Barbarian Days

by William Finnegan

BUT SURFING ALWAYS HAD this horizon, this fear line, that made it different from other things, certainly from other sports I knew. You could do it with friends, but when the waves got big, or you got into trouble, there never seemed to be anyone around.

  Everything out there was disturbingly interlaced with everything else. Waves were the playing field. They were the goal. They were the object of your deepest desire and adoration. At the same time, they were your adversary, your nemesis, even your mortal enemy. The surf was your refuge, your happy hiding place, but it was also a hostile wilderness—a dynamic, indifferent world. At thirteen, I had mostly stopped believing in God, but that was a new development, and it had left a hole in my world, a feeling that I’d been abandoned. The ocean was like an uncaring God, endlessly dangerous, power beyond measure.

  And yet you were expected, even as a kid, to take its measure every day. You were required—this was essential, a matter of survival—to know your limits, both physical and emotional. But how could you know your limits unless you tested them? And if you failed the test? You were also required to stay calm if things went wrong. Panic was the first step, everybody said, to drowning. As a kid, too, your abilities were assumed to be growing. What was unthinkable one year became thinkable, possibly, the next. My letters from Honolulu in 1966, kindly returned to me recently, are less distinguished by swaggering bullshit than by frank discussions of fear. “Don’t think I’ve suddenly gotten brave. I haven’t.” But the frontiers of the thinkable were quietly, fitfully edging back for me.

  That was clear on the first big day I saw at Cliffs. A long-period swell had arrived overnight. The sets (larger waves, which usually come in groups) were well overhead, glassy and gray, with long walls and powerful sections. I was so excited to see the excellence that my backyard spot could produce that I forgot my usual shyness and began to ride with the crowd at the main peak. I was overmatched there, and scared, and got mauled by the biggest sets. I wasn’t strong enough to hold on to my board when caught inside by six-foot waves, even though I “turned turtle”—rolled the board over, pulled the nose down from underwater, wrapped my legs around it, and got a death grip on the rails. The whitewater tore the board from my hands, then thrashed me, holding me down for long, thorough beatings. I spent much of the afternoon swimming. Still, I stayed out till dusk. I even caught and made a few meaty waves. And I saw surfing that day—by Leslie Wong, among others—that made my chest hurt: long moments of grace under pressure that felt etched deep in my being: what I wanted, somehow, more than anything else. That night, while my family slept, I lay awake on the bamboo-framed couch, heart pounding with residual adrenaline, listening restlessly to the rain.

  • • •

  OUR LIFE IN THE LITTLE COTTAGE on Kulamanu felt makeshift, barely American. There were geckos on the walls, cane rats under the floor, huge water bugs in the bathroom. There was strange fruit—mangoes, papayas, lychees, star fruit—that my mother learned to judge for ripeness, then proudly peel and slice. I don’t remember if we even had a TV. The sitcoms that had been a kind of prime-time hearth back on the mainland—My Three Sons, I Dream of Jeannie, even my favorite, Get Smart—now seemed like half-remembered black-and-white dreams from a world left behind. We had a landlady, Mrs. Wadsworth, who watched us supiciously. Still, I found renting grand. Mrs. Wadsworth had a gardener, which afforded me a life of leisure. My yard chores in California had seemed to take up half my waking hours.

  Another thing about our exotic new life: we all squabbled less, maybe because we each remained slightly awestruck by our new surroundings. And the fights we did have never escalated into the full-dress screaming and belting and spanking that we had regularly endured in L.A. When my mother yelled, “Wait till your father gets home,” she didn’t seem serious now. It was as if she were slyly quoting an earlier self, or some TV mom, and even the little ones were in on the joke.

  My father worked at least six days a week. When we had him with us, on the odd Sunday, we would ramble around the island—cross the sheer, dripping, wind-blasted Pali (the pass over the mountains that stood like a green wall above Honolulu), or picnic out at Hanauma Bay, beyond Koko Head, where the snorkeling on the reef was wondrous. He made it home most evenings, and on special occasions we went to a restaurant called the Jolly Roger, part of a pirate-themed chain, with burgers named after Robert Louis Stevenson characters, in a shopping mall in Kahala. One night we went to see Disney’s Snow White at a drive-in on Waialae Avenue, all six of us in a pile in our old Ford Fairlane. I know this because I wrote to my friend in L.A. about it. I described the film as “psychedelic.”

