Barbarian Days

by William Finnegan

  • • •

  WISE WAS TALKING about Mark Renneker. Renneker was a favorite topic of San Francisco surf banter, even something of a local obsession. He was a family-practice physician who lived a few blocks from Wise’s shop, on the oceanfront at Taraval. I actually knew Mark from college in Santa Cruz. He had come to San Francisco for medical school, and he had been urging me to move there for years, extolling the quality of the surf in letters, sending me photos of himself on great-looking waves that he described as merely “average.” I couldn’t tell if he was joking.

  Now that I was in town, Mark and I surfed together often. He was crazy about Ocean Beach, and he had made an unusually thorough study of it. He made an unusually thorough study of everything connected to surfing. Since 1969, I discovered, he had been keeping a detailed record of every time he went out, recording where he surfed, the size of the waves, swell direction, a description of conditions, what surfboard he rode, who his companions (if any) were, any memorable events or observations, and data for year-to-year comparisons. His logbook showed that the longest he had gone without surfing since 1969 was three weeks. That happened in 1971, during a brief stint of college in Arizona. Otherwise, he had rarely gone more than a few days, and he had often surfed every day for weeks on end. In a pastime really open only to the absurdly dedicated, he was a fanatics’ fanatic.

  He lived with his girlfriend, Jessica, who was a painter, on the top floor of a khaki-colored three-story building on the Great Highway. Across from their apartment, by the tunnel to the beach, was a sign: DROWNINGS OCCUR ANNUALLY DUE TO SURF AND SEVERE UNDERTOW. PLEASE REMAIN ON SHORE.—U.S. PARK POLICE. Mark and Jessica’s garage was filled to the rafters with surfboards—there were at least ten, most still on active duty, although on the tour I got, I noticed one collector’s item: a 7'0" single-fin, with pink rails and a yellow deck, shaped and originally ridden by Mark Richards, a four-time world champion from Australia. “It’s like owning Jack Nicklaus’s old golf clubs,” Mark said. The Richards was instantly recognizable to any reader of surf magazines. Mark Renneker hadn’t ridden it in years. Another five boards stood on their tails in the stairwell. Why did he need so many boards? For riding in different conditions, of course, and particularly for bigger waves, where equipment choice could be crucial. A keen student of board design, he even kept both halves of a cherished 7'4", shaped on the North Shore of Oahu and broken on a big day at Sloat, “for reference.” Big waves were Mark’s ruling passion.

  On the wall at Wise’s shop was a framed photo of “Doc” dropping into an enormous, nearly vertical, mud-colored Ocean Beach wall. The face was at least five times his height. I had never seen anyone ride a wave that size in California. I couldn’t recall another photo of anyone doing so. The wave was North Shore scale—Waimea, Sunset. Except the water temperature was probably fifty degrees—cold enough to make the surface hard to penetrate, and a falling lip feel like concrete. And the spot was not a famous, well-mapped reef but a shifty, ferocious, obscure beachbreak. I hoped I would never see Ocean Beach that big. Meanwhile, that photo went a long way toward explaining the local obsession with Mark.

  He was a hard guy to miss. Six-four, slim, wide-shouldered, with an unkempt brown beard and hair that fell halfway down his back, he was boisterous and imposing, with a big laugh that fell somewhere between a honk and a roar. For someone so tall, he was remarkably unselfconscious. He carried himself like a ballet dancer. Before he paddled out, he ritually performed a series of yoga stretches at the water’s edge. With people he liked, he was endlessly garrulous. There was always something going on with the waves, the wind, the sandbars, the lineup markers at Santiago that required detailed, spirited comment. Everybody knew when Mark was in the water. “Don’t you know the law of the surf movie?” he yelled to me, one morning, in mediocre waves.

  I didn’t.

  “There will never be good waves on the day after the night that a surf movie, or even surf slides, are shown!”

  We had looked the night before at slides from a surf trip to Portugal that he had taken with Jessica.

