Barbarian Days

by William Finnegan

  A word about bloody-mindedness. For most surfers, I think—for me, certainly—waves have a spooky duality. When you are absorbed in surfing them, they seem alive. They each have personalities, distinct and intricate, and quickly changing moods, to which you must react in the most intuitive, almost intimate way—too many people have likened riding waves to making love. And yet waves are of course not alive, not sentient, and the lover you reach to embrace may turn murderous without warning. It’s nothing personal. That self-disemboweling death wave on the inside bar is not bloody-minded. Thinking so is just reflex anthropomorphism. Wave love is a one-way street.

  Was the surf at Ocean Beach worth the travail of the paddle-out? On some days, certainly. But only for some people. It depended on your tolerance for punishment, the state of your nerves, your ability to read the bars, your ability to surf large waves, your paddling strength, your luck on the day. There might be beautiful waves—big, bowling rights, long-walled lefts—but there were, I found, rarely consistent, well-defined peaks, making it difficult to know where to wait. If there were other people out, you could exchange surmises and lineup markers. As an Ocean Beach newcomer, I eagerly lapped up any tip. I had a ridiculous amount to learn. The camaraderie itself was a comfort. And yet I knew that, in bigger waves, safety in numbers, the “buddy system,” was generally useless. In my experience at least, when things got heavy, there never seemed to be anybody around, let alone in a position to help. Particularly at a wide-open, poorly defined break like Ocean Beach, you were emphatically on your own if you got into trouble. And I hadn’t even seen it big yet. In those first couple of months, the biggest day I surfed was what the locals might have called ten feet.

  • • •

  WAVE SIZE IS A TOPIC of perennial dispute among surfers. There is no widely accepted method for measuring the height of waves—no method widely accepted by surfers, that is. So the disputes are inherently comic—male-ego opera bouffe, usually, about whose was bigger—and I have always tried to stay out of them. For wave-height descriptions, I try to rely on the visual, with a rider providing the increments: waist-high, head-high, overhead. A double-overhead wave has a face twice as tall as the rider. And so on. But for waves without riders, or waves with deceptive optics, which is to say most waves, it often makes more sense to describe them in feet. Simply eyeballing a wave face, estimating the vertical distance from top to bottom—pretending, for the exercise, that a breaking ocean wave is a flat, two-dimensional object—yields a rough, honest number. But that number is disdained as too high by nearly all surfers, including me. Why? Because underestimation is más macho.

  Actually, this question of what size to call a wave comes up only in some contexts, not others. I don’t remember ever debating, or even discussing, the size of a wave with Bryan, for instance. A wave was small or big, weak or powerful, mediocre or magnífica, scary or otherwise, to the exact degree that it was these things. Attaching a number to it added nothing. If a surf report had to be produced for someone who had missed it, some conventional shorthand (“three-to-five”) might come in handy, air quotes always implied. The crudity of the description was understood. But that was me and Bryan. At Ocean Beach, wave size calls were taken seriously. Big-wave spots have that effect on people. They induce self-seriousness and magnify insecurities.

  Indeed, underestimation is practiced with the greatest aplomb on the North Shore of Oahu. There, a wave must be the size of a small cathedral before the locals will call it eight feet. The subscientific arbitrariness of the whole business is obvious from the fact that among surfers, wherever they live, there is no such thing as a nine-foot wave or a thirteen-foot wave. (Anyone who says there is would be laughed off the beach.) Ricky Grigg, an oceanographer and big-wave surfer, used to phone a friend who lived at Waimea Bay for surf reports when he lived in Honolulu. His friend’s wife, who could see the surf from her kitchen, could never grasp surfers’ irrational system of wave measurement, but she could estimate with fair accuracy how many refrigerators stacked on top of one another would equal the height of the waves, so Grigg used to ask her, “How many refrigerators is it?”

