Look around. There are shapers who don't surf. Surf
Photographers! Hardly any of them surf. What's up with that?
We learned late last week that big money was pouring
into a TV Series about surfers and drug money which elicited mild
scepticism and to which Novocastrian surf writer Surfads
responded (magnificently):
“Surfing is an
impenetrable mess only understood by those cursed enough to be
betrothed to it”.
Surfing historian Matt Warshaw bowed down (almost literally)
before that statement and when I queried it by saying “surfing’s no
big deal, even for the vast majority who do it”, the normally
temperate Warshaw was so exercised he called “Bullshit, total
bullshit”.
Is it?
Is it an impenetrable mess?
Something that can’t be understood or represented by outside
forces like books and movies and TV series?
It felt so simple this morning. Surf was pumping so I paddled
out and rode a few waves. Then I came in and got on with the day,
stoked off my gourd because the waves were so good.
This will be a friendless viewpoint.
Get to the end before you start swinging.
We think surfing is amazing, addictive, an obsession like no
other; but that is only true for the very few, the exceptions. We
consistently confound the exception with the rule.
The rule is quitters. Dabblers.
Matt himself sheathed the broadsword at the age of 49. No
judgement. I see it all the time.
I know it will piss people off if I call in the Russians but in
this instance it’s warranted. In the famous Stalin scenes which
anchor Solzhenitsyn’s Nobel Prize winning The First Circle
the Russian dictator, feeling a little off colour, observes
ruefully, “In the Caucasus at seventy a man was in his prime – he
could climb mountains, ride horses and chase women.”
Fifty, for a decent obsession, is just getting started.
And yet Matt found giving up “incredibly easy”.
This is not news to me.
We overstate its importance, even to the individual. Our vanity
causes us to massively under-estimate outsiders’ ability to “get
it”, to represent it in print and motion picture.
Hollywood’s fictional treatment of surfing has been outstanding.
Fast Times at
Ridgemont High is a stone cold classic;
Big
Wednesday has aged very finely as a cult movie
and period piece, Point Break and
North Shore
are epic cheese. Surf’s Up with the
penguins and BigZ might be the best depiction of surfing ever.
My favourite, Blue Crush, with the flinty
foxes cleaning Hawaiian motels and ripping up the North Shore has
one of the finest closing sequences in movie-making history. Try
and imagine a better collection of pixels than a cross-dressing
Noah Johnson dominating Pipe as our conquering female hero. You’ll
try in vain*.
By contrast, all the earnest as oatmeal insider documentaries
aimed at square audiences – Riding Giants,
Bustin’ Down the
Door, Endless Summer 2, there
are (many) others I’ve forgotten – come off like a wet fart.
Tim Winton’s Breath descends into a
turgid, overblown mess (true), like all his novels. But the first
two thirds are note perfect. Impossibly good. Barbarian
Days is the first non-pro depiction of the
surfing life written in loving detail. It deserves its Pulitzer.
Sure, the slightly condescending New Yorker cool/objective tone
alienates. But that’s life. That’s show-biz.
I used to cleave to the romantic ideal of the hard-core
committed surfer. The obsessed, the addicted for life.
On a final night on the North Shore, waiting for a ride to the
airport, I was passed out on a couch in Owl Chapman’s slummy bedsit
behind Sunset beach. I don’t know what we’d been up to except it
was no good. Smoking joints, doing lines probably.
Our ride arrived.
Owl woke up, with a blankie wrapped around his knees. He looked
like every other old man passed out in front of the television, not
a big-wave rider still surfing Sunset Beach and Waimea every time
it broke.
He told me out by the post box in the cool night air, “There
ain’t nothin’ like ridin’ a cool, blue wave. No skiing, no mountain
climbing, nuthin’. It’s so sensuous, so close to nature. It’s a
better me.”
I thought that was gospel truth for every man, woman and child
fortunate enough to ride a wave.
Wrong.
A noted BG commentor suggested it was almost unfair to introduce
people to surfing because it would take over their lives and rule
their day-to-day existences. Yet, over the next decade, I
introduced thousands of people to it, as the (despised) surf
instructor/guide.
And at the end of the week, or the day, I’d watch incredulous as
these people ticked the box and moved on with life. I was slapped
in the face by Nassim Nicolas Taleb’s
“hidden evidence”. The cohort that don’t find surfing
that addictive or obsession forming, the very vast majority.
We don’t hear from them because they don’t write books, become
surf writers or become surf commenters. A handful moved to cities
near the coast and continued to dabble.
Still, they were kooks, the legions of the unjazzed.
Squares.
No-one salty and hard-core with a skill set would ever quit,
surely? Yet they did, they do. Get sick of it. Circling the drain
is a common reason: get older and fatter with less time to do it.
Shortboards don’t feel so good, satisfaction declines. Declining
satisfaction reduces motivation.
Weeks turn into months. Before long it’s fuck it, where’s my
golf clubs?
At the other end of the myth, the myth of the hard-core, we
over-reach massively about the level of sacrifice required to
maintain a surfing habit. Derek Hynd, when asked by Andrew Kidman
in Beyond
Litmus, if there were sacrifices to be made in
choosing surfing as the main thing in your life said, “I don’t
think so… Freedom’s no sacrifice. The end of a good day (surfing)
is hard to beat anywhere doing anything.”
It’s ridiculously easy to live as a surfer and hold down a job
in a city. A good, proper white collar job. Pound nails, tile
bathrooms, build pools, hang drywall, render brick, unblock dunnies
and the world is your oyster: raise a family and get go-outs.
Modern forecasting outsources all the semi-mystical knowledge that
had to be so laboriously grafted for.
Soon, it’ll be even easier.
We maintain the myths because they are beautiful and sustaining.
They make money for people. Because when whitey found surfing,
lions like Jack London and later Tom Blake weaved so much magic
into it we’d rather get drunk on a spoonful of their glorious syrup
than grimace through a slug of cold hard reality.
Look around. There are shapers who don’t surf.
Surf Photographers! Hardly any of them surf. What’s up with
that?
No anti-romantic here. I’m fucked! Proper rogered. Eleven on the
dial.
I like surfing barrelling lefts. Grajagan, Gnaraloo, Jakes etc
etc. My one surfing goal was to get to Teahupoo and get inside the
green room. I did get there, with the help of other people. New
born baby boy and beloved at home. Day one I got stuck at the boat
harbour with two ladyboys fishing and ended up on the end of a
tallie of warm Hinano.
By the time I got down to the end of the road I was in another
dimension. Completely unmoored. Paddling out through the lagoon I
felt the urge to stop and sit up. I turned around; razorback peaks
punctured the sky. Ahead Teahupoo, below sea level and spitting
white clouds of spray into the distant horizon. My throat
constricted and a little boozy sob escaped.
A grown man reduced to tears before he’d even caught a wave.
Ridiculous!
But my feels ain’t the way of the world.
OK, you can swing now.
*Maybe the final shot of Midnight Cowboy with
Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight at the bus station.