Barbarian Days

by William Finnegan

  The swell might have bypassed the bay if its angle were a bit more easterly. But it was swinging massively around the point, with sets breaking in places I had never seen waves break before, filling the whole north side of the bay, the entire arena we normally surfed, with whitewater. There was nobody around. I don’t remember much discussion. We had our boards on the roof. We were both hardwired to surf when there were waves. We waxed up and tried to study the lineup. It was hopeless. It was chaos, unmappable, closing out, and we were now tripping heavily. Peaking, as it was said. At some point we gave up and clambered down the trail. I picture us both giggling nervously. The roaring down on the narrow beach was constant, operatically ominous. I was sure I had never heard anything like it before. The bad news, some remaining rational part of me knew, was the good news. We would never make it out. We would be driven back onto the sand, quickly defeated by the multiple walls of whitewater stacked against us

  We launched from the upper end of the beach, in the lee of some big rocks. It wasn’t a wise place to enter the water, normally, but we wanted to stay as far as possible from the bluff at the other end, which had a cave on its upcoast flank that ate boards and bodies on nice days, and was now being battered nonstop. We started paddling, scrambling in an eddy alongside the rocks, and then got swept counterclockwise like ants in a sucking drain, out into the broad field of big walls of whitewater. Struggling to hang on to my board, I lost track of Becket. My thoughts turned toward survival. I would spin and try to catch the next wall of whitewater, then try to hit the beach above the bluff. The imperatives were suddenly simple: stay out of the cave, don’t drown. But no whitewater presented itself. I was being swept sideways across the bay, past the bluff, paddling over the shoulders of big, foamy waves. This was apparently a lull between sets. I kept paddling toward open ocean. The bad news had turned good, which was bad. I was going to make it out. Becket, for his sins, also made it. We paddled far outside, into sunlight, stroking over vast swells still gathering themselves for the apocalyptic festivities inside the bay.

  Our colloquy, sitting out in the ocean on our boards, would have seemed incoherent to an onlooker, had there been one. To us it made perfect, fractured sense. I remember lifting double handfuls of seawater toward the sky and letting them cascade through the morning light, saying, “Water? Water?” Becket: “I know what you mean.” I had dropped acid probably six or eight times before, and had usually had an awful time. The drug tended to reduce me after a while to molecular fascinations. These were okay as long as they stood at a certain angle to everyday perception, revealing its hilarious pomposity, its arbitrariness—this was the great promise of psychedelics, after all—but they were less funny when they locked into personal psychodramas, actual feelings, much distorted. Domenic had once had to carry me to a nurse we knew to get me pumped full of Thorazine, an antipsychotic, after I fell down a rabbit hole of guilt about deceiving my parents about my high school pot smoking. Caryn liked to say, quoting Walpole, that life is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel. That pretty well nailed my problem with LSD. The cerebral part was terrific; the emotional part, not so much.

  With this huge swell, the Maui surf grapevine worked faster than it did the first time I rode Honolua, when Domenic and I caught that modest new swell by camping there, and nobody turned up all morning. This time cars started appearing on the cliff not long after Becket and I got out. Nobody joined us, though. We must have looked like what we were—two fools, having made a major mistake, bobbing way beyond the waves, too scared to move in. The surf was much too disorganized to ride. Maybe it would clean up later. My fear, however, was not the usual, frantically calculating kind. It came and went, while my thoughts bounced between the troposphere and the ionosphere, with occasional swooping Coriolis detours down to the sea surface heaving beneath us. I knew I wanted to be back on shore, but couldn’t seem to hold that thought long. I began to edge in toward the point, having a vague idea that I could catch a green express train there, bound for dry land. Becket watched me recede with an expression of puzzled concern.

