Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life

by William Finnegan

Surfing had, and has, a steel thread of violence running through it. I don’t mean the roughnecks one encounters in the water—or, very occasionally, on land, challenging one’s right to surf some precious spot. The displays of strength, skill, aggression, local knowledge, and deference that establish a working hierarchy in the lineup—a permanent preoccupation at every popular break—are a simian dance of dominance/submission that’s usually performed without any physical violence.

No, I mean the beautiful violence of breaking waves. It is a constant. In small waves and weaker waves, it’s mild, benign, unthreatening, under control. It’s just the great ocean engine that propels us and allows us to play. That mood changes as the waves get more powerful. Surfers call power “juice,” and the juice becomes, in serious waves, the critical element, the essence of what we are out there to find, to test ourselves with—to recklessly engage or cravenly avoid. My own relationship with this substance, with this steel thread, has become only more vivid over time.

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. Robinson Crusoe, Endless Summer. This was a track that led away from citizenship, in the ancient sense of the word, toward a scratched-out frontier where we would live as latter-day barbarians. 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.

It seemed clear, later, that I was unwittingly hoping to reconstitute a kind of family circle. I had left home, effectively, at a very young age, and for many years felt a poorly understood compulsion to build myself a new shelter from the world—even as I declined to start a biological family with Caryn and seemed to roam the globe under an opposite compulsion.

Caryn liked to say, quoting Walpole, that life is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel. That pretty well nailed my problem with LSD. The cerebral part was terrific; the emotional part, not so much.

Underneath all the badinage, though, under her slinky sloe-eyed self-assurance, was a soft and wounded person whose restlessness was, as she would say, molecular.

Bryan and I, Teka announced, were exactly like every other “beach bum” in California, Florida, and Hawaii. We had no goals, no cares for tomorrow. Our type could be found “especially at Waikiki Beach,” she said. “If there was an earthquake, you wouldn’t worry about your house or your car. You’d just say, ‘Oh, wow, a new experience.’ All you care about is finding a perfect wave, or something. I mean, what will you do if you find it? Ride it five or six times and then what?”

A shiver of secondhand sorrow ran through me. And an ache of something else. It wasn’t exactly homesickness. It felt like I had sailed off the edge of the known world. That was actually fine with me. The world was mapped in so many different ways. For worldly Americans, the whole globe was covered by the foreign bureaus of the better newspapers—the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal—and, at that time, the big newsweeklies. Every place on earth was part of somebody’s beat. Bryan understood that map before I did, having gone to Yale. But when I’d found an old copy of Newsweek on Captain Brett Hilder’s bridge, and tried to read a George Will column, I’d burst out laughing. His Beltway airs and provincialism were impenetrable. 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.

Our conversation changed. It usually had a busy, must-say-everything edge to it, even during the long, lazy days of waiting for waves on Tavarua. But out in the lineup, once the swells started pumping, large pools of awe seemed to collect around us, hushing us, or reducing us to code and murmurs, as though we were in church. There was too much to say, too much emotion, and therefore nothing to say. “Look at this one” felt like grandiloquence. And it was only inadequate shorthand for “My God, look at this one.” Which was in turn inadequate. It wasn’t that the waves beggared language. It was more like they scrambled it.

Surfers have a perfection fetish. The perfect wave, etcetera. There is no such thing. Waves are not stationary objects in nature like roses or diamonds. They’re quick, violent events at the end of a long chain of storm action and ocean reaction. Even the most symmetrical breaks have quirks and a totally specific, local character, changing with every shift in tide and wind and swell. The best days at the best breaks have a Platonic aspect—they begin to embody a model of what surfers want waves to be. But that’s the end of it, that beginning. Bryan had no interest in perfection, it seemed to me, and his indifference represented, among the surfers I’ve known, a rare degree of realism, maturity, and philosophical appreciation of what waves are. I didn’t have much interest in the perfection chimera myself. More than he did, though.

