Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life

by William Finnegan

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.