A romanticised examination of surf culture in Montana and Idaho… 

In this second episode of Vans’ Weird Waves series, which is hosted by the Puerto Rican Dylan Graves, he and San Clemente kid Jett Schilling surf river waves in Montana and Idaho.

You’ll remember in episode one Dylan cast quite a glow over Lake Superior, riding six-foot waves in the world’s largest fresh-water lake.

Here we see Dylan and fifteen-year-old Schilling trussed up in hoods and body rubber.

It’s very cold. Murky, cold water.

Thirty degrees?

That’s minus one for the rest of the world tied to the metric system.

Both surfers, therefore, are as elastic as an after-birth vagina.

What’s most interesting, I think, is the sort of surfboard that works in these waves: wide, flat, shovel-nosed things, so white and rectangular they look like body-of-Christ wafers.

Click play and hear the scripture.

"It's a phenomenon of nature!"

Come, come chase a Code Red swell with Puerto Rico’s Dylan Graves to… Minnesota! A fabulous state which is home to the largest diaspora of Somalis east of Africa and backs onto the Greatest Lake of ’em all, Lake Superior.

(Ain’t no fresh-water lake in the world as big as Lake Superior.)

You remember Dylan, yeah? He’s mid-thirties now but he used to be on the Quiksilver roster, the clean-looking Young Gun playing cute foil to the hoary champ Kelly Slater.  Tween Young Gun and now (Old Bum?), Dylan took on the WQS (ain’t much success) before settling into that ever-warm freesurfing zone.

(Once when I interviewed Dylan, he said he liked to swish his long hair around women’s breasts, sometimes head-butts his friends when he’s boozed, and likes it “when girls aren’t afraid to let some dirty shit come out. I just like it when they say fuck.”)

Editor’s update: Dylan just texted to ask me if I had proof of the interview and to remind me that “a little more work might be required than a 10-year-old interview. Thanks for an unnecessary chat with the mrs. Shitty journalism for the sake of making a name for urself. Who wins?”

He’s right, of course, although the ol never-said-it argument rarely works and only serves to shrink the proprietor in front of his audience.

Anyway,

In this thirteen-minute “short feature”, Dylan exits the tropics to fly to the state of Minnesota to surfs a network of waves one local surfer points out is a “rare phenomenon” of rocky points, reefs and beachbreaks.

Dylan says the cold water feels like being hit by a neuralyzer, the device used in the Will Smith vehicle, Men in Black.

“Mind eraser,” he says.