  Wave size ends up being a matter of local consensus. A given wave, transferred intact somehow from Hawaii, where it was considered six feet, to Southern California, would be called ten there. In Florida it would be twelve, maybe fifteen. In San Francisco, when I lived there, a double-overhead wave was reckoned, for no good reason, to be eight feet. A triple-overhead wave was ten feet. A wave four times the height of a rider was twelve feet. Five times was fifteen feet, more or less. Beyond that, the system—if you could call it a system—disintegrated. Buzzy Trent, an old-time big-wave rider, allegedly said, “Big waves are not measured in feet, but in increments of fear.” If he said that, he got it right. The power of a breaking wave does not increase fractionally with height, but as the square of its height. Thus a ten-foot wave is not slightly more powerful than an eight-foot wave—because the leap is not from eight to ten but from sixty-four to a hundred, making it over 50 percent more powerful. This is a brute fact that all surfers know in their bowels, whether or not they’ve heard the formula. Two waves of the same height, for that matter, may differ enormously in their volume, in their ferocity. Then there is the human factor. As a variation on the old maxim has it, “Big waves are not measured in feet, but in increments of bullshit.”

  When I was a boy, big waves were a big deal. There was a famous crew, including Grigg and Trent, who surfed Waimea, Makaha, and Sunset Beach. They rode long, heavy, specialized boards known as elephant guns—later simply guns. The mags and surf movies celebrated their feats. There were terrifying cautionary tales that every surfer knew, such as the time that two North Shore pioneers, Woody Brown and Dickie Cross, paddled out at Sunset on a building swell in 1943. When the sets got bigger, forcing them to paddle far out to sea, they saw that it would be impossible to return to shore—Sunset was closing out—and decided to paddle three miles west, to Waimea Bay, in hopes that the deepwater channel would still be open there. It wasn’t, and the sun was going down. Cross, in desperation, struck for shore. He was seventeen years old. His body was never found. Woody Brown later washed ashore half-drowned and naked. The exploits of Grigg, Trent, and company in the ’50s and ’60s were mythic sagas to the surfing masses—to gremlins like me. They were not the world’s best surfers, but they were intensely dashing. I loved astronauts when I was a kid, but the tiny coterie of big-wave surfers was an even cooler group.

  Their heyday passed around the time of the shortboard revolution. People continued to ride huge waves, but they seemed to have hit a performance limit, as well as an upper limit to the size of the waves that could be caught and ridden. Anything bigger than what we called twenty-five feet seemed to move too fast; the physics got impossible. Very few surfers were interested in waves that size anyway. Matt Warshaw, the leading scholar of surfing—he’s the author of The Encyclopedia of Surfing and The History of Surfing, both hefty, authoritative tomes—puts the number of surfers ready to ride twenty-five-foot waves at less than one in twenty thousand. Others think it’s far fewer than that. Nat Young, the great Australian champion, a man whom Warshaw considers “perhaps the most influential surfer of the [twentieth] century,” and who in his prime was a swashbuckling ripper nicknamed the Animal, had no interest in riding waves over twenty feet. In a 1967 surf film, Young said, “I’ve only done it once, on one wave, and I don’t ever wish to do it ever again. If those guys can enjoy themselves while their hearts and guts are falling down a mineshaft, then I respect them and their courage. I just don’t think I could ever express myself while scared out of my wits.”

  I was with Young, and with the other 99.99 percent. I had surfed alongside a few big-wave specialists on the North Shore, but I thought of them as mutants, mystics, pilgrims traveling another road from the rest of us, possibly made from a different raw material. They seemed bionic, suspiciously immune to normal reactions (panic, fight or flight) in
the face of life-threatening peril. In truth, there was a wide middle ground of heavy waves that were not world-ending, not apocalyptically big, and we all negotiated a dark, highly personal fear line whenever a large swell hit. My own upper limit had been edging back for twenty years. I had ridden fairly big waves at Sunset, Uluwatu, outer Grajagan, even Santa Cruz—Middle Peak at Steamer Lane could throw some bombs. I had surfed aggressively, adrenaline-unhinged and unafraid, in big Honolua, in ten-foot Nias. I had even surfed Pipeline, a truly frightening, dangerous wave, a few times, though only on smaller days. But I had never owned a gun, and I didn’t want one.

  • • •

  MARK HAD THE COMPLETE BIONIC SWAGGER, in a rare antic hippie-doctor version. He said he had never been afraid of big waves. Indeed, he claimed that the common fear of big waves was unfounded. Just as people are more afraid of cancer, he said, than of heart disease, despite the fact that heart disease kills many more people, surfers are more afraid of big waves than of small waves, despite the fact that small, crowded waves injure and kill many more surfers than big waves do. I thought this theory was tripe. Big waves are violent and scary, full stop, and the bigger they are, generally speaking, the scarier and more violent they are. To anthropomorphize: big waves want, desperately, to drown you. Very few people surf them, and that’s the only reason they don’t kill more people than they do.

