Quiz: What’s your dream surf scenario? Do you crave community or isolation?

Do you reject the world and crave to live in perfect crowd-free isolation? Or do you chase a brotherhood of like-minded souls?

Picture your ideal scenario for living out a life in pursuit of these useless goals.

What does that look like for you?

Is it surf community? Or surf isolation?

I’m in a quandary.

Some of you who put up with crowds on the regular won’t believe it, but sometimes I yearn for a surf community. I’ve never had that. I’ve surfed alone as often as I’ve surfed with others. I think I’ve missed out on some level of shared joy and camaraderie.

And I missed out on learning to navigate crowds in my formative years. You should see me. I go to pieces. I’m stiff, like a brandy snap.

The idea of boardriders clubs and stolen weekday hours is appealing. The idea that surfing could be something incorporated into daily life, as opposed to a dirty habit that clashes up against it, seems like the answer.

But I’ve been thinking, as is my wont, about isolation. Not really in regards to surfing. But about escaping from all of it. Running away. Fleeing from desire and disease, from the shackles of rampant consumerism and capitalist one-upmanship.

“It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” – Jiddu Krishnamurti

It’s been motivated, as usual, by what I’ve been reading.

A Last Wild Place by Mike Tomkies is a marvel of observation of the natural world. A treatise of the lives and deaths of wild creatures amidst the setting of true wilderness.

The author, once a Hollywood columnist who shared beds, champagne and drugs with some of America’s brightest stars, fled the world at the age of 38, coincidentally my age now, and lived in isolation in the Highlands of Scotland for most of the rest of his life.

He spent hours and days crammed into hides that he dragged for miles into forests and up mountains. All to observe and document Golden Eagles, Scottish Wildcats, Red Deer, Black Throated Divers, Red Squirrels, Pine Martens, and other less glamorous things, like the minutiae of insects, plants and weather.

It’s a book containing such detail that it would be impossible to believe, had it been written in the age of the Internet. The temptation to fill in the gaps with Google, rather than spend aching hours in isolation, with your cold and your hunger, would perhaps be too great.

It made an impression on me that never left. A lingering sense that I’d be happy on my own (or perhaps just with my dog) confronted with the realities of finding food, maintaining shelter. Swaying with the seasons, tuned into the bliss of summer and the brutality of winter.

We’re too connected now to ever be truly alone.

I first read this book when I was ten. Re-reading it now I’m sure I pretended to understand most of it to impress my mum. But it feels promethean. I think it made an impression on me that never left. A lingering sense that I’d be happy on my own (or perhaps just with my dog) confronted with the realities of finding food, maintaining shelter. Swaying with the seasons, tuned into the bliss of summer and the brutality of winter.

Maybe I crave isolation because it’s so far removed from my day to day toil, from butting my head against systems and ideologies I don’t care about. Maybe it’s just because the threads were there for me to follow when I was young, but I never grasped them. And now, some days, I feel like I’m trapped here in the dark, with the monster breathing down my neck.

The Stranger In The Woods by Michael Finkel is the story of Christopher Knight, a seemingly normal man who, at 20 years old, left work one day, entirely without planning or preparation, and simply walked out of the world.

He spent the next 30 years in complete isolation.

For more than a quarter of a century he never slept indoors or spoke to another soul. He endured the harshest of winters in his patch of woodland in Maine, and survived with a combination of resourcefulness and theft from holiday cabins near his secret den.

Christopher Knight didn’t live in the wilderness in the traditional sense, but his commitment to isolation and rejection of society was absolute.

I have my retirement surf spot in mind. But it is remote, and it would be a rejection of sorts. I wonder if that’s truly what I want, or if the idea of just abandoning life is too romantic, or too easy. It’s definitely selfish.

These are my fantasies: walking out without ceremony and just never coming back.

Of course I won’t.

I got a job, and a girl, and kids. I’m not unhappy. I don’t think. And I love them dearly, but disappearing still appeals. Maybe all this yearning is just symptomatic of humanity’s great flaw. We continually want what we don’t have.

I have my retirement surf spot in mind. But it is remote, and it would be a rejection of sorts. I wonder if that’s truly what I want, or if the idea of just abandoning life is too romantic, or too easy. It’s definitely selfish.

So the paradox is this: on one hand I feel like rejecting people altogether. Yet on the other, I yearn for companionship, and the joy of sharing.

What would you choose, given the option?

I suspect the dream scenario doesn’t exist.

I suspect the dream is always taxed.