“When you are young and have no responsibility, that’s the time to be a surfer."
This 1967 essay by John Milius is where we first meet Jack Barlow, who would go on to star in Milius’ 1978 surfing epic Big Wednesday.
The Ride chronicles the rapid development of Southern California and the existential dilemma that all hardcore surfers face: freedom vs. responsibility.
“When you are young and have no responsibility, that’s the time to be a surfer,” John Milius said many years later. “But gradually, the world comes and calls you to other things. You have to go inland, face the whole catastrophe, get married, divorced, have a job.”
LOOMINGS
I’m Barlow. Sometimes I need a wave. I feel out of touch with something as though I’m sick and not functioning properly. Sometimes I can go for a week, month, once for a year, but one day I’ll know that I’m not in rhythm. Parts are broken. I need an overhaul. I need a wave.
You see, you might look at the blonde surfer in the Volkswagen bus and say does he need it on a cold winter day? He doesn’t. He’s not like me. He doesn’t need a wave, he just wants one. He looks like it. He rides waves but he does this at the beach. It’s not the same for those of us who go “down to the sea on boards.” We’re insane. And so, whenever I’m in the middle of a department store and I see myself in the mirror–a grubby stump in a forest of sophistication, or whenever I can no longer give audible responses to cocktail conversation, when it requires a strong moral principle to stop me from crashing headlong into the rush hour freeway, when I find myself jealously reading the evening paper about another mass killing, when I can’t stand rock’n’roll–then it’s high time I got away. Some noisily puff the Indian weed or devour the sugar cube I go quietly to the reef.
It’s no accident that men have called the sea woman. And it’s no accident that the wave rider tries to ride inside the wave; he knows the excitement of carnal love. The gratification beyond orgasm. A rhythm you can’t duplicate in bed. Why, man, it is “the very tide beating heart of the earth”, the mating of the elements, fountain of youth, elixir of the souls. And so, you can see why, when it’s all done and I phantom over the top and paddle back out, I wonder why I was asked to participate.
When, after my twenty-second birthday I suddenly realized I was older. That one doesn’t stay the same. That cells deteriorate. That fat can replace muscle. That I was white and stale. Then I knew that if something didn’t happen, if I kept on, I would get out of rhythm, come down with dysentery and die. It wasn’t too late so I got in the car and drove to Malibu.
Want to read the rest of John Milius’ epic essay?
Petey Maguire, whom you know well on these pages, has it over on his substack Sour Milk. Dive in!