  My Potts was not a big-wave board, but it was a fast paddler. I soon found myself in front of a broad green wall sweeping around the point and crisscrossed by backwash coming off the cliffs upcoast from Honolua. I was by then straight out from an area where people surfed on good days, although I had never surfed there myself—it wasn’t the classic spot, but the outer point, where swells first entered the bay. One of the backwash warbles ghosting across the big green unbroken face spoke to me. It was my door. It was a small tepee of dark water moving sideways across a huge wall of water headed shoreward. It would form a pocket of steepness where a small board could catch a big wave early. I turned and chased it. We met in the spot I envisioned. While the big wave lifted me unnervingly, I caught the small wave cleanly, jumped to my feet, and rode it over the ledge, down the big face, nice and early. The paradox did not end there. Although this was probably the biggest wave I had ever ridden—a bit hard to tell, on LSD—I surfed it like a small wave, making hard short-radius turns, never looking much beyond the nose of my board. I was completely involved in the sensations of turning—“entranced” would not be too strong a word. I might as well have been skateboarding, at an unusually high speed, when in fact I was trying to connect the outer point and the classic takeoff bowl, riding all the way through, something I had heard about but never seen done, and I probably had the wave to do it on. As it was, I arrived at the bowl, or at a very big bowl section directly out from the usual takeoff spot, still on my feet. I failed completely, however, to draw the shoreward line, to make the charge toward the bottom that might have let me keep going. Instead, I carved up the face and under the lip, still hardly looking beyond the nose of my board. I got launched, my board drifting sadly away from my feet as we fell awkwardly through the air together.

  I must have got a good breath, because the wave beat me viciously and long but could not convince my body to panic and suck water. I took several more waves on the head, diving deep and feeling myself get swept into shallower water. Soon I was being thrown against the rocks on the downcoast side of the bluff. I got a handhold and clambered out of the water, but climbed only a few feet before sitting down to inspect my shins and feet, which were battered and bleeding. A wave swept me off my perch. Incredibly, I did the same thing again a few waves later. I couldn’t seem to grasp that I needed to get higher up the cliff, onto dry rocks. The third time I scrambled up, a kind man who had climbed down the cliff to help grabbed me by the arm and escorted me to higher ground. I was too tired and disoriented to speak. I made my thanks known by sign language. I also inquired, by pantomime, about my board. “Went in the cave,” he said.

  I decided to take a nap. I climbed the cliff, ignored the stares, found my car, got in the backseat, and lay down. Sleep wouldn’t come. I flew out of the car, increasingly disoriented. I looked for Becket. He was still out there, halfway to Molokai, still alone. I decided to go down to the innermost part of the bay, where the ocean was always calm, to wait for him. Caryn and I had used to picnic there. You had to walk through creek-bottom jungle from the road. But I decided to drive. Somehow I crashed the old car through the jungle to the beach. But then the beach didn’t feel safe. There were very tall coconut palms, and falling coconuts were dangerous. I waded out into the water, up to my chest, but still felt the threat of coconuts. I decided to go see Caryn at the ice-cream parlor in Kaanapali.

  She seemed surprised to see me. I was still using sign language. She asked for a break, and took me outside to a small, round table. She set a sundae glass filled with water in front of me. The morning sun seemed to concentrate all its brilliance inside the water in the sundae glass. Staring into it, I could see Puu Kukui floating upside down in the sky. I told Caryn, inside my head, that the water in Honolua Bay was no longer clear, the way it had been when we snorkeled there in summer, that it was now all stirred up and murky. She took my hand to show that
she understood. I told her, still inside my head, that we would find her father. She squeezed my hand. Then I remembered that I had left Becket in peril, and that I had never found my board. I found my voice and said I had to go. She did too, she said, nodding toward her place of work. “Hana hana.”

  “Humuhumu.”

  I set off again for Honolua. On the side of the road, near the Kaanapali entrance, Leslie Potts was hitchhiking. I stopped. He had a surfboard and a guitar. I didn’t seem to be imagining this. He slid his board into the car, on the passenger side, and sat directly behind me. I drove on. He began to pick out little bluesy riffs on his guitar. We started seeing lines out at sea, marching south, from the swell. Potts whistled quietly. He hummed a few bars, sang a few lyrics. He had a keening, breathy singing voice, well suited to country blues. “How’s the board?”

  “It went in the cave.”

  “Ouch. Did it come out?”

  “Don’t know.”

  We didn’t pursue the matter.

