It doesn’t amount to much, some whispered tracery along the wave wall before it finally exhausts itself, closing out, the whole thing over in seconds, just foam now, some scattered boards and swimmers littering the seascape.
Yet those few seconds satisfy a powerful yearning that, for as long as man has attempted to ride waves, has been painfully difficult to articulate. Unless it's to explain, as William Finnegan does in Barbarian Days, A Surfing Life, what it's like to blast through a barrel, and see, quite suddenly, "the face of God".
So you better have religion, too. Finnegan, a lapsed Catholic, has perhaps inadvertently written yet a newer testament. Well, maybe not so inadvertently. Finnegan, a writer for the New Yorker who often reports from war-torn republics, is prone to a lyrical exactitude when it comes to his lifelong obsession (no less a combat zone in his telling) and does not spend his gorgeous phrases foolishly or without intention. Surf writing always tends towards the spiritual but, even so, the author, another "passionate pilgrim", is more apostle here than he is journalist.
His account of more than a half-century in the drink, circumnavigating the globe in search of the perfect wave, is a thoughtful reconciliation of play and purpose, the gospel according to him.
At Honolua Bay, the wave had enough pull that he “could see renouncing all other ambition … to surf it, every time it broke, forever”, inflaming his ambivalence. Even as he aged out of the more demanding aspects of his surf life, “wary of its siren call, its incessant demands”, he inevitably plunged back into it. The obsession had a comprehensive quality. At one point, he was “startled” to realise he had surfed nine of the top 10 spots according to a surf magazine. Not counting the one nobody else knew about.
That he finally makes sense of his compulsion, which even he admits is troublingly useless, elevates a surf book into the upper reaches of memoir. To watch that suspicious traveller, a wary 8-year-old in Malibu ripples, grow into a thoughtful father/husband/writer (but still surfer, now in his 60s in New Jersey hurricane swells) is almost a greater charm than the mastery of distant and powerful waves, some impossibly beautiful, a whole lot of them absurdly dangerous.
Not everybody catches this fever, not even those near California breaks nor, more serendipitously, children magically transported to Oahu for a formative year or two.
Finnegan caught his at the age of 10, discovering the “sense of weighty momentum” with family friends at San Onofre, in Southern California. Just as on that day, prodded into the water by fellow watermen, he is abetted in his addiction, at every critical point in his development, by accomplices. There was Glenn at Cliffs in Hawaii. Becket at Point Malibu, Domenic at Honolua Bay. Bryan at, well, every important (and secret) swell in the South Pacific. Later, even in his adulthood, there was Mark at Ocean Beach in San Francisco, Peter at Montauk, John off the Jersey Shore. In fact, the book is as much a meditation on friendship as surfing, admitting the necessity of like-minded supplicants in as solitary a pursuit as there is. In any case, he’s one stuck surfer.
How stuck is made clear when, in the book’s middle and liveliest passages, he suspends life as most of us know it to surf the world for five years. It’s 1978 and he’s just 25. This is surf movie stuff — Finnegan and fellow idealist Bryan Di Salvatore postponing their young rambling lives, dropping everything to experience the purity of feather-tipped monsters in tropics half a world away. Escapades ensue. There are pot-washing jobs in Australia, nights drinking kava in Tahiti, a hospital stay in Bangkok that was financed by cheque fraud. They were living by their wits, the changing exotica a mere backdrop to the business of chasing the next wave.
About those waves: the land-locked may not fully appreciate the metrics of every surfing proposition — how to get to a wave, how to ride it and, ultimately, how to survive it. But, in Finnegan’s hands, the ancient, pristine waters foam wonderfully for us all: “Then a roaring blue freight train all down the reef, deep into the bay. It was, once again, a glorious wave, with hues in its depths so intense they felt like first editions.”
The surf writing is that kind of revelation. Gnarly used to be a sufficient descriptor. And it’s not just what it’s like to be flung down that rail of water, the exhilaration of speed, escaping the fast-closing tunnel with just that quick glimpse of “eternity”.
He also communicates the dread those waves represent. On beautiful Tavarua, a Fijian island break then known to just nine people in the world (those nine swore a vow of silence; Finnegan and Di Salvatore refused to speak the name aloud), Finnegan gets caught in a wave that sucked so much water out from underneath that he seemed to be standing on the coral. Safely out, he staggered to the beach. “I was surprised to find myself sobbing.” There is crying in surfing. Another time, while waiting to see if he’d drown in a two-wave hold-down, he was puzzled by the basso rumbling underwater. He was horrified to realise it was boulders, tumbled by the wave that was trying to kill him. The waves did not all practise catch-and-release.
Of course, travelling to remote islands, wherever there are undiscovered waves, presents cultural challenges as well. And the two young surfers, entwined in a grouchy but respectful marriage, are as much amateur anthropologists as carefree hedonists. Finnegan is bothered, or at least aware, that their ritual deprivations do not satisfy the demands of equality among the tribal citizens whose waves they are conquering. There is as much moral ambiguity as adventure (and, per surfing tradition, girls). Still, they are able to swat away their liberal doubts whenever a train of rollers appears on the horizon.
Besides, aren’t they both working on novels in their downtime, reassured by the genius in their hip pockets? They would be insufferable, of course, if not for that innocence of youth.
But, this being a memoir, they do grow up. Bryan, continuing with him through Australia and Bali, aborts the adventure first (he becomes a New Yorker writer, too). Finnegan plunges on, not satisfied, until he splashes onto the coast of South Africa. He hoped to head north along the coast to Cairo but money was, as always, low. So he took a job teaching at a local black school. He was by no means cured of surfing (spoiler alert: still isn't) but now his innate wariness of authority was deepened by the injustice of apartheid. He began to feel capable of purpose, alert to it anyway, no longer a bobbing passenger on life's currents.
It took five years, but he did come home. Still, the big waves of San Francisco and Madeira (and, once he could afford it, back at Tavarua, now discovered and corrupted but still — what a wave!) never did let him go. But he did learn, growing into a career and family, to incorporate life on land into his world view.
Yet he still required the waves. Once, on one of his more toxic assignments, he found relief back at Malibu — “surfing had never made more sense”. Maybe, even as he was ageing, forced into rueful compromises in the surf, he needed it more than ever, the absurd commitment, the search for spontaneity, somehow informing everything he did. If the book ends in remorse at a surfing life receding, it also ends in relief, safe on shore, his faith justified after all.
Richard Hoffer is an award-winning sportswriter whose work has appeared in Sports Illustrated and the Los Angeles Times. He is also the author of four books, most recently, Bouts of Mania: Ali, Frazier, Foreman and an America on the Ropes
