Barbarian Days

by William Finnegan

  Peewee was there at Mark’s that night, along with most of the surfers I knew by name in San Francisco. Ages ranged from late teens to midforties. With only three years’ seniority, I was probably the most recent arrival in San Francisco. A slide of me surfing Ocean Beach the previous winter drew a couple of hoots but no insults—I hadn’t been around long enough for that. There was a sequence of Mark pioneering a fearsome outer reef in Mendocino County. Local surfers had been watching the place break for years, but no one had ever tried to surf it until, earlier that winter, Mark persuaded two big-wave riders from the area to paddle out with him. The wave broke at least half a mile from shore, on a shallow rock reef, and featured a horrendous drop, along with some troublesome kelp. Mark’s slides, taken by an accomplice with a telephoto lens from a mountainside, showed him cautiously riding deep-green walls two or three times his height. The trickiest part, he said, had actually come not in the water but in a nearby town that evening. People at the village hangout had been alarmed to hear that he’d surfed the outer reef, and suspicious, he said, until they learned that he had done it in the company of two locals.

  It was surprising to hear Mark mention local sensitivities. They were a real issue—I once saw a clipping from a Mendocino newspaper in which a columnist described Mark as “a legendary super surfer from the Bay Area,” adding sarcastically, “I’m sorry I didn’t stick around for his autograph”—but I usually thought of Mark as impervious to such matters. Of course, it was also tricky showing these slides to this audience; it required a deft touch, even a measure of self-deprecation. Mark might disregard the finer points of the surfing social contract among strangers in the water, but Ocean Beach was home; here the strong drink of his personality needed sweetening. Earlier in the evening, when Mark complained that his asthma was bothering him, making it difficult to breathe, Beeper Dave had muttered, “Now you know how us mortals feel.”

  A parade of photographers with their slide carousels followed. There were water shots, some of them good, and many blurry shots of giant Ocean Beach. Some old-timers showed slides from the ’70s, featuring surfers I’d never heard of. “Gone to Kauai,” I was told. “Gone to Western Australia, last we heard.” Peewee showed a handful of slides from a recent trip to Hawaii. Taken at Sunset, the renowned big-wave spot, Peewee’s pictures, which were of poor quality, showed some friends windsurfing on a small, blown-out day. “Unbelievable,” somebody muttered. “Windsurfing.” Peewee, who was one of the few guys from San Francisco actually capable of surfing big Sunset, said little. But he seemed amused by the crowd’s disappointment.

  • • •

  THERE WAS ANOTHER PHOTO on the wall at Wise’s shop when I first moved to San Francisco. It was flyspecked, curling, captionless, and incredibly beautiful. The photo showed a surfer—Peewee, according to Wise—trimmed very high on a seemingly endless backlit ten-foot left. The wave was lime green and wind-sculpted, and looked as if it must be somewhere in Bali, but Wise said it was at Outside VFW’s. The wave was so exquisitely proportioned that it made the 9'6" gun that Peewee was riding look like a shortboard. And the line he was drawing was out of a dream—too high, too fine, too inspired for real life.

  During my second or third winter in the city, more photos began to appear on the wall at Wise’s. They were all big, wood-framed prints under glass of Mark surfing giant Ocean Beach, with typed captions listing the exact date and place taken and identifying the rider.

  Mark and Peewee were the fire and ice of San Francisco surfing, the oversold thesis and the understated antithesis. They were like two opposed theories of character formation. In Peewee’s case, experience seemed to be about removing superfluities; in Mark’s case, it was all accumulation. More boards, more milestones, more spots conquered. Virtually everything with him hinged on surfing, from childhood to old age. Recalling his L.A. youth, he told me, “Among my friends, there was a strong belief in the surfer’s path. Most people swerved from it sooner or later.” For his models for aging well, he looked to older surfers—he called them “elders.” Doc Ball, a lifelong surfer and retired dentist in Northern California, then in his eighties, was a favorite. “He’s still stoked,” Mark said. “He still skateboards!”

  Peewee agreed that Mark was preternaturally youthful. “He’s like somebody who’s twenty or twenty-two, with that much stoke about surfing, that much enthusiasm,” Peewee told me during a rare conversation. But Peewee disagreed about the long-term benefits of the surfing life. As he put it, “The biggest locals can be the biggest derelicts.” We were sitting in a Chinese restaurant near his house, with Peewee warily watching me take notes. “It’s such a great sport it corrupts people,” he said. “It’s like drug addiction. You just don’t want to do anything else. You don’t want to go to work. If you do, it’s always ‘You really missed it’ when you get off.” As a carpenter, Peewee said, he had some job flexibility, and he tried to take a month off each year to go surfing someplace else, like Hawaii or Indonesia. But there was no way that he could surf as avidly as he had surfed while growing up—not without risking dereliction.