  Later that morning we were sitting in his study, warming up with coffee. Mark’s desk looked out on the ocean. His bookshelves were filled with medical texts (Cancer Epidemiology and Prevention), nature guides (Mexican Birds), books on the ocean, the weather, and hundreds of murder mysteries. On the walls were photos of Mark and friends surfing, along with faded posters for old surf movies—The Performers, The Glass Wall. A collection of surf magazines, going back decades and numbering in the thousands, was carefully stacked and cataloged. A weather radio was barking the latest buoy data. I sat leafing through old surf mags while Mark talked to Bob Wise on the phone.

  Mark hung up and announced that Wise now had in his shop exactly the new board I needed.

  I didn’t know I needed a new board.

  Mark was incredulous. How could I be content with just one surfboard? And a battered old single-fin at that!

  I couldn’t explain it. I just was.

  This was becoming a routine with us. Mark was provoked by my perceived lack of seriousness, my casual half-assedness, about surfing. Wasn’t I the guy who had done the big safari, the circumnavigation in search of far-flung waves? I was. And he was the guy who had stayed put and gone to med school. But that didn’t mean that surfing was as central to my existence as it was to his. My ambivalence about the sport we shared appalled him. It was heresy. Surfing, to begin with, was not a “sport.” It was a “path.” And the more you poured into it, the more you got back from it—he himself was the exuberant proof of that.

  I didn’t actually disagree. Calling surfing a sport did get it wrong at nearly every level. And Mark did seem to me to be an overgrown poster child for the upside of surf obsession. But I was wary of its siren call, its incessant demands. I was reluctant even to think about it any more than necessary. So I didn’t want another board. Anyway, I was broke.

  Mark sighed impatiently. He tapped at the keyboard of his computer. “You’re funny,” he said, finally.

  • • •

  I KNEW I HAD GIVEN ungodly amounts of time and heartsblood to surfing. One of the surf mags published, in 1981, a list of what its editors reckoned were the ten best waves in the world. I was startled to see that I had surfed nine of them. The exception was a long left in Peru. The list included several breaks I had been deeply involved with: Kirra, Honolua Bay, Jeffreys. I didn’t particularly like seeing those names there. They were famous spots, but they felt like private matters. I did like seeing that the best wave I had surfed went unmentioned because the world didn’t know about it. Bryan and I, superstitiously, still never spoke or wrote the word Tavarua. We just said “da kine” and figured we’d get back there in due time.

  One of the many splendid things about Caroline was her skepticism about surfing. The first time we ever looked at waves together, somewhere south of Cape Town, a few months after we met, she was appalled to hear me start jabbering in a language that she didn’t know I knew. “It wasn’t just the vocabulary, all those words I had never heard you use—‘gnarly’ and ‘suckout’ and ‘funkdog,’” she said, once she had recovered. “It was the sounds—the grunts and roars and horrible snarls.” She had since grown used to some of the insular codes and cryptic slang of surfers, even the grunts and roars and horrible snarls, but she still didn’t understand why, after spending hours studying the waves from shore, we often announced our intention to paddle out by saying things like, “Let’s get it over with.” She could see the reluctance—clammy wetsuit, icy water, rough, lousy surf. She just couldn’t see the grim compunction.

  Once, in Santa Cruz, she caught a fuller glimpse of the thing. 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 almost directly above, and then from the back. For a few seconds, we saw an elevated version of what the riders 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 dynamic pyramids, with steep faces; thickness; broad, sloping backs; and a complex three-dimensional construction, which changed, collapsing and rising and collapsing, very quickly. The whitewater was concussive and chaotic; the green water sleek and inviting; and the breaking lip an elusive, cascading engine and occasional hidey-hole. It was nearly enough, she said, to make watching surfing interesting.

