The water was atrociously cold. I could feel it tracing the seams in my wetsuit as I danced through the shallows; my hands throbbed when I started paddling. The first wall of sandy, grumbling white water felt like a barrel of gritty ice cubes poured down my back. I gasped, and kept churning toward what looked like a channel—a passage where fewer waves broke. At this tide, the waves near shore had little power, and I made steady progress. But I still had to cross the inside sandbar—a shallow ridge about halfway between the shore and the outermost surf—where unridable waves broke with pulverizing force. The first wave I saw break on the bar as I approached looked as if a string of land mines had exploded inside it. Sunlight splintered in long shards behind a curtain of falling water, then blew through the wall like a million grains of glass. An instant later, there was nothing but angry foam. I could see no channel. My progress stopped. For a couple of minutes, the waves and I quietly banged heads. Then came a lull: no waves. I sprint-paddled straight at the bar. A thick, glistening wave made a delayed appearance, but I got to the bar before it did, and hurled myself with an involuntary cry through its harmless, shiny, icy crest.
Beyond the inside bar, in the deepwater trough that separated it from the outside bar, scores of people came suddenly into view. They were scattered for two hundred yards in each direction: sitting in clumps far outside, scrambling for waves, scratching to get back out. Two or three were actually on their feet, riding waves. All had passed the snarling mastiff of the inside bar—the price of admission to this green-gold world of glassy low-tide peaks. The channels through the outside bar looked wide and easy to read. I angled north, toward a field of open water. Slightly farther north, a surfer I didn’t recognize, riding a needle-nosed pale blue board, caught a good-sized wave. He fought to keep his balance as the wave, which was about twice his height, jacked and began to pitch. He didn’t fall, but he lost speed in the struggle to keep his feet, and his first turn, now deep in the wave’s shadow, was weak. If the wave hadn’t hit a patch of deep water, and paused for a beat, he would have been buried by the first section. He managed to steer around it, though, and then pull into the next section and set a high line across a long green wall. By the time he passed me, he was in full command, perhaps one turn from the end of an excellent ride. But his face, I saw in the moment he shot past, was twisted with anguish, and with something that looked like rage.
Riding a serious wave is for an accomplished surfer what playing, say, Chopin’s Polonaise in F-Sharp Minor might be for an accomplished pianist. Intense technical concentration is essential, but many less selfless emotions also crowd around. Even in unchallenging waves, the faces of surfers as they ride become terrible masks of fear, frustration, anger. The most revealing moment is the pullout, the end of a ride, which usually provokes a mixed grimace of relief, distress, elation, and dissatisfaction. The assumption, common among nonsurfers, that riding waves is a slaphappy, lighthearted business—fun in the sun—is for the most part mistaken. The face of the stranger on the pale blue board had reminded me, in fact, of nothing so much as the weeping, contorted faces of the pillow beaters on the beach.
I slipped between the big, shifting peaks of the outside bar and arrived at the takeoff area, known as the lineup. I half knew a few of the people I could see there, but the crowd seemed amorphous, unfocused—there were no conversations in progress. Everyone seemed intent on the waves, on himself. I caught my breath, chose a lineup marker—a school bus parked in the Sloat lot—and went to work. It was important, especially in a strange crowd, to make a good showing on one’s first waves, for they established one’s place in the pecking order. Blowing a takeoff or failing to catch a catchable wave usually sent one to the end of the queue for waves; this was an improvised but fierce arrangement, and in an aggressive crowd where waves were scarce one could easily be stuck there for the duration. I moved to a spot about fifteen yards inside a group of four or five surfers—a risky position, vulnerable to a big set, or series of waves, breaking farther out, but I was fit after a winter of paddling, and had the advantage of knowing the bars off this part of Ocean Beach. And, as it happened, the next wave to come through held up nicely, shrugging off the efforts of two guys farther out to catch it, and handing me a swift, swooping, surefooted first ride.
