50 percent more powerful.
“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.
the outside waves themselves were smooth and shiny, with clean peaks and sections looming randomly in the mist. Some of them looked ridable—loveliness amid lethality.
bench-press twice what I could, but fast paddling is not simply a matter of strength. Making a board glide on the surface is partly a matter of artful leverage, and pushing through waves is largely a matter of presenting the least possible resistance to them. Big waves demand a paradoxical combination—ferocity and passivity—that Sloat Bill had never seemed to master.
Being out in big surf is dreamlike. Terror and ecstasy ebb and flow around the edges of things, each threatening to overwhelm the dreamer. An unearthly beauty saturates an enormous arena of moving water, latent violence, too-real explosions, and sky. Scenes feel mythic even as they unfold. 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,
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.
In San Francisco when I lived there, Mark Renneker and Peewee Bergerson had been the gnarliest dudes. That was why other men were obsessed with them.
Getting old as a surfer, I’d heard it said, was just a long, slow, humiliating process of becoming a kook again.
he and Deirdre were doing a stint at Williams College.
YOU HAVE TO HATE how the world goes on.
Back when I could get away with it, I subscribed to Norman Mailer’s view that exercise without excitement, without competition or danger or purpose, didn’t strengthen the body but simply wore it out.
It’s just trying to slow the rate of decline.