  Caroline was in no danger of becoming an ocean person. She had been born and raised in a landlocked country, Zimbabwe. I sometimes thought that her cool, critical take on various American enthusiasms (self-improvement, self-esteem, some of the rawer forms of patriotism) came from having grown up in the midst of a civil war in then Rhodesia. She had fewer illusions about human nature than anyone else I knew. I later realized I was wrong about the war’s impact on her thinking. She just had uncommonly good sense and a deep, easily embarrassed modesty. What was important to her was making pictures—etchings, in particular. The copperplate process she used was elaborate and outrageously labor-intensive, almost medieval, and her classmates at the art institute seemed to be in awe of her draftsmanship, her technical knowledge, her obsessiveness, her eye. I certainly was. She often worked all night. She was tall, long-waisted, pale. She had a Pre-Raphaelite stillness to her, as if she had stepped out of a Burne-Jones painting into scruffy, postpunk San Francisco. With people she liked, she could be jolly, even bawdy, tossing a wicked impasto of British and African street slang. She knew, and found a surprising number of occasions to use, a Gujarati expression for masturbation. Muthiya maar!

  With Caroline, San Francisco, 1985

  In the late afternoons, we took to walking in the hills just north of our place. The park up there was known as Lands End, and the hills looked west into the ocean and north into the Golden Gate. Cypress, eucalyptus, and tall, gnarled Monterey pines helped break the cold sea breeze. There was an old public golf course, never busy, up there too. Somebody gave me three or four rusty clubs—I could carry them all in one fist—and I started playing, for laughs, during our walks, the few holes near our place. I knew nothing about golf, and we never saw the clubhouse, but I liked whacking the ball off the deep-shadowed tees, down the lush fairways, while the low sun made the hills glow before it fell into the Pacific. Caroline wore baggy sweaters and long, beribboned skirts that she sewed herself. She had enormous eyes and a laugh that pealed thrillingly in the twilight.

  I was becoming domesticated. Not at Caroline’s behest—she was an expat art student, twenty-four, with no discernible interest in settling down—but by my own wary choice, with concessions small and extra-small to stability and convenience. I opened a checking account, the first of my life, at the age of thirty-one. I started paying U.S. taxes again, happily—doing so meant I was really back. I got an American Express card, ruefully vowing to be a model customer—my weak private reparations program for defrauding the company in Bangkok. I realized that in the thirteen years since high school, the longest period I had ever kept the same address was fifteen months. That was in Cape Town. Basta. Enough with itinerancy. I was writing my book in longhand, but if I ever had the money I would get a computer, just like everyone else, at least in the Bay Area, seemed to be doing. I had developed an avid interest in American politics, particularly foreign policy. I got an assignment that sent me to Nicaragua to profile a Sandinista poet for a magazine in Boston, and I came back feeling sick about the war we were funding there. I wrote a short piece for the New Yorker about Nicaragua and was electrified when the magazine ran it the following week.

  Mainly, my head was in South Africa. I lived in my journals and memories, in thick piles of books and periodicals that I had never managed to read while living there—so much was banned—and in correspondence with friends in Cape Town. Mandy had been released from jail not long after I left, though not before she had missed her exams and failed her first year of college. In her letters, she sounded fine. She sent her sympathies to me and to everyone living in Reagan’s America. There were a fair number of South Africans in the Bay Area, some of them scholars, some of them dedicated anti-apartheid activists, and I fell gratefully into their company. I started to do a bit of public speaking—a college, a high school. I was painfully nervous, and unsure where to draw the line between journalism and activism when it came to something as patently unjust as apartheid. I wrote. My first plan for the book called for nine chapters. It eventually had ninety-one. I covered the lime-green walls of my study with butcher paper, and covered the butcher paper with notes, lists, flow charts, struggling to see the book that might be there.

  • • •

  WHEN THE FIRST early-winter swells began hitting, the Ocean Beach paddle-out got dramatically worse. Most surf spots have recommended routes, shore to lineup; many have channels where no waves break. Ocean Beach had channels, but they rarely stayed put. You could stand on the embankment as long as you liked, painstakingly charting where the waves were breaking, devising a surefire course—all that water rushing in had to return to sea somehow, and it would presumably dig a channel along the course it took, where fewer waves would presumably break—and then rush to paddle out there, only to find conditions so quickly changed that you never got past the shorebreak.