  My father’s Hawaii was a big, truly interesting place. He was regularly in the outer islands, herding film crews and talent into rain forests, remote villages, tricky shoots on unsteady canoes. He even shot a Pele number on a Big Island lava field. Although he didn’t know it, he was building the foundation for an adjunct career as a Hawaii specialist—he spent most of the next decade making feature films and TV shows in the islands. His job involved constant battling with local labor unions, particularly the teamsters and the longshoremen, who controlled freight transportation. There was abundant private irony in these battles, since my father was a strong union man, from a union family (railroaders) in Michigan. Indeed, family legend had it that in New York City, where I was born, he spent the night of my birth in a jail cell, having been plucked off a picket line outside the CBS studios, where he worked as a newswriter, and where he and his friends were trying to organize. Though he never talked about it, our move to California, with me still an infant, had been driven by employment difficulties caused by his labor militancy. It was the heyday of Senator Joseph McCarthy.

  The Hawaiian unions were, around that same time, performing postwar miracles. Led by an outpost of the West Coast longshoremen, in league with local Japanese American leftists, they even organized plantation workers, transforming a feudal economy. This was in a territory where, before the war, the harassment and even murder of strikers and organizers by management goons and police generally went unpunished. By the mid-’60s, however, Hawaii’s labor movement, like much of its mainland counterpart, had grown complacent, top-heavy, and corrupt, and my father, although he came to like personally some of the union bosses he fought daily, never seemed much edified by the struggle.

  His work carried us into odd orbits. A hyperkinetic restaurateur named Chester Lau, for instance, had attached himself to Hawaii Calls, and for years my family turned up at far-flung luaus and pig roasts and civic events organized by Chester and usually held at one of his joints.

  My dad gained enough sense of local working-class culture to know that the streets of Honolulu (and perhaps the schools) might be a challenge for a haole kid. If nothing else, there was a notorious unofficial holiday called Kill a Haole Day. This holiday got plenty of discussion, including editorials (against) in the local papers, though I never managed to find out where precisely on the calendar it fell. “Any day the mokes want,” said Mike, our In Crowd chief. I also never heard whether the holiday occasioned any actual homicides. The main targets, people said, of Kill a Haole Day were actually off-duty servicemen, who generally wandered in packs around Waikiki and the red-light district downtown. I think my father took comfort in seeing that my best friends were the local kids who kept their surfboards in our yard. They looked like they could handle themselves.

  He had always worried about bullies. When confronted by bigger boys, or outnumbered, I should, he told me, “pick up a stick, a rock, whatever you can find.” He got alarmingly emotional giving me this advice. Was he remembering ancient beatings and humiliations in Escanaba, his Michigan hometown? Or was it just so upsetting, the thought of his child, his Billy, alone and set upon by thugs? I had never taken the advice, in any case. There had been plenty of fighting, some of it involving sticks and rocks, in Woodland Hills, the California suburb where we lived, but rarely the stark encounter my dad envisioned. Once, it was true, a Mexica
n kid, a stranger, got me down under some pepper trees after school, pinning my arms, and squeezed lemon juice into my eyes. That might have been a good time to grab a stick. But I couldn’t quite believe that was happening. Lemon juice? In my eyes? Put there by someone I didn’t even know? My eyes burned for days. I never told my parents about the incident. That would have been a violation of the Code of Boys. Neither did I tell them (or anyone else) about Freitas and his terrible two-by-four.

  My father as a scared child—that was a picture that would not come into focus. He was Dad, Big Bill Finnegan, strong as a grizzly. His biceps, a marvel to all of us, were like marbled oak burls. I would never have such arms. I had inherited my mother’s string-bean build. My dad seemed scared of no one. Indeed, he had a cantankerous streak that could be mortifying. He wasn’t afraid to raise his voice in public. He sometimes asked the proprietors of shops and restaurants that posted signs asserting their right to refuse service to anyone what exactly that meant, and if he didn’t like their answers angrily took his business elsewhere. This didn’t happen in Hawaii, but it happened plenty of times on the mainland. I didn’t know that such notices were often code for “whites only”—these were the waning days of legal racial segregation. I just quailed and stared desperately at the ground, dying of embarrassment as his voice began to rise.

