Barbarian Days

by William Finnegan

  Eight or ten surfers watch from the seawall, nervous and grumpy. All seem to agree that the wind has ruined the surf, that there’s really no reason to go out now. An unusual amount of profanity—unusual even for surfers—is being used to discuss the waves, the weather, the world. People pace, fists plunged in pockets, laughing too loudly, dry-mouthed. Then Edwin, who has been silently watching the ocean from behind mirrored sunglasses, erupts. “I have an idea,” he announces. “Let’s form a support group. I’m not going out there because I’m scared to go out there. Why don’t we all just say that? ‘I’m not going out there because I’m scared to go out there.’ Come on, Domond, you say it.”

  Domond, a noisy tough who works in Wise’s shop when he’s not driving a taxicab, turns away in disgust. So Edwin addresses himself to another homeboy, known as Beeper Dave, but he also turns away, grumbling and shaking his head. Everybody then ignores Edwin, who just laughs easily and shrugs.

  “Set,” somebody growls. All eyes swing to the horizon, where the blazing sheet of the sea is beginning to lift in sickeningly large gray lines. “Those guys are dead.”

  • • •

  I DECIDED TO TRY to write about Mark. He was up for it. I sent a proposal to the New Yorker: a profile of this amazing urban big-wave surfer and physician. Shawn liked the sound of it. I got the assignment.

  Things changed after that between me and Mark. I stopped being mortified that people might mistake me for one of his acolytes. I was his Boswell, don’t you know. I interviewed him about his childhood—his father was a psychiarist in Beverly Hills. I cataloged the contents of his van. I followed him around at work, sitting in while he examined patients. He had been a bit of a prodigy when we were in college. After his father developed a tumor, Mark, who was pre-med, started studying cancer with an intensity that convinced many of his friends that his goal was to find a cure in time to save his father. As it turned out, his father didn’t have cancer. But Mark kept on with his cancer studies. His interest was not in fact in oncology—in finding a cure—but in cancer education and prevention. By the time he entered medical school, he had created, with another student, a series of college courses on cancer and coauthored The Biology of Cancer Sourcebook, the text for a course that was eventually offered to tens of thousands of students. He cowrote a second book, Understanding Cancer, that became a bestselling university text, and he continued to lecture throughout the United States on cancer research, education, and prevention.

  “The funny thing is, I’m not really interested in cancer,” Mark told me. “I’m interested in people’s response to it. A lot of cancer patients and suvivors report that they never really lived till they got cancer, that it forced them to face things, to experience life more intensely. What you see in family practice is that families just can’t afford to be superficial with each other anymore once someone has cancer. Corny as it sounds, what I’m really interested in is the human spirit—in how people react to stress and adversity. I’m fascinated by the way people fight back, by how they keep fighting their way to the surface.” Mark clawed at the air with his arms. What he was miming was the struggle to reach the surface through the turbulence of a large wave.

  I asked Geoff Booth, an Australian journalist, surfer, and physician, for his professional opinion. “Mark definitely has the death wish in him,” Booth said. “It’s some extreme driving force, which I really think only a handful of people in the world would understand. I’ve only met one other person who had it—Jose Angel.” Jose Angel was a great Hawaiian big-wave surfer who disappeared while diving off Maui in 1976.

  Edwin’s theory was that Mark was driven to surf big waves by the rage and futility that he felt when his patients died. Mark said that was ridiculous. Edwin’s other theory was Freudian. (He was from Argentina, remember, where psychoanalysis is a middle-class religion.) “Obviously, it’s erotic,” he said. “That big board’s his prick.” I didn’t even run that one past Mark.

