“Barbarian Days” by William Finnegan
Paperback, 464 pages
Published in 2015 Penguin Press
ISBN-10 : 1594203474 | ISBN-13 : 978-1594203473
Date Finished: May 6, 2016
How strongly I recommend it: 8/10
Find it at BookShop.org or Amazon
This book won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Autobiography. I bought it so that I could learn what that looked like. Plus, I’ve surfed and many of my friends are surfers so I figured it would hold my attention… and it did.
My Notes:
Ignorant of all that, my parents sent me to the nearest junior high, up in working-class Kaimuki, on the back side of Diamond Head crater, where they assumed I was getting on wit the business of the eighth grade, but where in fact I was occupied almost entirely by the rigors of bullies, loneliness, fights, and finding my way, after a lifetime of unconscious whiteness in the segregated suburbs of California, in a radicalized world.
… in a paradox I didn’t appreciate at the time, amounted to a rowdy, hourly refutation of the idea of consistency. Cliffs possessed a moody complexity beyond anything I had known.
I won the rematch, I think. Then Tino kicked my ass, no questions asked.
You surfed it when you were ready. Most surfers, of course, would never be ready.
Book — Umi: The Hawaiin By Who Became a King
… but I new enough to keep my junior atheist mouth shut.
But surfing (skiing) always had this horizon, this fear line, that made it different from other things, certainly from other sports I knew.
They [waves] were the goal. They were the object of your deepest desire and adoration. At the same time, they were your adversary, your nemesis, ever you r mortal enemy. The surf was your refuge, your happy hiding place, but it was also a hostile wilderness—a dynamic, indifferent world.
I don’t think I’ve suddenly gotten brave. I haven’t. But the frontiers of the thinkable were quietly, fitfully edging back for me.
My dad seemed scared of no one. Indeed he had a cantankerous streak that could be mortifying.
My mother had an easy going, tennis-playing grace. She also knew how to make ends meet.
Error on page 20: this Wadsworth, who watched us suspiciously.
The Saturday rehearsal was, in any case, mandatory. The Roman Catholics in those days did not fool around. If you miss the rehearsal, you would not make the first communion.
Their winter harvest festival lasted three months – during which the surf frequently pumped and work was officially for bed.
I immediately stopped going to mass. God was not visibly upset.
But my utter absorption in surfing had no rational content. It simply compelled me; there was a deep mine of beauty and wonder to it.
The resistance offered by the sea bottom increases as the water gets shallower, slowing the progress of the lowest part of the wave. The wave above the surface steepens. Finally, it becomes unstable and prepares to topple forward—to break. The rule of thumb is that it will break when the wave height reaches 80 percent of the water’s depth—an eight-foot wave height reaches 80 percent of the water’s depth—an eight-foot wave will break in ten feet of water. But many factors, some of them endlessly subtle—wind, bottom contour, swell angel, currents—determine exactly where and how each wave breaks.
He was always surrounded by a deferential retinue, like a Mafia don.
When did I realize that I had taken part in a disgusting crime? Not soon. In the immediate aftermath, I was elated. We had defeated the evil giant, or some such crap. In retrospect, I had perhaps exorcised for myself some of the terrors of life without a gang—my time at the business end of a two-by-four, say.
He had... "a middle-class command of English."
I discovered the miracle of ejaculation by myself, one agitated night. That was helpful, and quickly became a habit. I was like most boys my age, no doubt, except none of the boys I k new discussed it. My constant erections were a source of constant embarrassment, confusion, and intense fondness for doors that locked. I pioneered a new solo route, on small days, from Cliffs back to our house near black point, …
Then a big set came, waves in a category for which I was not remotely prepared.
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. I felt like Pip, the cabin boy in Moby-Dick who falls overboard and is rescued but loses his mind, undone by visions of the ocean’s infinite malice and indifference.