  Back at Honolua, I saw that there were now a dozen guys in the water, and a dozen more waxing up. The surf looked far more organized than it had earlier. Still huge. I parked and hurried to the beach trail. Sitting on the rocks far below, his board beside him, was Becket. I made my way down. He was relieved to see me—not angry at being abandoned, as I expected. If anything, he seemed abashed, preoccupied. Then I followed his glance to a mangled board sitting propped on the rocks behind him. It was, of course, mine. I went over to it. The tail was smashed, the fin snapped off. There were too many dings to count. A flap of fiberglass hung from the underside of the nose. It could all be fixed, Becket murmured. It was amazing it hadn’t snapped in half. I wasn’t amazed. I felt light-headed and ill, inspecting the damage. The board would never be the same. Becket directed my attention to the lineup, where some of the local heroes were starting to perform. The swell was dropping, the surf improving. Becket, whose board was undamaged, paddled back out.

  I watched the show from the narrow beach. It was the worst seat in the house, but it felt right to be down at water level, where wave-roar filled the brain. More guys paddled out. The surf kept improving. Becket came in again, panting, raving. These waves were insane. I demanded to borrow his board. He reluctantly let me take it. I battled my way out through the lines of whitewater, relieved to have something to do. The water seemed less interesting at the molecular level than it had before. Now I just wanted a wave to ride. I paddled up to the point, where there were fewer people. There was a light mist—it was aerated seawater, from all the crashing and smashing—and no wind, which left the ocean’s surface slickly shiny. Its color was a muted gray-white until a wave reared; then turquoise floodlights seemed to switch on, illuminating the wave’s guts from the inside. I cruised the point lineup, constantly paddling, unable to sit still. When a wave finally came to me, I took it. The floodlights switched on in the middle of my first turn. I tried to look ahead, tried to see what the wave had in store down the line and plan accordingly, but I was surrounded by turquoise light. I felt some rapture of the deep. I looked upward. There was a silver, sparkling ceiling. I seemed to be riding a cushion of air. Then the lights went out.

  Becket rescued his board before it hit the cliff. That was it, he told me, when I struggled ashore. No more. He had seen my wave. I had disappeared into the tube standing straight up, he said, my arms extended crucifixion-style, face raised to the sky. I never had a prayer of making it. But I reappeared, he said, for a moment, blown through the curtain, somersaulting helplessly. “Rag doll” was the term he used. I couldn’t remember the wipeout. All I remembered was the rapture. I lay down on the rocks, shivering. There was speed in the acid, he said. That’s why I was cold. He went back out, and he stayed out for hours. I slowly curled into a ball, my arms around my knees. Something seemed to be bending my spine, forcing my head down into my chest. Many things were ending at once, I thought, and for a change I was right.

  • • •

  CARYN DID FIND HER FATHER. It was the following year, in San Francisco. We had both fled Maui for the civilizing precincts of college. I was back in Santa Cruz, she was living nearby, and we were no longer a couple. My grief over our breakup felt bottomless. I was not always reasonable. Still, Caryn called me after she found Sam, and we went back to see him together. He was living in a hotel on Sixth Street—skid row. We talked our way upstairs. The halls stank of piss, dried sweat, mildew, curry. Caryn knocked on a door. No answer. She called to him. “Dad? It’s me. It’s Caryn.” After several minutes of silence, Sam opened the door. He looked bewildered and unwell. A short, wiry-haired, sad-eyed man. He didn’t smile or reach for his daughter. A homemade chessboard, drawn on the side of a grocery bag, was on the bed, set with pieces made from bottle caps and cigarette butts. He appeared to have been playing alone. I left them to it. I walked the tragic warehouse streets, past winos sleeping in alleys. The Jones Hotel, the Oak Tree Hotel, the Rose. This couldn’t be Sam’s world, after a monastery on Maui. Later, we all went out to a dank cafeteria. Sam and I played chess. Caryn watched, her face a mask of sorrow. I tried to think about the moves. Sam played carefully. His few comments were measured, well chosen. Nobody cried, or said anything barbed. There would be time, I assumed, for that. I wouldn’t be there. Still, I wondered what Sam, mental illness and all, might have to tell us about adulthood. Why, for example, did it seem to be always receding as a concept, even as we got older?