Paddling back out, I burned to tell somebody about the wave—about the great crack the lip had made as it split the surface behind me, about the mottled amber upper hollows of the inside wall. But there was no one to tell. A surf crowd is a delicate social unit. Everyone out there is starring in his own movie, and permission is required before you inflict your exploits on anyone else. Vocal instant replays and noisy exultation are not unknown, but they’re subject to a strict code of collective ego control. Young kids sometimes misunderstand this part of the surfing social contract, and brag and browbeat each other in the water, but they generally cool it when older surfers are in earshot. The usual crowd at Ocean Beach was older than most—in fact, I couldn’t remember ever seeing a teenager out on a big day—and the unwritten limits on garrulity among strangers there were correspondingly firm. Those who exceeded them were shunned. Those who consistently exceeded them were hated, for they failed to respect the powerfully self-enclosed quality of what other surfers, especially the less garrulous, were doing out there—the emotions that many of them were surfing through.
Two black grebes popped out of the foam beside me, their spindly necks like feathered periscopes, their big, surprised eyes staring. I murmured, “Did you see my wave?”
I headed for an empty peak slightly north of the school bus. I caught two quick waves there, and half a dozen people saw fit to join me. The jockeying for waves got, for Ocean Beach, fairly bad. Nobody spoke. Each dreamer stayed deep in his own dream—hustling, feinting, gliding, windmilling into every possible wave. Then a cleanup set rolled through, breaking fifty yards outside the bar we were surfing. Huge walls of white water swatted all of us off our boards, pushing a few unlucky souls clear across the inside bar. The group that reconvened a few minutes later was smaller, and now had something to talk about. “My leash leg just got six inches longer.” “Those waves looked like December.” We settled into a rough rotation. Waves were given and taken, and givers were sometimes even thanked. After noteworthy rides, compliments were muttered. The chances of this swell’s lasting another day were discussed in general session. A burly Asian from Marin County was pessimistic—“It’s a three-day west. We get ’em every year.” He repeated his prediction, then said it again for those who might have missed it. The little group at the school bus peak, while it would never be known for its repartee, had achieved some rude coherence. A delicate fabric of shared enterprise had settled over all of us out there, and I found that my resentment of the non-locals had faded. The tide, which was now rising, was unanimously blamed for a lengthy lull. The sun, nearing the horizon, ignited a fiery Z of sea-facing windows along a road that switchbacked up a distant San Francisco hillside.
Then a familiar howl and raucous laugh rose from the inside bar. Heads turned. “Doc,” someone said, unnecessarily. It was Dr. Mark Renneker, on his rounds. Doc Hazard, as he was sometimes called, was the one San Francisco surfer whom nonlocals were likely to know. His fame derived mainly from his exploits in giant Ocean Beach surf, but he was hard to miss in waves of any size. He was paddling alongside somebody I didn’t know, regaling him with the plot of a horror movie: “So the head starts running around by itself, biting people to death.” Before they reached the lineup, Mark interrupted himself, swerved, sprint-paddled north, wheeled, and picked off a wave that had somehow slipped past the rest of us. Ten minutes later, I saw him steaming in my direction again. There was, it struck me, a gawkiness about Mark; today, for instance, he was wearing an absurd-looking short-billed neoprene hood, with his beard jutting over the chin strap and his ponytail flopping out the back. But when Mark was on a surfboard his gawkiness was completely obscured by the power and precision of his movements. He paddled like a Grand Pri
x racer, always poised for agile cornering and breathtaking accelerations. Mark was six feet four but rode boards as short as six feet—a sign of rare strength and confidence. I watched him bearing down on me. When he was still ten yards away, he made a face and yelled, “This is a zoo!” I wondered what the people around us made of that observation. “Let’s go surf Santiago,” he said. Mark didn’t recognize the unwritten limits on garrulity in the water. He tore up the surfing social contract and blew his great, sunburned nose on the tatters. And he was too big, too witty, and far too fearless for anyone to object. Feeling compromised, I reluctantly abandoned my spot in the rotation at the school bus peak and set off with Mark for the peaks breaking near the base of Santiago Street, half a mile north. “‘A three-day west’!” Mark snorted. “Who are these guys? It’s going to be bigger tomorrow. All the indicators say so.” An amateur meteorologist, Mark diligently monitored weather and buoy reports from the North Pacific, and he was usually right about what the surf would do. He was wrong about Santiago, though. The bars, we saw as we approached, were plainly sloppier than those we had left behind at Sloat. There was nobody surfing anywhere nearby. That was why Mark wanted to surf there, of course.
