Barbarian Days

by William Finnegan

  Mark had started surfing more cautiously. “When it’s dredging over a shallow sandbar, that’s when you break your neck,” he said. It was a paradox—that someone known for taking the most extreme risks was at the same time so prudent—but it was also true that Mark “made” a higher percentage of his waves (that is, exited from the wave still on his feet) than any other surfer I knew. He simply didn’t take off on waves that he didn’t believe he had an excellent chance of making, and once he committed himself to a wave he hardly ever made a careless or ill-considered move.

  We reconvened after Mark caught a right and I got a long left. As we paddled back out, he announced, “November is big and stupid.” What he meant was that the surf at Ocean Beach in November was often large but rarely well ordered. But before he could say more we got separated as we rushed to avoid an approaching set. A few minutes later, he went on, “The correspondences between what you see on the weather map and what actually arrives at the Beach aren’t really established yet.”

  In fact, there were great fall days at Ocean Beach, when the first north and west swells of the season met the first offshore winds. Those winds began to blow after the first snowfall in the High Sierras. Of course, fall surf benefited from the inevitable comparison with the months of fogbound, onshore slop that an Ocean Beach summer entailed. The first large swells of the season actually did arrive in November, though, often before the sandbars were ready to turn them into ridable surf. Winter was when the waves were best. In December and January, the combination of huge winter storm swells and local beach and weather conditions was frequently exquisite.

  It would be cold—water temperatures could fall into the forties, and the air on winter mornings could be below freezing. I was considering investing in neoprene booties, gloves, and a hood, all of which some guys were already wearing. A broken leash and a long swim could spell hypothermia. Loss of sensation in hands and feet was already giving me trouble. I sometimes had to ask strangers to open my car door and put the key in the ignition, my own manual dexterity having been deleted by a surf. The passage of time itself could feel distorted: a couple of long sessions in cold water, hard winds, and big waves could make two days seem like two weeks.

  We were now coming up on VFW’s, where the sandbars were a mess. We had drifted about three miles. But the tide was almost high now; the current seemed to be slackening. We had been out for at least two hours, my hands were numb, and no amount of mashing them under cold rubber wings would bring them back to life now. I was ready to go in.

  We decided to hitchhike back to Sloat rather than walk. As we climbed the embankment to the highway, Mark suddenly turned and said triumphantly, “Feel that? Here come the onshores!” He was right. A sharp, dark windline was already moving into the surf on the outside bars, tearing off the tops of the waves. “Those other guys blew it,” Mark crowed.

  • • •

  MY OLD PALS Becket and Domenic both seemed to be letting surfing slip. Becket was back in Newport, running construction jobs, doing boat carpentry, delivering yachts. His brand of hide-your-daughters wharf-rat hedonism was ready to be patented, I thought. While his neighbors had I’D RATHER BE SAILING decals on their cars, he drove around Orange County in a work pickup with a bumper sticker that said, I’D RATHER BE PERFORMING CUNNILINGUS. On the wall in his office, when I went to visit, I was startled to find a framed photo of myself. It was the Grajagan shot, clipped from a surf mag, of me standing, board under arm, at the edge of the reef while an empty, backlit, fabulous-looking left roars past. Becket had tacked up a caption, “Chickens Do Surf.” The reference was to my ankles, which are skinny. “I know why you had to go around the world,” he said while I studied the photo. “It was because you couldn’t find enough things to be miserable about in this country.”

  It was a theory, not without interest, and not so different from Domenic’s idea of my self-hating politics. Domenic, meanwhile, had taken his place in the world. He was directing high-end TV commercials. He had married an equally successful French commercial director. They kept an apartment in Paris, a house in Beverly Hills, a condo in Malibu. She had grown kids. Both Domenic and Becket still surfed, or at least owned boards, but neither seemed to be a full-fledged local at any spot. Southern California, with its miasmic crowds, would discourage that, I knew. Once I landed in San Francisco and entered my apprenticeship at Ocean Beach, I never thought of telling my old surf partners about the great uncrowded waves I had lucked into. I wasn’t trying to keep a secret. I just knew they wouldn’t be interested. Too much punishment for the occasional sweet ride. Too cold, too gnarly, too hard-core.