He was sardonic, almost aggressively relaxed—the essential California oxymoron. They had sun-bleached hair, drove old station wagons, wore plaid Pendleton shirts, white jeans, huaraches—Mexican sandals with soles made from old car tires—and they rioted, we heard, on weekend nights way down the peninsula at the Rendezvous Ballroom, where Dick Dale and the Del-Tones seductive, subversive music.
I still did, though, and I was horrified by what I had seen that warning – genuinely, religiously afraid.
But I was, to my enduring shame, an inlander.
I demanded tales of all the races he had won back in Michigan as a kid. Later I convinced myself that if It hadn’t been for World War II canceling the key Games, he would definitely have gone to the Olympics—if not as a skater, then as a miler, or a ski jumper.
The close, painstaking stud of a tiny patch of coast, every eddy and angle, even down to individual rocks, and in every combination of tide and wind and swell—a longitudinal study, through season after season—is the basic occupation of surfers at their local break. Getting a spot wired—truly understanding it—can take years. At very complex breaks, it’s a lifetime’s work, never completed.
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.
For me, our lopsided friendship in the neighborhood had ended one summer night when a bunch of us were sleeping out on the lawn in someone’s backyard and, to the horrified delight of our companions, he urinated in my mouth. That was a torture too far. I stopped hanging around with him. [Steve Painter]
Recalling all this, I’m struck by how much violence defined my childhood. Nothing lethal, nothing horrifying, but basic to daily life in a way that seems archaic now. Bigger guys bullied, even tortured, smaller guys. It didn’t occur to me to complain. We boxed in the street; adult didn’t bat an eye. I didn’t actually like to fight—certainly not to lose—and I don’t think I’ve been in a serious fight since I was fourteen.
I had a friend when I was very small, Glen, whom I could “take” in wrestling. He got so frustrated that he got his mother to buy him a can of spinach, which he ate straight from the can, just like Popeye did when he needed strength. We wrestled immediately. I won, but I told Glen that he definitely seemed stronger, which was not true.
Her spankings hurt less and less, in fact, as I got older. And so she started using a thin belt, then a thicker belt, then a wire coat hanger—those hurt more. I never fought back, but these were primal power struggles, quite painful emotionally for me, and probably for her too. Still, I thought they were normal.
Certainly I never blamed my parents. But their behavior was, as I see it now, not a small part of the ambient low-grade violence I lived in as a midcentury kid.
Surfing had, and has, a steel threat of violence running through it… 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.
Still, I sat there, immobilized by terror, in the channel at Tonggs. I knew that I was failing a basic test of nerve. Defeats, humiliations—craven avoidance—burn into memory so much more deeply, at least for me, that their opposites.
The damage was all on his side. He was heartsick, but he was good about it. After all, I had been looking God in the face before he got in my way.
In the meantime, 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, nearly expressed one’s disaffection.
In reality, he had built a good balance between an endlessly demanding job and a famously bankrupting hobby, sailing, and had done so on a tight budget, without sacrificing time with his family.
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.
Imagine going back to the days of the Chumash Indians, or the Spanish missions, if you could just take a modern surfboard with you. Malibu had been breaking exactly like this, unridden, for centuries, eons.
Vaulting was a glory sport in those days, and vaulters were considered prima donnas. In fact, the flashy, antiauthoritarian vaulters were suspiciously regarded, often with reason, by the coaches and their more loyal athletes as Thoreau-reading, dope-smoking, John Carlos-loving hippies.
We both got old Ford Econoline vans, surf vehicles par excellence, but we rarely had time to surf. Then we both fell under the spell of Jack Kerouac and decided we needed to see America coast-to-coast.
Years later, 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, and our friendship flourished in the daily onslaught of the unfamiliar. I felt less compelled to self-mock; Domenic seemed relieved to be rid of the popularity that defined him at school.
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 could not imagine a more soul stirring way. I wanted more of it. All I could get. Plato could wait.
A lot of mainland surfers had fetched up in Lahaina that year, but they were a hard-partying lot, which cut down on the number of guys ready to hit it at dawn. Caryn and I were by contrast a sober pair, and knew few people.
