A well-timed message from surfing’s great historian
Matt Warshaw…
Every cloud is lined with silver, or so the
saying goes.
In the case of a deadly-to-the-aged virus that was birthed in
the filth and horror of China’s infamous multi-species wet-markets,
it has fallen to surfing’s great historian, Matt
Warshaw, to reveal a layer that shimmers.
Matt needs little introduction, of course, former editor of
Surfer, keeper of surfing’s
flame, a man whom I’ve always pictured as a lone
cowboy entering a village on a horse, beholden to no one.
In his Sunday mail-out to Encyclopedia of
Surfing subscribers, and on the eve of an economic
apocalypse, Warshaw points out the enviable position of surfers
when it comes to thriving in catastrophe.
There is value in reminding ourselves that the sport has
already made it through hard times. On the disease side, surfing,
along with the native population at large, was utterly decimated in
the century following Captain Cook’s arrival in Hawaii.
From the 1900 nadir of that catastrophic event, however, we
get Duke Kahanamoku and George Freeth and surfing’s rebirth. (While
it messes up my point, I’m obligated to point out that Freeth died
in the coming flu pandemic.)
As far as squaring up to economic hardship, surfers didn’t
merely survive the Great Depression, we aced it. We slept on the
beach, pulled entire meals from the ocean, went hard DIY on
equipment, and if it wasn’t exactly a 12-year San Onofre clambake,
surfers in general got through the Depression happier and healthier
then the population at large.
Photographer Doc Ball put it this way: “We bought very
little. We made our own boards and trunks; I even made my own
camera tripod. It was good for you. After all that, you really knew
how to get there from here. Of course, we had a little trouble
getting gasoline. But then it was seven cents a gallon. Imagine
that! We had surfing. As long as there’s waves—you didn’t have to
pay for those. All we had to do was buy gas to get there.”
If you sign up to the EOS, you can dive
even further into the surfers-thriving-during-the-Great-Depression
thing.
Here’s the smallest taste,
The Depression did good things for surfing in America. Being
poor on the beach in Southern California was a lot better than
being poor in the Nebraska plains or on a New York street corner—or
anywhere else in the country, for that matter. Surfers were already
familiar with living on the cheap: they made their own trunks and
surfboards, pulled lobsters and abalone from the sea, gathered wood
for their own fires, and could build an evening’s entertainment
around a ukulele, a guitar, and a passed-around bottle of jug wine.
Riding waves didn’t make up for being jobless or underemployed, but
it was a nice way to pass the time if you were. With a long
curl-beating ride to the beach, surfers could still find grace
moments, just as they had during an era of prosperity.
In California, and to a lesser degree Hawaii, beaches and
lineups during the Depression were commanded by down-at-heels
journeymen like Tom Blake, who sold his swimming medals and cups to
pay for meals. Another was the hulking surfer-paddleboarder Gene
“Tarzan” Smith, who during the 1930s lived on and off in a cave he
excavated in a sandstone cliff near Corona del Mar. On weekend
nights, Smith, a binge drinker and predatory brawler, would roll
his only suit and a pair of old dress shoes into a piece of
oilskin, paddle across Newport Harbor to the enormous Rendezvous
Ballroom, change next to a nearby boathouse, dance and drink and
bust a few heads, then roll the suit back up and make the return
journey across the harbor to his cave. Smith would became famous
among surfers for his otherworldly paddling stamina. In 1940 he
paddled from Oahu to Kauai, a seventy-mile, thirty-hour journey, on
a board outfitted with a compass, flashlight holder, hunting knife,
and pneumatic pillow. Over the last few miles, Smith hallucinated
that he was stroking down Hollywood Boulevard. Sixty-five years
passed before another paddler made the crossing.
As I said, give Warshaw a few bucks and sign up to the EOS,
although as he told
readers last week, if suffering and privation is your lot, he’s
happy to carry anyone for free until a vaccine comes
along.