by Don Wallace
The short answer is no, of course not—but, you know, profitez.
The long answer? Surfing engages the natural world in a way a shutterbug’s camera or a birdwatcher’s binoculars never can. You live inside the tides with the sea state in your head, like a sailor or fisherman. You train body and mind to cope with conditions. The rules are up to you, and to make them, you learn to live with fear.
To surf well, you actually have to push yourself up to the edge and then, quite literally, go over. That brief moment of hanging upside down, head pointing into an imminent wipeout, is ironically what surfers live for. They call it “making the drop”—a phrase that can comfortably encompass our lives in general. Move to New York City at age thirty without jobs or prospects? We made the drop. Buy a ruin in a village on a tiny isle off the coast of Brittany? We made…(sound of idiot falling into a blackberry bramble).
The accusation that we are stuck in perpetual adolescence is harder to duck. Listen, surfing has a fairly stern code of law, an etiquette—but I can see you’re not buying it. We comprise a society. No, it’s not Baywatch and it’s not teeny-weeny bikinis that draw us to the waves. This isn’t about dudes, Malibu, or the Big Kahuna (though we enjoy them as kitschy tropes tropiques). We aren’t about evading responsibility.
We try to be good neighbors on dry land. We bring a covered dish to supper. We recycle. And, of course, we don’t bore friends or spouses by talking surfing (too much). A good surfer anywhere is laconic, cool. Pursues self-reliance in his life and appreciates competence in others. A really good surfer feels a responsibility to society and the environment. And has great hair.
• • •
Mindy and I slowly shake off the torpor of our nap in the sun to find ourselves the eye in a storm of passionate discussion.
The teenagers around us are studying for Le Bac, the great test that comes at the end of high school and determines your future in France. Even those who have two years to go are already studying, reading books off the list: Voltaire, Balzac, Thomas Moore, Flaubert, Sartre. Their mouths are pursed, brows furrowed. This discomfits Rory and Devo, who’ve always been able to count on Nintendo and Game Boy round-robins to fill the time when they’re not in the water.
Our boys ask about the books. They ask to see them. They try a page and visibly recoil. The young-looking boy with the Apollonian curls asks what they read in America. “Do you read any French authors? No?” He looks sad. “Well,” he brightens, “surely you’ve read Thoreau, Poe, Melville, Faulkner?”
Silence.
Celeste forms an “O” with her mouth and looks at Mindy, who nods. Our boys are savages.
The talk of books brings the teenage girls into the circle. Although they ask Mindy for her opinions about American authors, their own opinions—sassy, sardonic, and above all, knowing—immediately tumble out of their perfect, pouty mouths. Their hands fly about in languid arcs, as if holding cigarettes (which won’t come out until Maman goes for a walk). They know books, and what’s more, they can talk them. Better than you, their eyes say.
Their mockery reduces our boys to uneasy grins. But not Marc and the others, who fire back. Mindy and I are careful not to seem to be eavesdropping, or noticing Rory and Devo’s forays back into the conversation. They’re not used to being left behind. They seem energized by all the girls in the careful bikinis reading George Sand and Ronsard on the sand. The thought has perhaps occurred to them that there is more than one way to profité. Perhaps beau temps and bons livres will ignite a fire of a different kind. Not by coincidence do we happen to have those good books on the shelves in the house, back up the vallon.
• • •
But the books don’t fool our friends. Given that we Americans are all so sauvage, our Paris parents were a little anxious when we became Pied Pipers to the children of the villages, leading them out past the shore break into the wild ocean. We used Rory as bait—a bodysurfer since he was a babe, he could twirl, spin, and fly off ten-foot faces with aplomb.
The village kids were ripe for adventure, but Donnant is not for children, and their parents rightly worried. So while Mindy performed on the foamy stage—tempting and teasing the young Bellilois with her shortboard repertoire of Hawaiian-style drops and cutbacks—Rory and I spent a lot of time teaching the Parisian flock how to duck waves and deal with currents, while their parents watched from the water’s edge.