I took to surfing Harbor Mouth in the black of night, after work. The tide had to be high, and the swell good-sized, and a moon could help. Even so, it was a fairly insane thing to do. It was basically surfing blind.
Another major seller was Living on the Earth, by Alicia Bay Laurel, which was large-format, hand-illustrated, and offered practical guidance to people trying to live gently and penniless in the countryside, without electricity or flush toilets.
There were many such people on Maui at the time, virtually all of them newly arrived from the mainland. They were living up narrow mountain valleys, off dirt roads or jungle footpaths.
This mass reliance on food stamps carried, among our loose group of peers on Maui, no particular assumptions, I thought, about the welfare state. Food stamps were viewed as just another hustle—strangely legal and easy but decidedly minor. I alter lived among young able-bodied dole kludgers in England and Australia (some of the latter were surfers) who saw their government checks as essential sustenance and a type of right.
Caryn had no interest in learning to surf, which I thought sensible. 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 quite.
Caryn and I were in weird territory. I was deeply involved with my old mistress, surfing. I was waiting with passionate expectation for Honolua Bay to start breaking in the fall—tuning up, tuning up, surfing every day. Caryn, who had never seen me in this state, didn’t seem jealous.
We were fellow skeptics — rationalists, readers of books in a world of addled, inane mystics.
The persistent in the Stelzer that infected most surfers, even young ones – the notion that it was always better yesterday, and better still the day before — was related to this dystopian view of Southern California, the suburban megalopolis that it was, after all, the capital of modern surfing and the Head office of the nascent surf industry.
The whole scene had the feeling of a religious shrine overrun by passionate pilgrims. I half expected people to start speaking in tongues, to flail and foam at the mouth, or monastery monkeys to bomb us with guavas.
Surfing hard, putting my board up on edge, also put other people in the lineup on notice that I was not out there to watch them surf. It was a long trek up the pecking order, and I would never reach the first rank, but I began to take a place in the second rank.
"I know what you mean." I dropped acid probably six or eight times before, and he usually had an awful time. The drug tended to reduce me after a while to molecular fascinations.
About adulthood: Why, for example, did seem it to be always receding as a concept, even as we get older.
One of the few things that calmed me reliably was surfing.
Bryan, loyal to scruffy Idaho, sniffed, “Montana has a hard-on for itself.” It was true, but we both later ended up living there—going to graduate school in Missoula, learning to ski, and, in my case, learning to drink.
She had a laugh that went from high to low, drawing you into her confidence, merry eyes, and an eclectic intellectual glamour that wowed people, including me.
I knew that my secret ambition regarding limit was profoundly unoriginal. It took me a while to figure out that it might also be no fun.
But then she cried, in her green skirt and white blouse, when I left Pohnpei. 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.
The difficulty, the improbability, of finding good waves or unsorted coasts was undoubtedly why Glenn Kaulukukui had given me such a searching look when I told him about our plan.
They build their own houses and boats, made their own fishnets, mats, baskets, fans. They improvised endlessly. I was enchanted.
Global pop-culture florist with its usual virulence.
"Offshore winds, as I hope I've made clear, wreathe waves in glory.”
Bryan was frantic, understandably. 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.
“Just another New Yorker battling his way through paradise.”
The old-school masculinity that so many people, including me, found attractive carried with it no small loneliness.
Still, I was anxious frequently, and given to lacerating self-doubt. And I obviously didn’t see Bryan the same way he saw himself, which I found disorienting.
To me, he seemed to be going troppo. He said he was delighted to be here, but that wasn’t how it looked. Tiny hassles, and all kinds of innocuous people we met, annoyed him, I thought, unduly.
Our conversations changed. It usually had a busy, must-say-everything edge to it, even during the long, lazy days of waiting for waves to 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.
The idea that there would be more, but in 10 minutes we would very likely be looking at another, equally good set far up the reef, simply had no traction in the psychology of scarcity, which was still mine.
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.