  • • •

  I FINISHED my South Africa book. While waiting to hear from the publisher, I went to Washington to report a piece on U.S. policy toward southern Africa. Civil unrest in South Africa was in the headlines and the anti-apartheid movement was gaining traction globally. A group of conservative young congressmen, led by Newt Gingrich, judging correctly that apartheid was doomed, had staged a revolt against Reagan administration policy, which was basically pro-apartheid. A wave of Republican infighting ensued, and some of the principals were eager to talk. I had a sharp anti-apartheid ax to grind, but my poker face was getting better (still mixing metaphors, though) and the refinement of my understanding of power proceeded. I wore a cheap black suit, carried a new briefcase Caroline had given me, and tried to act like I knew what I was doing in the offices of congressmen and senators, the State Department, the Heritage Foundation. I found my way into the militarist fringe where Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, not yet a public figure, operated. I was green and awkward, but I loved the work: chasing leads, making connections, asking hard questions. It was my third or fourth piece for Mother Jones, a leftist monthly in San Francisco that was also trying to find its way in the bigger world. The revolt of the young conservatives in Congress succeeded. Reagan suavely reversed field on economic sanctions against Pretoria. His administration continued to rain death, though, on Nicaragua.

  My new status as a reporter seemed to dawn slowly on the little community of San Francisco surfers. By then I knew most of the main dudes—and it was still all dudes in the water at Ocean Beach, no women—though few of them knew much about me. When word got around that I was writing about Mark, people looked at me differently, I thought. Some volunteered their takes. “He’s the biggest little kid on the Beach,” Beeper Dave said. He meant that in a good way. “One thing about Doc,” Bob Wise said. “He keeps open the idea that anything is possible.” Another view of Mark, until then invisible to me, also began to surface. The most vivid expression of it came from a stranger who paddled up to me purposefully at VFW’s. He was a tough-looking guy, long dirty-blond hair, a lot of street in his face, and he got much closer to me than surfing social etiquette allowed. Looking me full in the face, he snarled, “Doc’s a fuckin’ kook.” I said nothing, and after a long moment he moved away. Nice to meet you too. On the face of it, the remark was absurd. A kook, in surf dialect, is a beginner. But the point was the insult, which was about as strong as it gets in surf world, and the seething hostility. Noted.

  I saw Mark as a devoted pupil of Ocean Beach. But to some locals, I came to see, he was just a rich kid from L.A., and he was taking up too much psychic space. The social divide between blue-collar natives and white-collar newcomers wasn’t actually simple or clear. Many of Mark’s buddies were Sunset District homies. And there were plenty of Ocean Beach regulars whose stories didn’t fit in any category. Sloat Bill, for instance, was a commodities trader from Texas via Harvard. He got his nickname when, following one of his divorces, he moved into his car and lived for a month in the Sloat parking lot, vowing not to leave until he had mastered the harsh art of surfing Sloat. Whether he had achieved that aim or not, he had certainly made more money, tapping buy and sell orders into a computer plugged into his car’s cigarette lighter, than any of the rest of us did while sitting in the Sloat parking lot. Sloat Bill had recently moved back to San Francisco after a stint in San Diego, declaring, “Surfing down there was like driving on the freeway. Totally anonymous.”

  • • •

  THE SURFING SOCIAL CONTRACT is a delicate document. It gets redrafted every time you paddle out. At crowded breaks, while jockeying for waves with a mob of strangers, talent, aggression, local knowledge, and local reputation (if any) help establish a rough pecking order. I had competed joyously, on the whole, at Kirra, Malibu, Rincon, Honolua. But most spots, less famous, are subtler, their unwritten rules built on local personalities, local conditions. Crowded days were rare at Ocean Beach. They occurred, though, and the same sensitivities and de
corum came into play then as they did anywhere else.

  On a February afternoon, I paddled out at Sloat and found at least sixty people in the lineup. I didn’t recognize any of them. It was the third day of a solid west swell. Conditions were superb: six-foot-plus, not a breath of wind. Normally the winter bars began to fall apart in early February, but not this year. What had happened, I guessed, was that surfers from up and down the coast who usually didn’t want to know about Ocean Beach had decided en masse that with the major winter swells probably over and conditions still improbably clean, the feared O.B. could be safely raided. I understood this selective bravado, of course, because I felt it too, along with an immense relief at having survived another winter—this was my third. Still, I resented the horde. I got pounded on the inside bar, eventually slipped out, and started hunting for a peak to ride. The crowd seemed amorphous, unfocused—there were no conversations in progress. Everyone seemed intent on the waves, on himself. I caught my breath, chose a lineup marker—a school bus parked in the Sloat lot—and took up a risky position straight inside a group of four or five guys.