  • • •

  MY MOTHER WAS PAT, née Quinn. Her willowy figure was misleading. With a mostly absent husband and no domestic help, she raised four kids without seeming to break a sweat. She had grown up in a Los Angeles that no longer exists—white Catholic working-class Roosevelt liberals—and her generation, reaching adulthood after the war, was broadly, blithely upwardly mobile. Beachgoing progressives, they hitched their stars, for the most part, to the entertainment industry—husbands working in it, wives managing the suburban brood. My mother had an easygoing, tennis-playing grace. She also knew how to make ends meet. When I was little, I thought carrot, apple, and raisin salad was required fare, seven nights a week. In fact, those were the cheapest healthy foods in California at the time. My mother’s people were Irish-immigrant hill farmers in West Virginia and she, even more than my dad, was a child of the Depression. Her father, an alcoholic refrigerator repairman, had died young. She never mentioned him. Her mother, left to raise three girls alone, had gone back to school and become a nurse. When my grandmother first saw my father, who was an inch shorter than my mother, she reportedly sighed and said, “Well, all the tall ones got killed in the war.”

  My mother was endlessly game. She didn’t like sailing but spent most weekends knocking around on the succession of little boats that my father, as we got less broke, bought and doted on. She didn’t like camping but went camping without complaint. She didn’t even like Hawaii, although I didn’t know that at the time. To her, the provincialism of Honolulu was suffocating. She had grown up in L.A., had lived in New York, and apparently found the Honolulu daily paper painful to read. She was terrifically social, and not at all snobbish, but she made few friends in Hawaii. My father had never really cared much about friends—if he wasn’t working, he preferred to be with his family—but my mother missed the wide circle of other families we knew in L.A., most of them also in show business, as well as her close friends from childhood.

  Patricia Finnegan, Windward Side, Oahu, 1966

  She hid all of that from us and threw herself into making the most of life in an insular, reactionary town. She loved the water, which was lucky (though not for her fair Irish skin). On the patch of damp sand at the bottom of our path, she would spread beach towels and lead the little ones into the lagoon with masks and nets. She got my sister, Colleen, into training for her First Communion at a church in Waikiki. She even, when possible, jumped on planes to the neighboring islands with my dad, usually with Michael, who was three, on her hip, and some hasty babysitting arrangement in her wake. And in the outer islands she found, I think, a Hawaii more to her liking—not the Babbitty boosters and country-club racists of Honolulu. In snapshots from those jaunts, she looked like a stranger: not Mom but some pensive, stylish lady in a sleeveless turquoise shift, alone with her thoughts in the middle distance—a Joan Didion character, it seems now, walking barefoot, sandals in hand, past a shaggy wall of shorefront pines. Didion, I later learned, was her favorite writer.

  • • •

  I TREASURED THE BREAK from yard work. But, to my sorrow, I was coming into my own as a babysitter. My parents, ignorant of my budding career as a Kaimuki gangbanger, knew me only as Mr. Responsible. That had been my role at home since shortly after the others started arriving. There was a substantial age gap between me and my siblings—Kevin was more than four years younger, Michael ten—and I could be counted on to keep the little ones undrowned, unelectrocuted, fed, watered, rediapered. But formal babysitting duties, evenings and weekends, were a new thing, and a terrible imposition, I found, when there were waves to ride, city buses begging to be pelted with unripe mangoes, unchaperoned parties to attend in Kaimuki. I took my revenge on poor Kevin and Colleen by sourly reminiscing about the good old days before they were born. It was a golden age, really. Just Mom and Dad and me, doing what we pleased. Every night out at the Jolly Roger. Cheeseburgers, chocolate malts. No crying babies. Those were the days.

  I tried to lose my job one blazing Saturday with Colleen. She was scheduled to receive First Communion the next day. Saturday was dress rehearsal for the big ceremony. Mom and Dad were away, probably at a Chester Lau function. Colleen was in head-to-toe white lace regalia. She was supposed to make her First Confession that day—although what, even generally, a seven-year-old girl would have to confess in the way of mortal sins is hard to imagine. The Saturday rehearsal was, in any case, mandatory. The Roman Catholics in those days did not fool around. If you missed the rehearsal, you would not make your First Communion. Come back next year, little sinner, and God save your soul in the interim. Because I had been raised in the cold bosom of the church, I knew what tough nuts the nuns could be. Therefore, when Colleen and I contrived to miss the once-an-hour city bus to Waikiki on the day of her rehearsal, I knew exactly what the stakes were. And because I was still, deep down, little Mr. Responsible, I panicked. I put my tiny sister out in the middle of Diamond Head Road in her showstopping costume, flagged down the first Waikiki-bound vehicle, and got her to the church on time.