  • • •

  ON THIS QUESTION, my professors weren’t always a help. I was in awe of Norman O. Brown, a gentle, formidably erudite classical scholar turned social philosopher who took on minor figures like Freud, Marx, Jesus, Nietzsche, Blake, and Joyce and wrestled their work to the ground, declaring victory for “holy madness” and “polymorphous perversity” and Eros over Thanatos, all while living quietly with his family in a ranch-style house near campus. Everybody at UC Santa Cruz called him Nobby; I found the nickname stuck in my throat. Brown did not welcome me back to school. Polite as always, he said he was disappointed to see me. My dropping out to go surfing in Hawaii had evidently represented, to him, a triumph over repression, a vote for Dionysus and erotics and against civilization, which was, after all, just mass neurosis. I made a little joke about the return of the repressed, and we went back to work.

  But everything felt different without Caryn: harsher, more jagged. She, for good reason, felt abandoned by her father. I, for less identifiable reasons, felt abandoned generally. The existentialist psychiatrist R. D. Laing—a radical critic, like Brown, of received wisdom, and similarly inclined to see mental illness as a sane response to an insane world, even as a form of “shamanic” journey—described in one of his early books what he called the “ontologically secure” person. That, I thought, was not me. I read and wrote feverishly. My journals were full of anguish, self-excoriation, ambition, overheard speech that tickled me, and long passages from the work of favorite writers copied out by hand. One of the few things that calmed me reliably was surfing.

  Bryan Di Salvatore, Viti Savaiinaea, and me, Sala’ilua, Savai’i, Western Samoa, 1978

  FIVE

  THE SEARCH

  The South Pacific, 1978

  CALL IT ENDLESS WINTER. SUMMER IS PART OF THE POPULAR iconography of surfing. Like much of that iconography, it’s wrong. Most surfers in most places, north or south of the equator, live for winter. That’s when the big storms occur, usually in the higher latitudes. They send forth the best waves. There are exceptions, including, speaking of iconography, Waikiki and Malibu, but summer is most often the doldrums for surfers. An exception that had long interested me was the summer cyclone season in northeastern Australia. Basically, though, when I left Los Angeles in early spring 1978, with a board and a tent and a stack of much-studied nautical charts of Polynesian atolls, I was chasing winter.

  It wasn’t easy to leave. I had a job I loved. I had a girlfriend. The job was on the railroad. I had been a b
rakeman on the Southern Pacific since 1974, working local freight in Watsonville and Salinas and mainline trains between San Francisco and Los Angeles. Everything about braking pleased me inordinately—the country we moved through, the people I worked with, the arcane and ancient language we spoke, the mental and physical tests the work imposed, the big iron itself, the paychecks. It felt like I had lucked into a steel-toed, rock-solid version of adulthood. To get hired, I had failed to mention my degree in English. Because most of the Coast Route traffic we handled was agricultural—produce from the Salinas Valley—the work was seasonal, particularly for low-seniority trainmen like me. I used my furloughed winters to earn another degree, which the S.P. also didn’t need to know about. The company didn’t trust college graduates to become railroaders. It invested time and trouble in bringing young trainmen along, and old heads liked to say that no one with less than ten years’ experience could really pull his weight on a train crew. So the company was looking for forty-year men. Braking could be dirty and dangerous, and college grads might decide to move on to something cleaner and safer. I hated to confirm this view by quitting. I believed I would never find another job as satisfying or well paid.

  But I had five thousand dollars in the bank, by far the most I had ever saved. I was twenty-five, and I had never been to the South Seas. It was time for a serious surf trip, an open-ended wave chase. Such a trip felt strangely mandatory. I would go west forever, like Magellan or Francis Drake—that was how I thought of it. In truth, difficult as it was, pulling up stakes was in many ways easier than staying. It gave me an excellent excuse to postpone mundane but frightening decisions about where and how to live. I would disappear from the overdetermined, underwhelming world of disco-dulled, energy-crisis America. I might even become another person—someone more to my liking—in the Antipodes.