Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life

by William Finnegan

pompadour,

pidgin

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.

Directions in Honolulu were always given, though, in terms of local landmarks, not the compass, so you went mauka (toward the mountains) or makai (toward the sea) or ewa (toward Ewa Beach, which was out past the airport and Pearl Harbor) or diamondhead. (Among those of us living on the far side of Diamond Head, people just said kokohead—same difference.) These picturesque directions weren’t

I missed my friends in L.A. But Southern California, in its sprawling, edgeless blandness, was losing its baseline status in my mind. It was no longer the place by which all other places had to be measured.

demimonde

“kook” (an insult usually reserved for an incompetent surfer—the term derives from

kuk, a Hawaiian word for excrement).

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.

He was keen.

Tube rides and hard, flowing, short-radius turns, banking vertically off the lip and riding always as close as possible to the breaking part of the wave—these weren’t exactly new ideas, but they were all newly elevated as the goals of progressive surfing, and they were all being realized at levels never seen before.

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.

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

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. I

where his father was born, in the eastern Appenines, working in a vineyard, learning Italian. (Domenic liked his own kind fine. I envied that.)

The old nothing-else-truly-matters obsession was in abeyance.

had certainly developed a weak spot for anticapitalist, even Third Worldist politics.

Motion, new companions, new lands were my drugs in those days—I found they did wonders for the adolescent nerves.

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.

shivering. There was speed in the acid, he said.

I knew that my secret ambition regarding women was profoundly unoriginal. It took me a while to figure out that it might also be no fun.

had set off from the United States with an ignorant ambition to see more of the world before it all turned into Los Angeles.

Then there was the self-disgust, which we each wrestled with differently. 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. In an inescapable way, we sucked, and we knew it, and humility was called for.

prelapsarian

demurred.

thought he worried too much. He thought I took stupid risks. Neither of us was wrong.

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.

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

The true parameters of my loneliness were mine to cope with.

worrying. He had finished, on Guam, a novel

BUT I DID WONDER what I was doing with my life. We had been gone so long now that I felt unmoored from all possible explanations for this trip. It was certainly no longer a vacation. What was I vacationing from?

I panicked sometimes, convinced I was wasting my youth, aimlessly wandering on the dark side of the moon while old friends, classmates, my peers, were building lives, careers, becoming adults back in America. I had wanted to be useful, somehow, to work, to write, to teach, to accomplish great things—what had happened to that? Yes, I had felt compelled, almost required,

On good days, I still thought I was doing the right thing. The particulars of new places grabbed me and held me, the sweep of new coasts, cold, lovely dawns. The world was incomprehensibly large, and there was still so much to see. Yes, I got sick sometimes of being an expatriate, always ignorant, on the outside of things, but I didn’t feel ready for domestic life, for seeing the same people, the same places, thinking more or less the same thoughts, each day. I liked surrendering to the onrush, the uncertainty, the serendipity of the road. And I generally liked being a stranger, an observer, often surprised.

I resented the fact that it felt dangerous to do anything out of the ordinary, anything outside the rut of habit. One

I agreed that Bali was overrun, and the collision of mass tourism and Indonesian poverty was grotesque, but the place suited me nonetheless. We stayed in a cheap, clean losmen (guesthouse) in Kuta Beach, ate well for practically nothing, and surfed daily. I found a good

satori,

But I found it oddly moving, the intensity with which a group of guys could talk about the lines of a board standing up against a wall—its release points, its rocker—or the way that surfers often dropped to the ground to draw in the dirt the layout of their home breaks for guys from other places, other countries. Their stories, they felt, would make no sense if their listeners didn’t understand exactly how a reef back in Perth caught a west swell.

(Bahasa Indonesia is an easy language to learn if you don’t mind speaking it badly. It has no verb tenses, and in much of the country it is—or at least was then—nobody’s first language, which helped level the field for a foreigner.)

I simply couldn’t picture returning to the United States.

but it seems to me that for each of us going home must be like going to render an account.”

“Jam karet.” Rubber time. It was a stock joke answer, meaning that time was a flexible concept in Indonesia.

A fisherman in Java had taught me the best way to eat rice with your fingers. You used the first three fingers as a trough and the back of the thumb as a shovel. It worked.

I felt lost, spiritually, and the growing suspicion that I was wasting my life came back with a vengeance. I wished my father would appear and give me some concrete, comprehensive advice. I would follow it to the letter. Not that I wanted my parents to know I was ill. And they didn’t know.

Sharon’s goals were less immediate, less evident. With my usual one-eyed thoughtlessness, I never asked her what she wanted. We never talked about the future. She was nearly thirty-five. The truth was, we were mismatched. I had somehow kept her interested for years, but I wasn’t what she wanted. Meanwhile, I took her for granted. We made no plans or vows when she left Cape Town.

Surfing, to begin with, was not a “sport.” It was a “path.” And the more you poured into it, the more you got back from it—he himself was the exuberant proof of that.

did like seeing that the best wave I had surfed went unmentioned because the world didn’t know about it. Bryan and I, superstitiously, still never spoke or wrote the word Tavarua. We just said “da kine” and figured we’d get back there in due time.

Uluwatu,

lugubriously,

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.

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