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Where was my sense of social responsibility?
The newly emerging ideal was solitude, purity, perfect waves far from civilization.
Team sports were effectively out of the question for students opposed to the war—the coaches were the most rock-ribbed members of a generally conservative, pro-war faculty and administration, and they were not shy about ragging on kids they suspected of being commies.
It was 1969, the summer of Woodstock, but the flyers for the festival plastered around Greenwich Village mentioned an admission charge. That sounded lame to us—some kind of artsy-craftsy weekend for old people—so we skipped it.
Domenic’s first wife, a worldly Frenchwoman, refused to believe that we slept chastely side by side all summer in that van. We did, though,
We surfed only twice that summer
This is what I mean by quitting surfing. When you surf, as I then understood it, you live and breathe waves. You always know what the surf is doing. You cut school, lose jobs, lose girlfriends, if it’s good.
I had certainly developed a weak spot for anticapitalist,
humuhumunukunukuapua‘a—not the fish itself, which isn’t much (a blunt-nosed triggerfish),
Caryn’s own life had imploded when she was thirteen, after her parents got into LSD and split up.
I was so indifferent to bar life that when a tourist asked me the legal drinking age in Hawaii, I had to admit I didn’t know.
Our customers were all tourists, hippies, surfers, and hippie-surfers.
I felt suddenly old, like some kind of premature anti-hippie.
Hard-core surf films are essentially meaningless to anyone who doesn’t surf.
People who tried to start at an advanced age, meaning over fourteen, had, in my experience, almost no chance of becoming proficient, and usually suffered pain and sorrow before they quit.
It was possible to have fun, though,
as it passed into the inshore lagoon, I saw four or five dorsal fins beyond her: sharks cruising parallel to the shore.
I dragged her on grueling pilgrimages to rock festivals (Bath) and surf towns (Biarritz) and the old haunts (and graves) of my favorite writers.
We were fellow skeptics—rationalists, readers of books in a world of addled, inane mystics.
Maybe we could comprise a ménage à trois. Hadn’t we all seen Jules and Jim? Sung along with the Grateful Dead, “We can share the women, we can share the wine”?
L.A. equaled living death. If Ireland was the sow that ate its farrow, L.A. was the John Wayne Gacy of cities,
The persistent nostalgia that infected most surfers, even young ones
One day I saw a heart-stirring thing in a surf mag. It was a photo of Glenn Kaulukukui at Pipeline.
His stance in the closing jaws of the Pipeline beast was stylish and proud—almost Aikau.
Caryn liked to say, quoting Walpole, that life is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel.
D. Laing—a radical critic, like Brown, of received wisdom, and similarly inclined to see mental illness as a sane response to an insane world,
Surfing is notably easier on one’s frontside.
it was true, also changed. It was now vividly bisexual. But I had been too intent on exchanging ideas about the decadence of Sartre and situationism
I was reading, between fruitless forays, Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques, which has a nice first line: “I hate traveling and explorers.”
Lee had a friend, Valo. Young and studly, Valo had love me tender tattooed on one bicep. Lee watched Valo constantly, rapturously, and when Valo wasn’t around he talked about him.
This was decades before Google Earth. We had to trust in Willard Bascom, the great oceanographer, who wrote, in Waves and Beaches, “This zone where waves give up their energy and where systematic water motions give way to violent turbulence is the surf. It is the most exciting part of the ocean.”
I wanted to change, to feel less existentially alienated, to feel more at home in my skin, as they say, and in the world.
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.
the dunes were unnatural. Indeed, they were haunted. The surf breaking off the dunes was also, in my experience, a tropical first. It was a big, cold, foggy beachbreak.
The garbage in the surf was thicker than ever, with the runoff from the downpour, but the swell was clean and had built overnight.
he could not think of a better way to spend his thirtieth birthday: surfing good waves at an unmapped spot in the South Seas, gone from the known world.
The island was called Tavarua.
We soon picked and ate all the ripe papayas we could find.
as a regularfoot, a considerable irony that the wave was a left. I could surf it only half as well as I might have surfed a comparable right. My backhand technique improved, though.
Surfers have a perfection fetish.
“da kine,” Hawaiian pidgin for whatchamacallit, when we meant Tavarua, even with each other.
Nullarbor coast, is known for great white sharks—people called them white pointers.
“hire a board carrier and experience the dizzying thrill of colonialism,
the collision of mass tourism and Indonesian poverty was grotesque,
I liked his nasi goreng—
already famous left called Uluwatu.
being a rich orang putih in a poor brown world still sucked irredeemably. We, that is, sucked.
Those were the people getting on with careers in the arts, having what Bryan sometimes called Suckcess.
Once, exasperated by my travels with Bryan, she had shocked me by saying, “Why don’t you two just fuck each other and get it over with?”
Our curriculum’s version of South African urban geography was, in its way, worse. It treated residential racial segregation, for instance, as if it were a law of nature, peacefully evolved.