We made bodysurfing our focus because surfing is so hard to learn, and nobody had surfboards to spare anyway. We decided that to join us, you also had to reject bodyboards, “le peste polyeste,” and said it was for reasons of safety. As long as you’re tethered to a foam floatation device, you aren’t going to become a strong swimmer. You’re also going to get dragged backwards, over and over. Then if your leash breaks, you’ll be in trouble. But our real reason was aesthetic. Bodyboarders have no manners. They plow over people like bumper cars.
The rejection set us apart. It was our Aquatic Code. As anyone with any taste and refinement knows, we sniffed, bodysurfing is the ultimate form of surfing—nothing gets between you and the sea, the currents, the waves. It’s pure.
Once our crew learned to handle themselves, we shared the advanced Hawaiian technique that involves dropping into the curl, gliding parallel to the wave, then spinning and carving using the planing surfaces of the body, like a dolphin. One by one, each had his “aha!” moment.
We also went big. Donnant pumping outside was a spectacle that beckoned. We ended up with a platoon of fearless wave hounds that came to include the lifeguards. At the fore were Rory and Devo and Marc. And Raoul. A quiet young man when I spotted him, fins in hand, at the shore break, I didn’t know he’d just lost his father. I just invited him to ditch the bodyboard and come along. We’ve since been in the biggest surf of my life with shit-eating grins on our faces and looks that said: Can you believe this?
Too late, parents in the villages recognized the savage gleam in their child’s eye at the sight of dark blue-green swells popping up on the horizon. But it really was too late. Once you’ve gone big, you never truly go home.
• • •
Out of the water, warming up on my towel, I glance up the beach and—uh-oh. There is the man we call Man. Nicknames are our vice, in particular the iconic ones Rory gave to people when he was in his sixes and sevens. Because once they stick, you’re stuck.
Man suits man. Wearing horn-rimmed glasses, the opinion writer for Le Monde is a serious person. Walking along the water’s edge, hands clasped behind his back, deep in thought, he is the very image of French philosophy—despite or because of his pinstriped Speedo.
Man has been waiting for me to look up. He beckons, and I groan, pushing myself to my feet. Ever optimistic in the quest to improve my French to the point where we can talk books and politics, Man is my personal seriousness trainer.
I’ve come relatively late to seriousness. Like many an insecure grommet of Southern Californian origins, I cringed under the lash of my high school social superiors’ drawled put-downs, delivered from Olympian clouds of coolness. I could only respond with the spoofy humor of the sixties inhaled from MAD Magazine, late-night FM radio, Catch-22, and rock ’n’ roll. Eventually, like the old matchbook cover come-on, I found popularity through humor and became “the life of the party.”
As a college student I tested an expression of profundity and, after graduation, had a couple of serious jobs. But humor was still my default when anxious. At times I felt it was eating away at my personality like some insect chewing up my brain.
Moving to New York brought a welcome brusqueness into my life, but the feeling returned and the predicament became chronic after we started going to France. Once again I was a social mute, helpless to order even a glass of orange juice without creating a ruckus. When people are laughing at you, there are only two responses: to get mad, or roll with it. Being a funny guy, I rolled with it—Young Strudel!—built on the misunde
rstandings, and played with words and pronoun agreement. Would it were that I’d been learning the subjunctive like Mindy did in Tours!
At age thirty I did begin working to learn French on my own, simply by ear and reading, but my progress was halting and the backsliding frustrating. Although it’s actually fairly hilarious and a great icebreaker to offer to cut off your host’s penis—completely unintentionally the first few times, I swear—it does wear thin.
Fortunately, Celeste and Henry began acting as unofficial conversation partners, bringing me along. And it was Henry who one day made the fateful observation, after I deflected yet another grammatical error with a quip:
“Don, you must be more serious.”
“Don be serious,” Celeste echoed, nodding.
I felt nailed. Of course, Henry was a psychiatrist. It was his job to nail people. And I definitely had the anxiety of someone who has never been analyzed. But still—he was right. I’d had a nagging, depressive feeling about my clown-as-avoidance strategy. It cloys, brings you down, when everything is a joke. That’s why clowns are so sad, of course.