  Just as everyone who surfs has a limit to the size of the waves he will venture among, the surfers who live in a place that gets big waves come to know, over time, one another’s limits. When I lived in San Francisco, the only other surfer whose range approached Mark’s was Bill Bergerson, a carpenter whom everyone called Peewee—an unlikely nickname, left over from the days when he was somebody’s younger brother. Peewee was a quiet, intense, exceptionally smooth surfer, probably the best pure surfer San Francisco had produced. His interest in big waves was not, however, indiscriminate. He did not try to surf every big day at Ocean Beach; he paddled out only when it was reasonably clean. Mark, meanwhile, would go out in borderline madness, when no one else would even consider it, and come in laughing. There were people who found this sort of thing annoying.

  But Mark trained for big waves with a joyful masochism. One morning I found myself standing on the embankment at Quintara, watching him try to paddle out. The surf was eight-feet-plus, ragged, relentless, onshore, with no visible channels. Even the trough was not in evidence. Getting out looked impossible, and the waves looked not worth the effort anyway, but Mark was out there still, a small black-wetsuited figure in a world of furious whitewater, throwing himself into the stacked walls of onrushing foam. Each time he seemed to be making headway, a new set would appear on the horizon, bigger than the last and breaking farther out—the biggest waves were breaking maybe two hundred yards from shore—and drive him back into the impact zone. Watching with me was Tim Bodkin, a hyrdrogeologist, surfer, and Mark’s next-door neighbor. Bodkin was getting a huge kick out of Mark’s ordeal. “Forget it, Doc!” he kept shouting into the wind, and then he would laugh. “He’s never going to make it. He just won’t admit it.” At times we lost sight of him altogether. The waves rarely gave him a chance even to clamber onto his board and paddle; mostly he was underwater, diving under waves, swimming seaward along the bottom, dragging his board behind him. After thirty minutes, I began to worry: the water was cold, the surf was powerful. Bodkin, aglow with schadenfreude, did not share my concern. Finally, after about forty-five minutes, there was a brief lull. Mark scrambled onto his board and paddled furiously, and within three minutes he was outside, churning over the crests of the next set with five yards to spare. Once he was safely beyond the surf, he sat up on his board to rest, a black speck bobbing on a blue, windblown sea. Bodkin, disgusted, left me alone on the embankment.

  Mark took to calling me at first light. I came to dread his calls. Dreams full of giant gray surf and a morbid fear of drowning would climax with the scream of the phone in the dark. His voice on the other end of the line at dawn was always bright, raucous, from the daylight world.

  “Well? How’s it look?”

  He could see the south end of Ocean Beach from his place; I could see the north end; he wanted a report. I would stumble, shivering, to the window, peering through blurry binoculars at a cold, wild sea.

  “It looks . . . hairy.”

  “Well? Let’s hit it!”

  Other surfers also got these calls. Edwin Salem, a genial college student, originally from Argentina, and a protégé of Mark’s, told me that he used to lie awake half the night worrying that the phone would ring, and then panic if it did. “Doc only called me when it was big and he knew nobody else would go out with him. I usually would.”

  I usually would too, up to a point not yet determined.

  • • •

  ON A CLEAR, CHILLY DAY in early November, Mark and I paddled out at Sloat. It was the first day of a small north swell, and the surf was confused—lumpy, harsh, inconsistent. He had persuaded me that before the waves had time to calm down and clean up, northwest winds—which, according to his weather radio, were already blowing twenty-five knots in the Farallon Islands, twenty miles offshore—would be here. Those winds, when they arrived, would wreck the waves completely, so this might be our only chance to surf this swell. Yes, we were the only surfers in sight, but that was because the others were expecting it to get better later, on the outgoing tide. They didn’t know about the northwesterlies.

  “Or maybe they have jobs,” I panted.

  “Jobs?” Mark laughed. “That was their first mistake.”