Nothing too heavy came. Instead, I caught in road so many weights, through four or five distinct phases of the day, that I felt absolutely saturated with good fortune, and more deeply connected to the rhythms of the wave than ever before.
Bryan and I had grown up in a Southern California where most beach towns, and beach cops, loathed and harassed surfers. My high school would have expelled us before they supported us. Surfers were bad boys, outlaws, rebels.
I was the more dedicated Joyce van – I litter spent years studying Finnigan's Wake with Norman O. Brown, and exercise and masturbatory obscurantism that Brian would never undertake.
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.
What was consistent was a certain serenity that followed a rigorous session. It was physical, this post surf 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.
Being friends as in writing letters was so much easier than being friends as in living together. We bickered and, every few months, fought bitterly. I resented the fact that it felt dangerous to do anything out of the ordinary, anything outside the rut of habit.
I made the wave, but I escaped horrible injury, if not worse, by pure dumb luck. Pulling in had been a low-odds survival move. Stupidity had put me inside that tube. If I had a chance to do it over again, I wouldn’t.
This could be my million-dollar ladder, they said—the piece of defective equipment that allowed me to sue the railroad, get rich, and retire young. I considered such thinking contemptible, and so a few days later, when my back felt better, I cashed a check, signed a release, and returned to work. Of course, my back started hurting again the next day, and had ached ever since.
Every stream, river, weir, and rice-paddy canal that the tracks crossed seemed to be lined with farmers and villagers placidly squatting. It was a tour of the world’s biggest, most picturesque toilet, and it reminded me that I had vowed to be more careful about what I ate and drank after my Bali paratyphoid follies.
I peaked, in some ways, as a surfer on Nias, although I didn’t know it at the time. I was twenty-six, probably stronger than I had ever been, as quick as I would ever be. I was on the right board, on the right wave. I had been surfing concisely for a year-plus. I felt like I could do almost anything on a wave that occurred to me.
The local Christianity was strictly nominal, they said. During World War II, when the island was cut off from the outside world, congregations had swiftly reverted to precolonial practice and eaten the Dutch and German missionaries among them. I was unable to verify their gory gossip.
He said it wasn't me, but I knew it partly was. We pulled together nearly effortlessly now, and he had quarreled in months, but the subterranean dynamics of our partnership a changed.
I was after something, whatever it was. And the chemistry of my brashness and what Bryan called his passivity, which he had been noting since Air Nauru and the Guam Hilton, was not doing him any good. He did not want to feel like he was along for the ride.
I felt somewhat lost, truth be known. After Indonesia, I found the absence of hassling, the unbegrudged privacy on Ko Samui, unnerving.
She seemed to mean the Thai people—all forty-six million of them, perhaps three of whom she had met. It was just a style problem, I told myself. I had been speaking a different language—more cutting, ironic, masculine, permanently on guard against sounding silly—for a long time.
You want it? No, you go! And the moment would pass, the beast unridden. Farther down the line, at a less scary juncture, somebody might jump aboard.
I returned to my novel. It took me another eight months to finish. I realized that my interest in the kind of fiction I was writing was fading. South Africa had changed me…
The decisiveness of our breakup was all Sharon’s. I was more upset than I had any right to be. Our dissolution had been overdue.
I passed. In truth, I didn’t want to dive back into the manuscript for any purpose. I was afraid of what I might find—infelicities, corniness, yet more juvenilia.
Something told me I belonged in a city. Some hardheaded spite of ambition, no doubt.
The whole four miles was beach break, meaning it had no point of land or built obstruction—no reef or river mouth, no pier or jetty—to define it. … All waves are too complex to diagram in detail, but beach breaks are, among surf spots, an especially unpredictable species.
Besides being complex, Ocean Beach got big. Not California but Hawaii big. And it was cold water, unmapped and, once you got a monster, frequently unreasonable.
I tried to keep my go out short. I work better after surfing, though. The icy water, the exertion, then find under a hot shower, left me physically quiet, able to sit without fidgeting at my desk. I slept better too.
