I don't think I'll ever really surf, but William Finnegan's Barbarian Days contains everything there is to know about surfing without ever having to surf, which isn't really the point. The point of Finnegan's book is to tell a life through surfing adventures. Surfing is a life and life is surfing for a surfer.
I could relate to Finnegan's surfing life through my love of hiking. Like hiking, surfing is monomaniacal and anti-social. It can be so all-engrossing that nothing else matters. You drift through the work week, looking forward to nothing but getting away and doing it again. In a world increasingly devoid of meaning, surfing for Finnegan and hiking for me offer a new way to see the world.
Like hiking, surfing can be both hyper-local and a way to explore the entire globe. You could spend your whole life at one spot, getting to know it throughout the seasons, and seeing how it changes in response to natural and human-made changes. Or, you could go on a wild international adventure to far-flung places like Fiji, Australia, and Madeira, places that Finnegan learns by surfing, which gives him a unique view both at an ecological level and at a community level by meeting people there directly and indirectly involved with surfing. Surfing takes Finnegan to apartheid South Africa, an experience that marks him, as he becomes a reporter in zones of conflict, like El Salvador where, of course, he also surfs.
Finnegan is slow to reveal himself as a surfer to his reporter friends because he's afraid that people won't take him seriously, but what the reader gets from this book is how deeply you get into the world by surfing.
Like hiking, or anything else worth really doing--fishing, music, art, cooking--you could spend your entire life and never really master how to surf, to predict how waves will perform in a given situation. Jerry Seinfeld, who claims he will be doing stand-up comedy into his 80s compared himself to surfers, and nails the pursuit so well: "What are they doing this for? It's just pure. You're alone. That wave is so much bigger and stronger than you. You're always outnumbered. They always can crush you. And yet you're going to accept that and turn it into a little, brief, meaningless art form." It's this brief, meaningless art form that keeps Finnegan surfing well into his sixties as he writes.
Finnegan describes his surfing adventures with a Broadway dancer, who sums up the art and that searching aspect to surfing in a comparison to dancing: "With music as with waves [...] you are 'yielding to something more powerful than yourself.'"
When I hike, I'm also yielding to higher powers. You're at the mercy of the elements, which is a really pure feeling, in comparison to so much of the rest of my waking life in front of a screen in a temperature-controlled office.
On the surface, surfing, for Finnegan, and hiking, for myself, are an escape. But they're much more than escapes. They're a deep search for that meaning and connection to something more powerful. Connection to the planet. To the earth's processes and its life. To a spirit with higher meaning. As with music, I yield to the earth's higher powers.
The search for waves for any surfer is a great exploration. Surfers dig in deep like mad scientists. As Finnegan notes, "All surfers are oceanographers, and in the area of breaking waves all are engaged in advanced research. Surfers don't need to be told that when a wave breaks actual water particles, rather than simply the waveform, begin to move forward. They are busy figuring out more arcane relationships, like the one between tide and consistency, or swell direction and nearshore bathymetry. The science of surfers is not pure, obviously, but heavily applied. The goal is to understand, for the purpose of riding them, what the waves are doing, and especially what they are likely to do next. But waves dance to an infinitely complex tune. To a surfer sitting in the lineup trying to decipher the structure of a swell, the problem can indeed present itself musically. Are these waves approaching in 13/8 time, perhaps, with seven sets an hour, and the third wave of every set swinging wide in a sort of dissonant crescendo? Or is this swell one of God's jazz solos, whose structure is beyond our understanding? 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 [...] 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."
Finnegan creates a haunting picture of how a place can change over time. In the pre-Internet days, armed with only ocean charts, he and a friend go on a wild search for waves throughout the South Seas in places like Samoa and Fiji. Listening to weather reports, guessing when swells would hit, and looking at the bathymetric charts, they attempt to find a spot and how guess how sets would hit it in order to create ridable waves. During "the search," a 2-year quest for the perfect wave in the South Seas, a "two-dimensional chart suddenly became a multidimensional vision of ridable waves. You could isolate half a dozen factors on the chart alone. But studying charts of places we had never even seen? We were flying blind. This was decades before Google Earth. We had to trust in Willard Baston, 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.'" Finnegan and his partner find the ultimate location by hitching rides with fishermen and comparing notes with yachters. A remote island. Tavarua, in Fiji. Filled with deadly sea snakes, they use bonfires to communicate with the fishermen who gave them a ride to the island. They spend several weeks in this paradise surfing the best, most consistent waves of their lives.
Years later, a surf mag falls in Finnegan's lap and there is the wave that probably only a handful of people had surfed before them. They learn that the island had been bought by Californian entrepreneurs who created an exclusive surf resort where guests pay thousand of dollars to have a wave to themselves. Finnegan's travel partner is especially sick to his stomach upon hearing the news and vows never to return. But decades later, Finnegan goes to the resort and finds the wave has changed a bit but there's an even better wave that you can only get to with a power boat supplied by the resort. These sorts of changes are constant throughout Finnegan's surfing life, as he witnesses waves literally ruined by the crowds, and the same goes for any other sacred places. There are so few of them left--we see trailheads for hikes that look like the parking lot of a Walmart. At least people are out and not staring like zombies at their screens. But we're seeing a breaking point. When you put too many rats in a cage or too many fish in an aquarium, you see the stress levels rise, bullies emerge, causing even more stress. Surfers and hikers and other outdoor recreationists are the first to see that we need more open space. And yet still we as a society build more malls and more McMansions, which are the last things we need.
It's important to note how fickle waves are--just like life, which can be senselessly cruel: "Here's how ridable waves form. A storm out at sea churns the surface, creating chop--smaller and then larger disorganized wavelets, which amalgamate, with enough wind, into heavy seas. What we are waiting for on distant coasts is the energy that escapes from the storm, radiating outward into calmer waters in the form of wave trains--groups of waves, increasingly organized, that travel together. Each wave is a column of orbiting energy, most of it below the surface. All the wave trains produced by a storm constitute what surfers call a swell. The swell. The swell can travel thousands of miles. The powerful the storm, the farther the swell may travel. As it travels, it becomes more organized--the distance between each wave in a train, known as the interval, increases. In a long-interval train, the orbiting energy in each wave may extend more than a thousand feet beneath the ocean surface. Such a train can pass easily through surface resistance like chop or other smaller, shallower swells that it crosses or overtakes."
Surfing is a life and life is surfing for a surfer. Finnegan describes his time with an oncologist in San Francisco who is obsessed with the huge waves at Ocean Beach, an unlikely spot for surfing, where the frigid water numbs body parts and the waves literally crush human beings. The oncologist makes an important observation that he's not as interested in cancer as he is in people's response to it: "A lot of cancer patients and survivors report that they never really lived till they got cancer, that it forced them to face things, to experience life more intensely. What you see in family practice is that families just can't afford to be superficial with each other anymore once someone has cancer. Corny as it sounds, what I'm really interested in is the human spirit--in how people react to stress and adversity. I'm fascinated by the way people fight back, by how they keep fighting their way to the surface." This is how Finnegan fights through his life and how the oncologist surfer lives, surfing the enormous waves in the City by the Bay. It's not by living the fake smiling, superficial conversations. It's about a deep search that never ends.