  It was late morning, still nearly windless. My hands burned with cold. Even after we got outside, there was no chance to warm them in my armpits because there was a fierce current running north, meaning we had to paddle constantly just to stay in the same place off the beach. The current also meant that we were looking only for rights, which carried one south. I was breathing too hard to argue about employment. Mark had a work schedule built around surfing, with a variety of gigs and maximum flexibility. He constantly rearranged his practice around swells, tides, and wind. So he had plenty of work, which he described as highly fulfilling, and he had no trouble paying rent. I was a convenient person to surf with partly because my schedule was flexible. His disdain for the conventionally employed was in truth mostly a joke, meant to get my goat, which he enjoyed doing.

  Mark’s disdain for marriage and children was even more pointed. “The rule about guys getting married: their readiness to ride big waves goes down one notch immediately,” he liked to say. “And it goes down another big notch with each kid. Most guys with three kids won’t go out in waves over four feet!”

  The waves turned out to be better than they had looked from shore, and we both got a series of short, fast rides on good-sized waves. Their lumpiness gave them odd, unexpected speed hollows. Mark came flying out of one thick-muscled close-out chattering about needing a longer board. He was riding a 6'3". In the moments when the roar of the surf subsided, we could hear monkeys howling in the city zoo, beyond the beach embankment. But really San Francisco might as well have been in another hemisphere. Ocean Beach in the winter is a wilderness, as raw and red-clawed as any place in the Rocky Mountains. We could see traffic on the coast highway, but it was unlikely that the people in the passing cars saw us. Many of them would undoubtedly say, if asked, that there was no surfing in San Francisco.

  Mark couldn’t resist a large, wrapping left. He took off and in a matter of seconds rode halfway to Ulloa. I caught the next wave, also a left, and was carried even farther north. Paddling back out, we were both driven still farther north by a set breaking south of us. We were now so far downcurrent that we decided to abandon Sloat for Taraval. The peak breaking over the sandbar at Taraval was shifty and sloppy, though, and we stopped catching waves. A better peak seeemed to be breaking at Santiago. Mark had an idea: let’s quit fighting the current. When it was this bad on an incoming tide, it
turned into the Sloat-to-Kelly’s Express. Let’s just ride it north, he said, surfing whatever we found. I was exhausted, and therefore agreeable. We stopped paddling south, and soon the beach started streaming past. It was a goofy, hapless feeling, letting the sandbars come to us, instead of struggling to reach a takeoff spot and staying there. Water flows off a sandbar, and can make it difficult to maintain position at the bar’s outside edge, where waves will prepare to break, but the rushing, sinuous current was carrying us across all sorts of spots, at all sorts of angles, willy-nilly.

  Mark, who loved this kind of half-uncontrolled experiment, provided a running commentary on the bars we were traversing. Here was where that great peak broke last year—at Outside Quintara. And this was the lineup on giant days at Pacheco. See that cross on the mountain? You had to keep it above the church. And you could see that Noriega was starting to do something interesting: “On these pushy swells, it’s not really breaking outside and it’s not really breaking inside. The inside bar swings out here now, so that it’s breaking in the middle, and peeling off in both directions.”

  He was right about the sandbars at Noriega. Surf was no longer breaking on the outside bars that we had been drifting among. We swirled slowly through a wide, waveless field. An otter popped up ahead of us, swimming on its back. It had a small, shiny red-brown head, with huge dark eyes. Otters weren’t common at Ocean Beach; it was as if this one had been summoned by our peculiarly passive behavior.

  The current was now carrying us out to sea. I suggested we paddle toward shore. Mark reluctantly agreed to abridge our drifting experiment.

  On the inside bar, as we continued our progress toward Judah, we found short, thick waves breaking with surprising power. I liked the quick, steep drops, and caught three straight high-adrenaline rights before stroking into a head-high mistake. My board stuck for a moment in the wave’s lip. Then I was launched into space. I tried to get away from my board, but dared not dive straight down—the inside bar was shallow. I hit the water awkwardly, twisted, and hit the bottom, softly, with one shoulder. I felt my board flash past, actually brushing my arms, which were over my face, in the moment before the wave landed on me. I got comprehensively thrashed, and finally surfaced, gasping, with what felt like several pounds of sand inside my wetsuit. I had been lucky—I could have been hurt. I scrambled back out, head ringing, nose streaming.