There was a small crew of local surfers. They were effectively invisible to the rest of the city. Indeed, native San Franciscans would tell you that there was no surfing in San Francisco.
My ambivalence about the sport we shared appalled him. It was heresy. 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. [Mark Renneker]
I got an assignment that sent me to Nicaragua profile send any support for a magazine in Boston, and I came back feeling sick about the war we were funding there. I wrote a short piece for the New Yorker about Nicaragua and was electrified with the magazine read it the following week.
I was painfully nervous, and unsure where to draw the line between journalism and activism when it came to something as patently unjust as apartheid.
That self-disemboweling death wave on the inside bar is not bloody-minded. Thinking so is just reflex anthropomorphism. Wave love is a one-way street.
Indeed, underestimation is practiced with the greatest aplomb on the North Shore of Oahu. There, a wave must be the size of a small cathedral before the locals will call it eight feet. The subscientific arbitrariness of the whole business is obvious from the fact that among surfers, wherever they live, there is no such thing as a nine-foot wave or a thirteen-foot wave.
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.
As a variation on the old maxim has it, “Big waves are not measured in feet, but in increments of bullshit.”
Mark had the complete bionic swagger, and a rare antic hippie Dr. version.
But really San Francisco might as well have Benin another hemisphere. Ocean Beach in the winter is a wilderness, as raw and red-clawed as any place in the Rocky Mountains. We could see traffic on the coast highway, but it was unlikely that the people in the passing cars saw us. Many of them would undoubtedly say, if asked, that there was no surfing in San Francisco.
I sometimes had to ask strangers to open my car door and put they in the ignition, my own manual dexterity. Having been deleted by a surf.
My old pals Becket and Domenic both seemed to be letting surfing slip. Becket was back in Newport, running construction jobs, doing boat carpentry, delivering yachts. His brand of hide-your-daughters wharf-rat hedonism was ready to be patented.
Once I landed in San Francisco and entered my apprenticeship at Ocean Beach, I never thought of telling my old surf partners about the great uncrowded waves I had lucked into.
She thought it was a fine place to visit but self-satisfied and somewhat stale, particularly since its hippie heyday.
Nearly all surfers love shots of themselves in the act of surfing. To say that waves and the rides they provide our inherently fleeting events, surfers Nashly therefore what the Mentos, doesn't begin to explain the collective passion for self-portrait.
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.
Everything untrammeled in this world gets exploited, he said, and sullied and spoiled. His letter to Surfer asked the right questions about financial arrangements between the magazine and the resort, calling the editors pimps or, at best, morons.
I catalogued the contents of his van.
The surfing social contract is a delicate document. It gets redrafted every time you paddle put.
Everyone out here was starring in his own movie, and permission was required before you inflicted your exploits on anyone else. (Like ultrarunning).
"It's such a great sport it corrupts people," he said. "It's like a drug addiction. You just don't want to do anything else. You don't want to go to work." [Peewee]
But he never managed to ditch his nickname. He also seemed never to have lost the unassumingness of the novice. Getting him to talk, over tepid tea in an emptying restaurant, was the journalistic equivalent of paddling out at Sloat on a mean day. My requests for an interview had no doubt startled him. Peewee knew me as a face in the water, a recent Ocean Beach regular, one of Mark’s crowd. Now, suddenly, I was a reporter.
And then there were great surfers, the fabulously gifted. They were by definition exceedingly rare—although pro surfers were slowly, as the popularity of surfing increased and an international contest circuit matured, getting more common. For them, surfing was a sport, with training, competition, sponsorship, the lot. In Australia they were treated like other professional athletes; champions were even subject to public adulation. Not so in the United States, where the average sports fan knew essentially nothing about surfing, and where even surfers paid little attention to contest results and rankings.
You feel honored simply to be out there. I’ve been reduced on certain magnificent days—this had happened to me at Honolulu 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.
I set aside my ambivalence, I was letting Mark’s exuberance carry me along, letting him become the engine that powered my surfing life.