  My mother had her doubts about San Francisco generally. This made her unusual in Los Angeles, where the natives traditionally wax romantic about their northern counterpart—Baghdad by the Bay, Tony Bennett’s lost heart, etcetera. She thought it was a fine place to visit but self-satisfied and somewhat stale, particularly since its hippie heyday. I once heard her call it “an old folks’ home for young people,” a quip that had some bite since Kevin and I were both living there. Kevin was now in law school, having bailed on the film business. He lived downtown, in a neighborhood called the Tenderloin. Neither of us was exactly slacking, but I did notice, on holidays when we all went home, how L.A. buzzed with a kind of acid élan, an endemic entertainment-industry-ambition frenzy that I had ignored while growing up there but could now safely appreciate. The Bay Area had nothing like it, at least not outside Silicon Valley, which held no interest for me but was obviously fizzing with brainpower.

  I knew that my mom had gone back to work, and yet the reality never quite registered with me until I found myself watching a smiling, well-spoken filmmaker, Patricia Finnegan, accept an award in a hotel ballroom in Washington, D.C., for a movie she had produced. Was that my mother? She had started by volunteering at a nonprofit production company, found her feet quickly, and then she and my dad had started their company. They had their start-up struggles, but within a few years my mother was hiring my father as a line producer on movies-of-the-week. She had a sharp eye for story and got on famously—easily, productively—with writers, directors, actors, and network executives, which sounds simple but is actually a rare talent. She and my father were wildly busy. Colleen and Michael each took serious looks at the family business, and then went elsewhere—Colleen into medicine, Michael into journalism, both back east. Kevin, who had strong left-wing politics, would not be returning to Hollywood after law school. So we had all flown the show-business coop. I couldn’t tell if my finally getting some articles published here and there pleased my father, the old newswriter. The book I was writing, I thought, might surprise my parents. They still thought of my teaching in Cape Town as good works. But a large part of the book would be about my failure to help my students and the unintended consequences of my more benighted efforts.

  The emotional disarray in which I departed southern Africa had not left me. I still had evil, agonizing dreams about Sharon. I had no contact with her, and I tried to hide my heartache from Caroline. But I sometimes wondered how it might color my account of the struggle for black liberation in South Africa.

  Kevin, who had gone to college in San Francisco, was living with a categorically more serious nightmare. The HIV/AIDS pandemic was in its early stages, still poorly understood. In San Francisco young people were falling ill, terminally ill, by the hundreds, soon to be thousands. Caroline and I were new in town, and we didn’t know anyone who had tested positive, but Kevin’s friends and neighbors downtown were living in terror, and they were being cruelly cut down. San Francisco General Hospital opened the first dedicated AIDS ward in the United States in 1983. Within days, it was full. One of Kevin’s closest friends, a sweet young lawyer named Sue, who was his college roommate, and spent Christmas with us, died of AIDS. She was thirty-one. Most of the victims in the city were gay men, of course. Kevin, who is gay, was active in the movement to demand more resources for AIDS research and treatme
nt, but he didn’t talk to me much about it. Our travels in Africa felt like they had taken place in another, less stark century. He seemed distracted, at best. I spared him my stories of near drownings on the inside bar at Ocean Beach.