Man took me farther down the road. When we first encountered him at one of our gatherings at the beach, he was so delighted to meet American writers—and so disappointed with our lack of engagement in the affairs of the day, no, hour. Wilting under his monologue, Mindy soon ran off, leaving us together.
Man lived for earnest discussion and demanded details and attributions. I have that sort of mind, and we took to walking the beach chewing the fat, as they say en Amérique. He had no humor, so mine was worthless. He took the most facetious remark at face value. But he also was a friend to the point of partisanship. I remember his outrage that in America writers and intellectuals like Mindy and me weren’t living high on government grants and university gigs. He took it personally that I had to work for such oddball magazines and scrape to get my serious work published. In France I’d be golden.
Over the years I’ve taken the Serious Challenge. During the eleven months away from Belle Île, I actually spend a little time each week composing my thoughts on the subjects of the day and then translating them into French, usually on my walks to and from the office. Yes, I know that sounds odd. Well, guess what? I also compose dialogues with other people—friends I’ll be seeing in the summer. I’ve rehearsed for a hypothetical summer dinner party a whole year in advance.
It helps to cut my embarrassment to know that Oscar Wilde did the same, and in English, too. There is a tradition in France of Le Remark. Still—it’s definitely eccentric behavior.
But did I mention that it works?
Learning a foreign language always starts with you talking, as it is a lot harder to listen. But too much talking is ungenerous, boring, isolating. When I embarked on listening, however sincere my vow, I found it almost impossible to follow whole stretches of glissading French phrases. It was hard not to break out my shabby old jokes. But if I had one of my composed-in-advance remarks up my sleeve, I felt calmer and, even if I was faking it on the outside, more serious.
• • •
At the north end of the beach, the mouth of our vallon meets the sea in a wide sandy wash. The steep cliff towering above has a pair of German gun emplacements, one for a machine gun, the other for a 75mm cannon, both still camouflaged after fifty years.
These remnants of Hitler’s Atlantic Wall remind us of Belle Île’s occupation during World War II. It was a harsh four years: the able-bodied men and boys were sent off to do forced labor on the Continent, many to build the bombproof submarine pens at Lorient. The elderly men and the women who remained, not by choice, mostly worked the fields and kept the herds. They had to turn over their milk, meat, eggs, and grain to the occupiers, who let them starve. Suzanne says she ate grass, comme une vache. To this day she does her best to ignore or avoid German visitors.
As a young boy in Le Palais, Denis LeReveur had a different kind of war. He mainly remembers the nightly B-17 bombing runs to take out the radar installation on the Côte Sauvage and the 88mm flak guns firing back. Sometimes the bombs fell inland, once even on the town. Sometimes the flak shells didn’t burst in midair—a popular act of sabotage by women forced to work in the ammunition factories was to break the proximity fuse—and fell back on the island to explode or burrow deep into fields and barns.
At war’s end the Germans honored the island’s allure in a peculiarly disagreeable way by refusing to surrender, holding out until after the rest of Germany’s armed forces capitulated. It may have only lasted twenty-four hours but they must have been long ones for the îliens.
I admit to a masculine weakness for fortifications, and Rory and I have explored the Côte Sauvage’s installations. What a waste of concrete! What misguided ingenuity! But I didn’t question my boyish attitude toward Donnant’s casemates and gun slits until the day I accepted an invitation to lay my towel down next to the Majestic Madame.
Many decades ago, Madame and her husband had bought a postwar refuge on Belle Île, an entire village, one of the most peaceful and beautiful places I’d seen on an island full of them. The pair were very cultured and she had done something big in the Resistance—the Legion d’Honneur doesn’t go to just any old hero, you know—and I worried about bruising her eardrums when I spoke my brand of French, though she never betrayed any discomfort. They had preserved their house and village, inside and out, in the old Breton style. This is what led to our acquaintance, actually. She was curious about our project, as it has been called, no doubt euphemistically.