Journalism was ferrying me into a world that interested me far more than chasing waves.
Yes, I have been bewitched by serving as a kid – trotting dreamily down path at dawn, lit by visions of trade-blown waves, rapt even about the long paddle to Cliffs. The old spell had been broken, at times, or seem to be. But it always lay there, under the surface, dormant but on destroyed while I knocked around the far world, living in waveless places – Montana, London, New York.
He also said a lot of things that annoyed me. Once, on another trip to Mendocino, while we were surfing an exquisite little hidden cove, I had just ridden a wave rather well, I thought, and Mark had seen it. “You really got a rhythm going on that one,” he said as we paddled back out. “You need to do that more.” Giving unwanted advice in the water was a breach of what I understood as the surfing social contract, and the condescension of his remark only made it worse. But I held my tongue, which was not like me. It was ridiculous, I knew, to be so sensitive.
I was trying to figure out how to live with the disabling enchantment of surfing –
Surfing bigger waves, especially, felt atavistic—a compulsive return to some primal scene to prove some prom a fact of manhood.
Nobody maintains their dignity while getting rumbled by a big wave. The only thing you can hope to control at that point is the panic.
But the biggest reason for my reluctance to finish the piece was a gnawing concern that Mark wouldn’t like it. I admired him and found him easy to write about, but he was a complicated character, with a plus-sized self-regard that annoyed, at best, many people in the little surf community I was also trying to depict.
“Quiet, seemingly egoless, he draw little attention to himself—until he paddles out and goes off,” Mark wrote. “Best spot on the beach—Peewee’s there. Best wave of the set—Peewee’s on it.
But I was not wrong about Mark’s reaction to the piece, when it was finally published. He hated it.
My life had assumed a settled, middle-aged shape. Caroline and I were married. We had been in New York eight years. I was churning out work—columns, articles, books. Journalism. I had turned forty. We had made a world. Bought and apartment. Our friends were writers, editors, artists, academics, publishers.
For me, it was a point of pride to keep riding a shortboard as I staggered into my forties. Reverting to a longboard would be, I thought, like using a geriatric walker—your dancing days were over. I planned to put it off as long as possible.
The shore was rocks and cliffs, which often multiplied the danger quotient, which was already high, by a large factor.
A harlequin crew of Brits, Aussies, Americans, and Portuguese mainland surfers had started passing through the village, lodging here and there.
They were a luminous pair, living in a seaside room on next to nothing.
Dirty, half-naked children jeered at strange cars. On certain afternoons, roughly half the adults in Paul do Mar seemed to be falling-down drunk.
What was I doing? I was out here? I was a grown-up, a husband, citizen, full of conventional public spiritedness my real life. My American life. I was 41 years old, for Christ's sake. I'm not a churchgoer. Everything feels unreal, including my sense of disbelief. And yet the cup in my hand and not shake. Indeed, the week instant coffee tasted sublime.
They were all, as per cliché, graduate students with heart stopping breasts.
The groom’s side was lousy with surfers, many of them from Santa Barbara.
He had the lifelong surfer’s build: a slim waist under a huge triangle of back muscles.
When had I become such a mewling creature of habit?
Peter was what surfers used to call (some still do) a gnarly dude. There had always been guys, usually big-wave surfers, who quietly, casually did things that beggared belief. I remember hearing, on the Hawaiian rumor mill, that Mike Doyle and Joey Cabell, two surf stars from my youth, had set off swimming down the Na Pali Coast on Kauai. The Na Pali Coast is seventeen miles of inaccessible wilderness, facing northwest into the biggest storm-producing expanse of the Pacific. The swim took three days. They wore nothing but trunks and goggles. … Those Two were gnarly dudes, which was both why they did it and why they survived.
But writing that requires serious courage and skill that toting one's own horn Zakim test of character. In pro surfing, there's a growing niche of gnarly dude's with publicist. That isn't the idea at all.