It was an old disagreement between us. Mark believed that crowds were stupid. “People are sheep,” he liked to say. And he often claimed to know more than the crowd did about where and when to surf. He would head down the beach to some unlikely-looking spot and stubbornly stay there, riding marginal, inconsistent waves, rather than grub it out with the masses. I had spent a lifetime paddling hopefully off toward uncrowded peaks myself, dreaming that they were about to start working better than the popular break, and sometimes—rarely, briefly—they actually seemed to do so. But I had a rueful faith in the basic good judgment of the herd. Crowds collected where the waves were best. This attitude drove Mark nuts. And Ocean Beach, with its great uncrowded winter waves, did in fact bend the universal Malthusian surf equation. Freezing water and abject fear and ungodly punishment were helpful that way.
A block or so before we reached Santiago, I took off, over Mark’s objections, on a midsized wave, a detour that I quickly regretted: The set behind my wave gave me a thorough drubbing, almost driving me over the inside bar. By the time I got back outside, the sun was setting, I was shivering, and Mark was a hundred yards farther north. I decided not to follow him. I would see him later; there was going to be a slide show at his apartment that evening. Now shivering badly, I started looking for a last wave. But the peaks along here were shifty, and I kept misjudging their speed and steepness. I nearly got sucked over backward by a vicious, ledging wave, then had to scramble to avoid a monstrous set.
The twilight deepened. The spray lifting off the wave tops still had a crimson sunset tinge, but the waves themselves were now just big, featureless blue-black walls. They were getting more and more difficult to judge. There were no longer any other surfers in sight. I was ready to try to paddle in—an ignominious maneuver. And, when a lull came, that’s what I did, digging hard, struggling to keep my board pointed shoreward through the crosscurrents of the outside bar, using a campfire on the beach as a visual fix, and glancing back over my shoulder every five or six strokes.
I was about halfway to shore, coming up on the inside bar, when a set appeared outside. I was safely in deep water, and there was no sense trying to cross the inside bar during a set, so I turned and sat up to wait. Against the still bright sky, at the top of a massive wave off to the south and far, far outside, a lithe silhouette leaped to its feet, then plunged into darkness. I strained to see what happened next, but the wave disappeared behind others, nearer by. My stomach had done a flutter kick at the sight of someone dropping into such a wave at dusk, and as I bobbed over the swells gathering themselves for the assault on the inside bar I kept peering toward where he had vanished, watching for a riderless board washing in. That wave had looked like a leash breaker. Finally, less than forty yards away, a dim figure appeared, speeding across a ragged inside wall. Whoever it was had not only made the drop but was still on his feet, and flying. As the wave hit deep water, he leaned into a huge, elegant carving cutback. The cutback told me who it was. Bill Bergerson, known around Ocean Beach as Peewee, was the only local surfer who could turn like that. He made one more turn, driving to within a few yards of me, and pulled out. His expression, I saw, was bland. He nodded at me but said nothing. I felt tongue-tied. I was relieved, though, by the thought of having company for the passage across the inside bar, which was now detonating continuously. But Peewee had other plans. He turned and, without a word, started paddling back out to sea.
Surfing is not a spectator sport. There is an international contest circuit, and a handful of surfers earn a living from competition, but most of the professionals actually make ends meet by endorsing products—surfboards, wetsuits, or the output of one of the many companies in the surf apparel industry. Contest surfing is seldom exciting to watch: The ocean cannot be relied on to provide memorable waves on an organizer’s schedule, and few of the world’s great surf spots happen to be natural amphitheaters.