  I was vulnerable there to a big set, but it was important, in a crowd, to make a good showing on one’s first waves, and after a long winter I knew the bars here better than these tourists did. As it happened, the next wave to come through held up nicely, shrugging off the efforts of two guys farther out to catch it, and handing me a swift, swooping, surefooted first ride. Paddling back out, I burned to tell somebody about the wave—about the great crack the lip had made as it split the surface behind me, about the mottled amber upper hollows of the inside wall. But there was no one to tell. Two black grebes popped out of the foam beside me, their spindly necks like feathered periscopes, their big, surprised eyes staring. I murmured, “Did you see my wave?”

  Everyone out here was starring in his own movie, and permission was required before you inflicted your exploits on anyone else. Vocal instant replays and noisy exultation are not unknown in surfing, but they’re subject to a strict code of collective ego control. Young surfers sometimes misunderstand this part of the surfing social contract, and brag and browbeat each other in the water, but they generally cool it when older surfers are in earshot. The usual crowd at Ocean Beach was older than most—in fact, I couldn’t remember ever seeing a teenager out on a big day—and the unwritten limits on garrulity among strangers here were correspondingly firm. Those who exceeded them were shunned. Those who consistently exceeded them were hated, for they failed to respect the powerfully self-enclosed quality of what other surfers, especially the less garrulous, were doing out here.

  I headed for an empty peak slightly north of the school bus. I caught two quick waves, and half a dozen people saw fit to join me. The hassling for waves got, for Ocean Beach, fairly bad. Nobody spoke. Each dreamer stayed deep in his own dream—hustling, feinting, gliding, windmilling into every possible wave. Then a cleanup set rolled through, breaking fifty yards outside the bar we were surfing. Huge walls of whitewater swatted all of us off our boards, pushing a few unlucky souls clear across the inside bar. The group that reconvened a few minutes later was smaller, and now had something to talk about. “My leash leg just got six inches longer.” “Those waves looked like December.” We settled into a rough rotation. Waves were given and taken, and givers were sometimes even thanked. After noteworthy rides, compliments were muttered. The chances of this swell’s lasting another day were discussed in general session. A burly Asian from Marin County was pessimistic—“It’s a three-day west. We get ’em every year.” He repeated his prediction, then said it again for those who might have missed it. The little group at the school-bus peak, while it would never be known for its repartee, had achieved some rude coherence. A light fabric of shared enterprise had settled over all of us, and I found that my resentment of the nonlocals had faded. The tide, which was rising, was unanimously blamed for a lengthy lull. The sun, nearing the horizon, ignited a fiery Z of sea-facing windows along a road that switchbacked up a distant San Francisco hillside.

  Then a familiar howl and raucous laugh rose from the inside bar. “Doc,” someone said, unnecessarily. Mark was the one San Francisco surfer whom nonlocals were likely to know. He was paddling alongside somebody, regaling him with the plot of a horror movie: “So the head starts running around by itself, biting people to death.” Mark was wearing a silly-looking short-billed neoprene hood, with his beard jutting over the chin strap and his ponytail flapping out the back, steaming in my direction. When he was still ten yards away, he made a face and yelled, “This is a zoo!” I wondered what the people around us made of that observation. “Let’s go surf Santiago.”

  Mark didn’t recognize the unwritten limits on garrulity in the water. He tore up the surfing social contract and blew his great, sunburned nose on the tatters. And he was too big, too witty, and far too fearless for anyone to object. Feeling compromised, I reluctantly abandoned my spot in the rotation at the school-bus peak and set off with Mark for the peaks breaking off Santiago, half a mile north. “‘A three-day west’!” Mark snorted. “Who are these guys? It’s going to be bigger tomorrow. All the indicators say so.”