She must’ve been pushing ninety when I came upon her that day. She waved me over. We talked. Sunning on the beach at Donnant with her left me a little awed and bashful. As we spoke—she so patiently—I happened to spot the tattooed number on the pale, crêpey skin of her inner forearm. From the cliffs on either side, the vacant eyes of those Nazi gun emplacements stared down on us. I’ll never forget that sense of being watched. Or of how glad I was to be able to speak of other things, and so seriously.
• • •
At the end of one summer—after the waves had finally played out—our psychiatrist friends cornered us at the end of a long group dinner and conducted an impromptu, wine-and-coffee-fueled intervention.
After a while, an elegant woman attorney, whose husband was also a distinguished international lawyer, took over the prosecution: “Why do you do thees surf? When we first met you, you did not use to. You did the garden, the shopping, the baseball. Now all you do is thees surf! And”—here came the clincher—“you don’t come to apéros anymore.”
When I started to explain, she interrupted me: “You do not come to France to surf!”
The following afternoon, to placate my inquisitors, I went with them to the all-weather courts of Gouerc’h and the Club de Tennis. We played a genteel game of doubles.
After a couple of points, our avocat huddled with her partner and then lined up opposite me at the net. We played several spirited rallies. She was good. Then very good. Too good. At the end of one quick-witted volley she caught me on my backhand and, with a slam, somehow broke my wrist.
Now I couldn’t play tennis. But when the waves returned, I could go out with a waterproof splint—thanks to Docteur Pleybien, who entered into the spirit of my passion and empathized with my needs. Thus I resumed bodysurfing.
When Madame Avocat saw me on the beach again, she waved her hands. “Pouf! You did it all on purpose!” There’s no pleasing some people.
• • •
A couple of nights later, after feasting on Madame Avocat’s excellent Algerian tangine of lamb, I felt I owed her one more attempt at an explanation.
Donnant was the magnet, the wave we’d spotted in that winter of 1980. It was part of the legend of our time there: a mystery spot. So surfing it was a matter of fulfillment of a task or quest. We saw it before it had ever been surfed. So then it became our duty to surf it. “Do you understand?”
> “No.”
Because it is the only obvious surf break on the island, these days Donnant can be overwhelmed in summer by crowds of bodyboarders. But—and I’d hate it if this got out—compared to California and Hawaii and Montauk, it is uncrowded. There are rarely too many boards in the water. The cost and time needed to catch a ferryboat and rent a car, all to check out a single sketchy beach, a rumor, discourages the surf masses that travel up and down the Atlantic coast from Spain to Brest.
“And?”
It feels like our own world here. A family affair. To know everyone in the water creates something special. A lot of surfers will pay through the nose to go 5,000 miles and surf with strangers in Bali and Fiji. Here we are with our friends. It is our break.
“So? We have our tennis here, too.”
“I hope you will excuse me, but it is…not the same.”
Her eyes narrowed and the whole table leaned in. Now the game was on.
I stood up and made my argument.
In the past Mindy and I may have been guilty of giving the impression that we were the first surfers on Belle Île, when it’s better to say that we introduced the surfer to Belle Île who introduced surfing. This was back in 1984, when I was on assignment for the boating magazine. The story concerned a tribe of fierce, single-handed transatlantic sailboat racers who’d settled at a port fifteen kilometers across the bay from Le Palais. Imagine that! The best sailors in the world on our doorstep.
We found La Trinité-sur-Mer to be a hive of extreme sailing. Huge catamarans and trimarans sat on blocks or rested on sleds on slanting stone quays. Bearded men and women with sun-frosted hair hung off hulls in trapeze seats, scraping away sea slime and baby barnacles.
People ignored us to the point of being rude until one heard that Mindy was from Hawaii. His question—“Do you surf?”—changed everything. It turned out that when he wasn’t sailing radical trimarans, Yves explored the rockbound coast of Brittany, pioneering the breaks. Every surfer’s dream is to discover and explore one uncharted surf spot in his or her life. Yves had tried scores, maybe a hundred: reckless, even dangerous attempts.