  • • •

  I WAS STARTING TO GET my bearings in Honolulu. From the lineup at Cliffs, you could see the whole south coast of Oahu, from the Waianae Mountains in the west, beyond Honolulu and Pearl Harbor, to Koko Head, which was a sort of second-rank Diamond Head—another parched-looking crater at the water’s edge—in the east. The city filled a plain between the coast and the Ko‘olau Range, whose steep green peaks were usually buried in clouds and mist under brilliant, billowing thunderheads. The mountains sent rain clouds out to water the city, though most burned up before they reached the coast. Rainbows littered the sky. Beyond the mountains was the Windward Side, and somewhere out that way was the fabled North Shore.

  Directions in Honolulu were always given, though, in terms of local landmarks, not the compass, so you went mauka (toward the mountains) or makai (toward the sea) or ewa (toward Ewa Beach, which was out past the airport and Pearl Harbor) or diamondhead. (Among those of us living on the far side of Diamond Head, people just said kokohead—same difference.) These picturesque directions weren’t slang or affectations—you saw them on official maps and street signs. And they were also, for me—and my sense of this was unformed but strong—a salient piece of a world more unitary, for all its fractiousness, a world more coherent in its mid-Pacific isolation than any I’d known before. I missed my friends in L.A. But Southern California, in its sprawling, edgeless blandness, was losing its baseline status in my mind. It was no longer the place by which all other places had to be measured. There was a kid in the In Crowd, Steve, who groused endlessly about “the Rock.” He meant Oahu, although he made it so
und like Alcatraz. Steve’s urgent ambition was to escape the Rock, ideally to England, where his favorite band, the Kinks, played. But anywhere “mainland”—anywhere not Hawaii—would do. I, meanwhile, wouldn’t have minded staying in Da Islands forever.

  • • •

  IN OLD HAWAII, before the arrival of Europeans, surfing had religious import. After prayers and offerings, master craftsmen made boards from sacred koa or wiliwili trees. Priests blessed swells, lashed the water with vines to raise swells, and some breaks had heiaus (temples) on the beach where devotees could pray for waves. This spiritual awareness did not preclude raucous competition, even large-scale gambling. “One contest between Maui and Oahu champions involved a wager of four thousand pigs and sixteen war canoes,” according to the historians Peter Westwick and Peter Neushul. Men and women, young and old, royalty and commoners surfed. When the waves were good, “all thought of work is at an end, only that of sport is left,” wrote Kepelino Keauokalani, a nineteenth-century Hawaiian scholar. “All day there is nothing but surfing. Many go out surfing as early as four in the morning.” The old Hawaiians had it bad, in other words—surf fever. They also had plenty of what we would call leisure time. The islands were blessed with a large food surplus; its inhabitants were not only skilled fishermen, terrace farmers, and hunters, but built and managed elaborate systems of fishponds. Their winter harvest festival lasted three months—during which the surf frequently pumped and work was officially forbidden.

  This was not what the Calvinist missionaries who began arriving in Hawaii in 1820 had in mind for the islanders as a way of life. Hiram Bingham, who led the first missionary party, which found itself in a crowd of surfers before it had even landed, wrote that “the appearance of destitution, degradation, and barbarism, among the chattering, and almost naked savages, whose heads and feet, and much of their sunburnt swarthy skins, were bare, was appalling. Some of our number, with gushing tears, turned away from the spectacle.” Twenty-seven years later, Bingham wrote, “The decline and discontinuance of the surfboard, as civilization advances, may be accounted for by the increase in modesty, industry or religion.” He was not wrong about the decline of surfing. Hawaiian culture had been destroyed, and the people decimated by European diseases; between 1778 and 1893, the Hawaiian population shrank from an estimated eight hundred thousand to forty thousand, and by the end of the nineteenth century surfing had all but disappeared. Westwick and Neushul count Hawaiian surfing less a victim of successful missionary zeal, however, than of extreme demographic collapse, dispossession, and a series of extractive industries—sandalwood, whaling, sugar—that forced the surviving islanders into a cash economy and stripped them of free time.