  On smaller days, perseverance was usually rewarded. Bigger days were another matter. From the water’s edge, looking out across a stepladder of six or seven walls of cold, growling, onrushing whitewater, the idea of paddling out actually carried with it a whiff of lunacy. The project looked impossible, like trying to swim up a waterfall. It took a literal leap of faith to start. You threw yourself into the icy torrent and started plowing seaward. The waves as they approached sounded like bowling balls rumbling down a lane, and then like the crashing of pins as they slammed into and rolled over your bowed head and shoulders, inducing instant ice-cream headache. Long, strain-filled minutes passed. Little or no progress. The frisky, punishing waves came on and on. You tried to present the least possible resistance to the onrushing walls of whitewater, willing them past your body even as they snatched at you, sucking you backward. Breathing turned to gasping, then rasping, and your mind began to play ever-shorter loops, turning over the same half-nonsensical questions: Is perseverance rewarded? Is it even recorded? Meanwhile, underneath this aimless, half-hysterical activity, your brain struggled to detect the underlying patterns in the surf. Somewhere—upcoast, downcoast, or perhaps just beyond this next shallow spot—the waves might be weaker. Somewhere, the current must be running in a more helpful direction. The best available route would be obvious from almost any other vantage—from the embankment, or from that pelican’s airborne perspective—but from down in the maelstrom, where you sometimes spent more time underwater than out in the visible world, and often got just one foam-edged breath between waves, it merely danced cruelly in the imagination: the theoretical solution to an impossibly complex problem.

  In fact, there was a basic structure to the Ocean Beach setup. On any day over five or six feet, particularly south of VFW’s, you normally surfed the outside bar, where the waves broke first. To get to the outside bar, you normally had to cross the inside bar, which was where waves tended to break the most relentlessly and the hardest. The guys whom one saw wash up in the shorebreak, defeated by the paddle-out, had usually been stopped by the inside bar. Between the two bars was, usually, a trough—deeper water, where you could sometimes cop a breather, let your vision clear, your sinuses drain, your arms come back to life, and plot a course across the outside bar.

  But I wasn’t always happy to reach the trough. Crossing the inside bar sometimes took me to the limit. If you gave up soon enough, you would just wash in, but if you pushed past a certain point, that option vanished. If I started getting seriously worked, I usually abandoned my board entirely, relying on my leash. I
simply clawed my way along the bottom, fistful by fistful of sand, coming up for one breath between waves. Frequently, there came a moment when I thought, No, never mind, this is getting too heavy, I want to go back to shore. But it was always too late then. The violence in the impact zone on the inside bar at Ocean Beach on a solid winter day was such that one’s wishes, one’s volition, meant little. It was not possible to turn back. Waves sucked you toward them with monstrous force. Fortunately, the scariest, most powerful wave, the one that seemed truly bloody-minded, always seemed to spit you out the back, into the deepwater trough, once it was through with you. That was why I found the trough increasingly a place of terror. I had suddenly lost all interest in surfing, but I could no longer head toward shore. Indeed, I now faced another test, across a wider field, of much bigger waves.

  It helped to remind myself that the waves on the outside bar, however big, were generally softer than the shallow water bombs on the inside. Still, I now had to find an outside channel, which meant craning to read, from the crest of each swell moving through the trough, the horizon. What were the significant patterns in the faint, distant movements of blue-gray water half a mile out? And in the bumps beyond that? Where along the vast, undulating outside bar did the energy seem to be concentrating? Which way should I go? When to start sprinting? Now? Two minutes from now? How to avoid a frightening, deepwater pounding. The fear in these long trough moments was nothing like the concentrated panic I once felt at big Rice Bowl as a kid. It was more diffuse, queasy, contingent. Drowning was just a vague, unlikely possibility, the ultimate unwanted outcome, floating around the edge of things—a cold green specter, nothing more. If I made it across the outside bar intact, it would be time to surf, to find waves to ride. That, after all, was what we were out here for.