  • • •

  I PADDLED OUT with Mark on a shiny, scary-looking day at Pacheco. It was hard to gauge the size of the surf because there was no one else in the water. We got out easily—conditions were immaculate, the channels easy to read—but then we misjudged conditions and took up a position that was too close to shore. Before we caught our first waves, a huge set caught us inside. The first wave snapped my ankle leash like it was a piece of string. I swam underneath that wave and then kept swimming, toward open ocean. The second wave looked like a three-story building. It, like the first wave, was preparing to break a few yards in front of me. I dived deep and swam hard. The lip of the wave hitting the surface above me sounded like a bolt of lightning exploding at very close range, and it filled the water with shock waves. I managed to stay underneath the turbulence, but when I surfaced I saw that the third wave of the set belonged to another order of being. It was bigger, thicker, and drawing much more heavily off the bottom than the others. My arms felt rubbery, and I started hyperventilating. I dived very early and very deep. The deeper I swam, the colder and darker the water got. The noise as the wave broke was preternaturally low, a basso profundo of utter violence, and the force pulling me backward and upward felt like some nightmare inversion of gravity. Again, I managed to escape, and when I finally surfaced I was far outside. There were no more waves, which was fortunate, since I was sure that one more would have finished me. Mark was there, though, perhaps ten yards to my right. He had been diving and escaping the unimaginable just as narrowly as I had. His leash had not broken, however; he was reeling in his board. As he did so, he turned to me with a manic look in his eyes and yelled, “This is great!” It could have been worse. He could have yelled, “This is interesting!”

  I later learned that, from a record-keeping point of view, Mark had indeed found that afternoon’s surf interesting. He stayed out in the water for four hours (I made the long swim to shore, collected my board from the sand, and went home to bed), and he measured the wave interval—the time it takes two waves in a set to pass a fixed point—at twenty-five seconds. It was the longest interval he had ever seen at Ocean Beach. That didn’t completely surprise me. Long-interval waves move through the ocean faster than their shorter-interval cousins, reach deeper below the surface, and when they break drive more water forward because they have more energy. Mark’s journal entry for that session also showed, among other things, that my leash broke on the twenty-first day of that surf season on which Mark had surfed waves eight feet or bigger, and the ninth day on which he had surfed waves ten feet or bigger.

  The thing to be feared most, I believed, was a two-wave hold-down. That was a drubbing so prolonged that you didn’t reach the surface before the next wave landed on you. It had never happened to me. People survived it, but never happily. I had heard of guys who quit surfing after a two-wave hold-down. When someone drowned in big waves, it was rarely possible to know exactly why, but I believed it often started with a two-wave hold-down. The biggest single reason I was so frightened by the third wave in that monster set that broke my leash was because the wave had two-wave hold-down written all over it. It was a rare slabby specimen for Ocean Beach, like the worst kind of inside-bar dredger—except two or three times the size. I didn’t understand where on the bars it was breaking or why—I still don’t understand it—but with its ultra-thickness I knew as I swam under it that there would not be much water left in front of it, meaning that it was very likely that if I got sucked over, I would have at least one encounter, possibly catastrophic, with the bottom, as well as an extremely long, possibly fatally long, hold-down. I didn’t know about the interval of the swell, but had gathered from the first waves we saw that it was exceptionally long. A two-wave hold-down in extremely long-interval waves would be, for obvious reasons, very long indeed.

  Forty or fifty seconds underwater might not sound too bad. Most big-wave surfers can hold their breath for several minutes. But that’s on land, or in a pool. Ten seconds while getting rag-dolled by a big wave is an eternity. By thirty seconds, almost anyone is approaching blackout. In the worst wipeouts of my experience, I had no way of knowing afterward precisely—or even imprecisely—how long I had been held down. I tried to concentrate on relaxing, on taking the beating, not fighting it, not burning oxygen, trying to conserve energy for the swim to the surface once the flogging ended. I sometimes had to climb my own leash to the surface, my board being more buoyant than I was. My worst hold-downs were always the ones that I thought had come to an end—one more kick to the surface—before they actually had. The unexpected extra kick, or two, or three, still without reaching the surface, made the desperation for air, the spasm in the throat, feel suddenly like a sob, or a stifled scream. Fighting the reflex that wanted to suck water into the lungs was nasty, frantic.

  Nothing physically unpleasant had happened under that third wave in the Pacheco set. And there was no wave behind it, so the two-wave hold-down that I feared if I got sucked back over would not have happened. Still, the near miss spooked me. I knew I was not ready for the consequences of getting hit squarely by a wave that consequential. I doubted I ever would be.