A cheap homemade sugarcane rum known as aguardiente took a toll on the village, particularly on unemployed men. [Jardim]
My complaints were trivial, actually, not deeply felt. Caroline indulged my surf fever, even its juvenile moments, beyond anything I had a right to expect, and I consciously tried never to lose sight of that fact.
Telling myself that they were half my age, or less, that they probably surfed 10 times as much as I did nowadays, should've helped. It did. I pulled myself. I miss ways that I should've caught, lumbering to my feet when I should've sprung. Getting old is a surfer, I hear it said, it was just a long, slow, humiliating process of becoming a kook again. I clung to my delusions that I can still surf decently.
I still thought of surfing as a wild thing. You did it with your friends, or you did it alone, but it happened out in the ocean. It couldn’t be socialized. Of course, I had seen how pervasive and presentable and clubbed-up surfing was in Australia. It could be socialized, and here, in cozy, remote Jardim, I was catching a glimpse of my old anchoritic obsession being integrated into Euro-yuppie team-sport norms. Something similar was happening, haltingly, I gathered, in Souther California and Florida.
Boulders started surfacing in front of me, and then I was standing in a field of rocks in rushing, waist-deep water. I did not understand where I was—a field of rocks had risen out of the ocean, quite far from shore, at a break I thought I knew. In a lifetime of surfing, I had never seen anything like this.
I paddled out looking for a dopamine rush that was both familiar and rare, that required nerve and experience but had nothing in common with terror. Similarly, while reporting, I went out looking for stories to satisfy my curiosity, to try to make sense of calamities—certainly not to get shot at.
El Salvador has a great wave called lalibertad, which was uncrowned in those days, because of the war. I spent a week hiding out there. Surfing was an antidote, however mild, for the horror.
These things belonged on opposite sides of the ledger.
But the worst part was the feeling in my chest as I paddled over large, exquisite waves, over and over, unwilling to risk the takeoffs. It was such a waste. Such cowardice. My self loathing spiked insufferably.
Why didn’t I just leave it to guys in their physical prime, like Andre? Even the guys my age who still tried to ride serious waves—gas in their forties, even fifties—managed to get in the water two hundred, three hundred days a year. Who was I kidding, trying to skate by on a small fraction of that? Why. Not walk away while I could? Would quitting really leave such a big psychic hole?
I didn't serve to be called decision-making. I wasn't proud of it. Still, I felt hot shame and regret as I drove away. Page 406Still, I find it unsettling when random Manhattanites jauntily announce that they surf. Oh yes, they say, they learned how on vacation last summer in Costa Rica.
Water in the 30s, air in the 30s, an icy west wind. Evil brown ocean. I have an awful session – missing waves, getting blasted.
We had this unappeasable curiosity in common.
My notion was that his devotion to my mother, his emotional dependence on her, had set me a bad example, had given me a model for love that ended up devastating me. But I had abandoned that idea, that ludicrous resentment, long ago.
“People I know in New York are incessantly on the point of going back where they came from to write a book, or of staying on and writing a book about back where they came from.” Thus A.J. Liebling, in “Apology for Breathing,” a short, terrific essay. Liebling was pretending to apologize for being form New York, a city he loved lavishly and precisely. Now I’m one of those New Yorkers incessantly on the point of going back to where I came from.
You have to hate how the world goes on. [after a death]
I lash myself to people I want to write about. We knock around together, talk our way through their world. Then, at some point, it’s published, the story’s out, we’re done. Strike the sets. Sometimes we stay in touch, even become friends, but that’s the exception.
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. Swimming laps always seemed to me especially pointless. But I can’t get away with the attitude now. If I don’t swim. I will be a pear-shaped pillar of suet.
“Do you know God, Bill? He asked. “Do you know God loves you?”
He wanted an answer.
Not really, I murmured.
“We will not fear, though the earth give way and the mountains fall into the heart of the sea, though its waters roar and foam.”
I continued to doubt. But I was not afraid. I just didn’t want this to end.
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