  Mark was usually right about what the surf would do. He was wrong about Santiago, though. The bars were sloppier than those we had left behind at Sloat. There was nobody surfing anywhere nearby. That was really why Mark wanted to surf there. It was an old disagreement between us. He believed that crowds were stupid. “People are sheep,” he liked to say. And he often claimed to know more than the crowd did about where and when to surf. He would head down the beach to some unlikely-looking spot and stubbornly stay there, riding marginal, inconsistent waves, rather than grub it out with the masses. I had spent a lifetime paddling hopefully off toward uncrowded peaks myself, dreaming that they were about to start working better than the popular break, and sometimes—rarely, briefly—they actually seemed to do so. But I had a rueful faith in the basic good judgment of the herd. Crowds collected where the waves were best. This attitude drove Mark nuts. And Ocean Beach, with its great uncrowded winter waves, did in fact bend the universal Malthusian surf equation. Freezing water and abject fear and ungodly punishment were useful that way.

  I took off on a midsized wave, a detour I quickly regretted: the set behind my wave gave me a thorough drubbing, almost driving me over the inside bar. By the time I got back outside, the sun was setting, I was shivering, and Mark was a hundred yards farther north. I decided not to follow him, and started looking for a last wave. But the peaks along here were shifty, and I kept misjudging their speed and steepness. I nearly got sucked over backward by a vicious, ledging wave, then had to scramble to avoid a monstrous set.

  The twilight deepened. The spray lifting off the tops still had a crimson sunset tinge, but the waves themselves were now just big, featureless blue-black walls. They were getting more and more difficult to judge. There were no longer any other surfers in sight. Now shivering badly, I was ready to try to paddle in—ignominious as that would be. When a lull came, that’s what I did, digging hard, struggling to keep my board pointed shoreward through the crosscurrents of the outside bar, using a campfire on the beach as a visual fix, and glancing back over my shoulder every five or six strokes. I was about halfway to shore, coming up on the inside bar, when a set appeared outside. I was safely in deep water, and there was no sense trying to cross the inside bar during a set, so I turned and sat up to wait.

  Against the still-bright sky, at the top of a massive wave off to the south and far, far outside, a lithe silhouette leaped to its feet, then plunged into darkness. I strained to see what happened next, but the wave disappeared behind others nearer by. My stomach had done a flutter kick at the sight of someone dropping into such a wave at dusk, and as I bobbed over the swells gathering themselves for the assault on the inside bar I kept peering toward where he had vanished, watching for a riderless board washing in. That wave had looked like a leash-breaker. Finally, less than forty yards
away, a dim figure appeared, speeding across a ragged inside wall. Whoever it was had not only made the drop but was still on his feet, and flying. As the wave hit deep water, he leaned into a huge, elegant carving cutback. The cutback told me who it was. Peewee was the only local surfer who could turn like that. He made one more turn, driving to within a few yards of me, and pulled out. His expression, I saw, was bland. He nodded at me but said nothing. I felt tongue-tied. I was relieved, though, by the thought of having company for the passage across the inside bar, which was now detonating continuously. But Peewee had other plans. He turned and, without a word, started paddling back out to sea.

  • • •

  LATER THAT EVENING, grunts and roars and horrible snarls filled the air in Mark’s apartment. Slides from the past couple of winters at Ocean Beach were being shown, and most of the surfers featured were on hand. “That can’t be you, Edwin. You hide under the bed when it gets that big!” Mark convened these gatherings quasi-annually. “This was the best day last winter,” he said, projecting a shot of huge, immaculate Sloat that elicited a deep general groan. “But I don’t have any more pictures of it. I paddled out after taking this one, and stayed out all day.” Mark’s voice had the nasal, waterlogged quality it got after a long session. In fact, he’d come in from the surf—its steady thunder from across the Great Highway was supplying a bass line for the entertainment—only an hour before. “The moon rose just as it got really dark,” he’d told me. “I went back to Sloat. All those kooks were gone. It was just Peewee and me. It was great.” I found this scene hard to picture. It wasn’t that I didn’t believe him—his hair was still wet. I just couldn’t imagine how anyone could surf by moonlight in waves as big as those that were pounding Sloat at dusk. “Sure,” Mark said. “Peewee and I do it once every winter.”