Their swains were all local bravos whom they had probably gone to high school with. I spent the night of the party in my tiny, grotty bungalow room trying to work on my novel. How I hated being a foreigner, always on the outside. The intensity of my shame and self-loathing was unsettling. Sharon and I wrote letters, many, and hers were usually a comfort to get, but I could hardly tell her everything. She was undoubtedly being similarly discreet. The true parameters of my loneliness were mine to cope with.

The best surfers were admired, even revered, for their style and ability, but the important thing we shared with them was esoteric, obsessive, not mainstream but subcultural, certainly not commercial. (Some of this—not much—has changed in recent years.)

The main thing we shared, at every level of talent, was a profound absorption in waves. Mark liked to say that surfing “is essentially a religious practice.” But there was too much performance, too much competition (however unstructured), too much appetite and raw preening in it for that description to ring true to me. Style was everything in surfing—how graceful your moves, how quick your reactions, how clever your solutions to the puzzles presented, how deeply carved and cleanly linked your turns, even what you did with your hands. Great surfers could make you gasp with the beauty of what they did. They could make the hardest moves look easy. Casual power, the proverbial grace under pressure, these were our beau ideals. Pull into a heaving barrel, come out cleanly. Act like you’ve been there before. Make it look good. That was the real fascination, and terror, of photos of oneself. Do I look good? If this was a religion, perhaps it didn’t bear thinking about what was being worshipped. “Muthiya maar,” Caroline sometimes trilled over her etching plates as I swapped stories with other surfers over beers.

When the surf is big, or in some other way humbling, even these questions tend to fall away. The heightened sense of a vast, unknowable design silences the effort to understand. You feel honored simply to be out there. I’ve been reduced on certain magnificent days—this had happened to me at Honolua Bay, at Jeffreys Bay, on Tavarua, even once or twice at Ocean Beach—to just drifting on the shoulder, gawking at the transformation of ordinary seawater into beautifully muscled swell, into feathering urgency, into pure energy, impossibly sculpted, ecstatically edged, and finally into violent foam.

Surfing and I had been married, so to speak, for most of my life, but it was one of those marriages in which little is said. Mark wanted to help me and surfing patch up our stubborn, silent marriage. I didn’t think I wanted it patched up. Having a sizable tract of unconsciousness near the center of my life suited me, somehow. I almost never talked about surfing except with other surfers. It contributed little to how I saw myself. I was reluctant to think of it as part of my real life as an adult, which I was now busy trying to kick-start. Journalism was ferrying me into worlds that interested me far more than chasing waves. But something odd was happening. Setting aside my ambivalence, I was letting Mark’s exuberance carry me along, letting him become the engine that powered my surfing life. In some ways, I realized, I had let Mark thrust himself between me and surfing, antically filling the foreground, haunting my dream life with his fantasies, rending my winter night’s sleep with a screaming phone. I even let him preside over primordial moments, his Mephistophelian cackle providing a lifeline from the yawning space of my fear in big waves to some rock face where the psychic crampons held. It was a reporter’s passivity, this yielding to an alter ego, but on this story it was disfiguring. I hardly recognized myself in the mirror of the Doc Squad.

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, 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 ecstasy of actually riding big waves requires placing yourself right beside the terror of being buried by them: the filament separating the two states becomes diaphanous. Dumb luck weighs heavily, painfully. And when things go badly, as they inevitably do—when you’re caught inside by a very large wave, or fail to make one—all your skill and strength and judgment mean nothing.

I know I felt the gears spinning, turned by ancient compulsion. Parts of me were already anticipating the shock of the water, envisioning the line of approach. It was more reflex than thought. That was my most heedless, least reasonable self down there. It did not weigh risks and probabilities. It didn’t deserve to be called decision making. I wasn’t proud of it. Still, I felt hot shame and regret as I drove away.

IF I’M NOT on the road or surfing locally, I try to swim a mile a day now in a basement pool on West End Avenue. This humble routine, and the dry-land workout that goes with it, are my surf salvation.