One of the few times I’ve seen nonsurfers get their money’s worth was on a minor Indonesian island about a hundred miles west of Sumatra, in 1979. Half a dozen of us, Australians and Americans, had found our way to a fishing village on the southwest shore of the island. Photographs of the wave that breaks near the village would later be splashed across the surf magazines, putting the spot on the world surfing map, but at that time it was known only to a small, malaria-ridden band. Two Swiss travelers—hearty types in hiking boots, who had come to the island to look at Stone Age fortifications—turned up in the village one day, and decided that it might be interesting to join us in the surf. They came out on borrowed big-wave boards and, following instructions, took up positions in a deepwater channel near the edge of the reef. The waves happened to be magnificent that day: big, powerful, flawless. The rides were long, fast, and extremely intense, and most of them ended in the channel right where the Swiss travelers bobbed like a pair of buoys, slowly turning orange in the equatorial sun. We would come screaming through the final, jacking section and skittering onto the wind-brushed flat, steering around them as we coasted out of the waves, too pumped up to reply when they applauded solemnly and said things like “Marvelous! How I admire you!” I wanted to try to explain to them that they were witnessing the culmination of years of hard search and sacrifice. But they clearly thought they were just watching a bit of sport. They weren’t even afraid of the waves. Two of the surfers there that afternoon had boards they had dragged thousands of miles—across oceans, through Asian cities and jungles—destroyed, snapped in half by the waves, but the Swiss observers just splashed blithely back toward the channel whenever we warned them they were drifting too close.
My girlfriend, Caroline, watched surfing for years, with no particular interest, until one day in Santa Cruz. We were standing on the cliffs at a popular break called Steamer Lane. As surfers rode past the point where we stood, we could see the waves from the side and then from the back. For a few seconds, we saw an elevated version of what the surfers themselves saw, and Caroline’s idea of surfing was transformed on the spot. Before, she said, waves to her had been two-dimensional objects, sheer and onrushing, standing up against the sky. Suddenly, she could see that they were in fact pyramids, with steep sides, thickness, broad, sloping backs, and an incredibly complex three-dimensional construction, which changed, collapsing and rising and collapsing, very quickly. It was nearly enough, she said, to make watching surfing interesting.
It was also nearly enough, she said, to make the desire to surf comprehensible. Caroline had never understood why, after surfers spent hours studying the waves from shore, they often announced their intention of going out by saying things like “Let’s get it over with.” But then she wasn’t there in Ventura, on a cold afternoon in 1964, when my father ordered me back into the water after a dismal session during which I had caught no waves. I was eleven
years old, just learning to surf, still too small to get my arm around my battered, beloved old board. Three waves, Dad said, and we could go. My feet were bloody—it was a rocky shore, and this was before the invention of ankle leashes—and I was probably crying, and I wanted desperately to get warm and go home. But he had the car keys, not to mention the keys to manhood, and I bitterly paddled back out and caught my three waves, riding them in on my knees. My father has always claimed that I would never have learned to surf if it had not been for that episode. All I know is that over the next few years I lost all interest in other sports—especially team sports. By high school, when the other boys were doing or dying for the school, their parents cheering in the stands, my friends and I were skulking in Mexico, camping on lonely beaches and bluffs, looking for waves.
The only audience that matters to most surfers is other surfers, for they alone can truly appreciate what they are seeing. They have been through the special ordeal of learning to surf, and know what a good performance involves. Also, they share the obsession. Sunday surfers—people for whom surfing is a hobby, who keep their surfboards in the closet next to their skis and tennis racquets—undoubtedly exist. But every Sunday surfer who can stand up on his board was, at some stage, obsessed, for nothing less can get one through the hundreds of difficult, discouraging hours it takes to gain basic skills. And retaining those skills requires constant practice; in other words, competence presumes obsession. It also takes exceptional physical fitness. James Michener once reported, in a book called Sports in America, that the demands made on the muscles, lungs, and heart by surfing were roughly the same as those made by paddleball and slightly less than those made by badminton. Michener must have meant by surfing only the act of riding a wave, because if paddling out and catching waves are included—and it would be hard to surf without catching a wave—the level of fitness required for surfing is more like what might be needed for a combination of long-distance rowing, white-water kayaking, and ballet. Brian Low-don, an Australian exercise physiologist, has published studies showing that surfers have a faster return to baseline pulse and respiratory rate after exertion than even Olympic pentathletes. (Lowdon’s studies fail to mention badminton players.)
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