  • • •

  IT WAS ASTOUNDING TO ME that anyone learned to surf in San Francisco. I took to interviewing, informally, guys who had. Edwin Salem told me that when he was a kid he built a board rack to hitch to his bicycle, using scrounged plywood, two-by-fours, and wheels off a shopping cart. He would set off from the Sunset District two hours before the tide would be good at Fort Point because that’s how long it took to pedal there. Fort Point is a sloppy left under the south end of the Golden Gate Bridge. It gets crowded but is a relatively gentle wave. At twelve or thirteen, Edwin started riding the whitewater at Ocean Beach. Peewee, who was already one of the big guys there, told him that, before he could surf, he had to collect a lot of wood—good dry stuff for a bonfire that would be blazing when he came in. “I collected a lot of wood,” Edwin said. “And I took a lot of crap.” Slowly he became an Ocean Beach local.

  Now in his midtwenties, Edwin was a smooth, powerful surfer with curly black hair and merry green eyes. He and I were out at Sloat, catching our breaths after a bruising paddle-out. It was cold, midmorning. The surf was fierce but mediocre; there was no one else out. The smell of fresh doughnuts drifted across the water from a bakery near Wise’s shop. On the horizon a container ship was steaming toward the Gate. We decided we were too far out. As we began paddling back toward the takeoff area, gliding watchfully over the swells, I asked Edwin about the surf in Argentina. I knew he still made occasional trips there to visit family. He laughed. “After this place, I couldn’t believe how easy it was to surf there,” he said. “The water was so warm! The waves were so mellow! There were girls on the beach!”

  • • •

  ON A VERY BIG DAY, the city itself looked different. The streets and buildings seemed glazed and remote, the lineaments of an exhausted sphere: land. The action was all at sea. One January morning in 1984, Ocean Beach was so big that San Francisco felt like a ghost town as I drove the few blocks to the coast. It was a dark, ugly day, drizzling and cold. The ocean was gray and brown and extremely ominous. There were no cars at Kelly’s or VFW’s. I headed south, driving slowly, so that I could watch the surf. It was impossible to say how big it was. There was nothing—no one—out there to provide any scale. It was twenty feet at least, probably bigger.

  Sloat looked totally out of control as I pulled into the parking lot. The waves breaking farthest out were barely visible from the shore. Paddling out was unthinkable. There was no wind, but the largest waves were feathering slightly anyway, from the sheer volume of water they threw forth as they broke. The explosions that followed were unnaturally white. They looked like sm
all nuclear blasts; watching them made my stomach churn. When Mark had phoned me earlier, he had said simply, “Sloat. Be there or be square.” But Sloat was out of the question. Mark pulled into the parking lot a few minutes after I did. He turned to me and opened his eyes wide—his way of saying that the waves were even bigger than he had thought. He cackled darkly. We agreed to look at the surf on the south side of a temporary construction pier that the city had built half a mile below Sloat. As we were leaving, Edwin pulled into the lot. Mark had also rousted him at dawn. The three of us drove into the dunes south of Sloat.

  The swell was coming from the northwest—it was being generated by a major storm in the Aleutians—so the pier, which was four or five hundred yards long, was significantly diluting the power of the surf to its immediate south. The waves there looked barely half the size of the gargantuan stuff on the north side, and almost manageable. There was still the question of getting out, however. People sometimes paddled out underneath the pier—a regular rip current, carrying water that the surf had piled up near the beach back out to sea, had dug a deep trench under the pier, so that waves rarely broke there. But it was nasty under the pier. There were loose cables dangling, and huge iron sheets sticking up at odd angles under the water, not to mention the pilings themselves, which were closely spaced and did not budge when the surf slammed you into them. I had paddled out under the pier a few times, on days when getting out at Sloat had been beyond me, but I had sworn not to do it again. In any case, even paddling out under the pier looked impossible this morning. Broken waves were rumbling through the pilings like small avalanches through an iron forest. The only nonlethal way to get out today would be to sneak past the guard on the construction project, run out on the pier, and jump off the end, which was safely outside the surf.