  Peewee learned to surf on borrowed boards at Pedro Point, a beginner’s break a few miles south of San Francisco. It took him five years to work up to Ocean Beach. He was a Sunset District kid, in awe of the big guys from his era. Eventually he became a big guy himself—over six feet, broad-shouldered, with the poker-faced, blond good looks of a B-western gunfighter. But he never managed to ditch his nickname. He also seemed never to have lost the unassumingness of the novice. Getting him to talk, over tepid tea in an emptying restaurant, was the journalistic equivalent of paddling out at Sloat on a mean day. My request for an interview had no doubt startled him. Peewee knew me as a face in the water, a recent Ocean Beach regular, one of Mark’s crowd. Now, suddenly, I was a reporter. That didn’t mean I was dispassionate. As someone who had been struggling for several winters now with Mark’s contention that to miss a swell was a far greater sin than to miss a deadline, I got more comfort than Peewee knew from his simple description of the inevitable conflict between surfing and work. Of course, it was an argument as old as Hiram Bingham—the missionary who saw surfing as barbaric and nearly strangled it in its cradle in Hawaii.

  Peewee’s self-effacement was so thorough that it was easy to misread him as remote. Even I could see, though, after a while, that his terse exterior hid an acute shyness, which in turn hid an old-fashioned sensitivity. He had been a straight-A student in school—I learned this not from him but from others—and an English major at San Francisco State University. He also took science courses in college, including an oceanography class in which the instructor once averred that the big winter swells that hit the Northern California coast came typically from the south. This notion is solidly false. The instructor refused to be corrected, and Peewee let it slide.

  When letting foolishness slide became impossible, though, he was capable of taking a memorable stand. Once, on a crowded day at VFW’s during my first winter in San Francisco, a local surfer was behaving badly—stealing waves, jumping the queue, and threatening anyone who objected. Peewee warned him once, quietly. When the guy kept it up, then nearly decapitated another surfer with a clumsy pullout, Peewee invited him to leave the water. The miscreant snarled. Peewee knocked him off his board, turned his board over, and, with small, sharp blows with the heel of his hand, broke off each of his three fins. The guy paddled in. Years later, Ocean Beach regulars who hadn’t seen this incident were still asking those who had to tell it again.

  Peewee was a locals’ local. He was one of those guys who, when you surfed with them at Fort Point, under the Golden Gate Bridge, could look up and tell you how many workers were entombed in its pilings; how long the lines of men waiting for work were during its construction, back in the Depression, and how much they were paid; and how much the present-day maintenance workers, some of whom were friends or relatives, earned. Peewee was a union carpenter, and often served as the job stewa
rd on construction sites. When I asked about that, he said simply, “I believe in the construction unions.” He was equally closemouthed on the subject of big waves. He preferred them to small waves, he said, because they were uncrowded. “Crowds can get tense,” he said. “In big waves, it’s just you and the ocean.” Peewee was known around Ocean Beach for his iron nerves in big surf, but it took him a number of years, he said, to build up to facing very big waves. “Each new wipeout makes you realize, though, that you’re actually safer than you thought. It’s just water. It’s just holding your breath. The wave will pass.” Did he never panic? “Sure. But all you have to do, really, is relax. You’ll always come up.” In retrospect, he said, the times when he had thought he was drowning were not in fact such close calls.

  “Doc’s kind of building a reputation here,” Peewee conceded, ten years after Mark started surfing Ocean Beach. What about Peewee himself? “I’m kind of maintaining a reputation here,” he admitted. Still, he only surfed big waves when they were clean. What was the biggest wave he had ridden at Ocean Beach? “The biggest wave I’ve taken off on out here, I didn’t make,” he said. “The wave was perfect—my board was just too small. It was an eight-four. I only got about three-quarters of the way down the face. I fell, and I got sucked up and over. It was the scariest moment I’ve had. I thought I’d never stop free-falling. But it wasn’t so bad.” How big was it? “Twelve feet,” Peewee said. “Maybe fifteen.” He shrugged. “I hardly try to measure waves in feet anymore.” That was just as well, I thought, because plenty of surfers around the city believed they had seen Peewee ride waves larger than fifteen feet.

  • • •

  WHILE WE JOUSTED, groveled, and gloried in a world invisible to other San Franciscans, we were still in the city, and it sometimes came to us. One shining day, at low tide, Ocean Beach was wide and full of people. The surf was good, and I was hurrying across the sand, board under arm. Off to my left, two young black men in 49ers warm-up jackets were silently putting a pair of miniature remote-control dune buggies through their paces; they wove and whirled and fishtailed in the sand. Off to my right, a group of white people were beating the hell out of pillows with yellow plastic clubs. As I passed, I could hear screaming and cursing: “Bitch! Bitch!” “Get out of this house!” Some people were weeping. A chubby man in his forties was pounding a sheet of paper laid on a pillow. When it flew off, he chased it down, bellowing, “Get back on there, you bitch!” Near the water’s edge, I found another middle-aged man, gazing out to sea, his yellow club at his feet, a beatific expression on his face. He eyed my board as I knelt to strap on my leash. I asked about the pillow beaters, and he said they were engaged in something called the Pacific Process. Thirteen weeks, three thousand dollars. This exercise, he said, was called Bitching at Mom. I noticed he was wearing work gloves. Hey, no use getting blisters while beating the bejeezus out of Mom.

  Later, out in the water, I saw a surfer I didn’t know drop in late on a big, glassy peak. He was riding a needle-nosed pale blue board and he fought to keep his balance as the wave, which was twice his height, jacked and began to pitch. He didn’t fall, but he lost speed in the struggle to keep his feet, and his first turn, now deep in the wave’s shadow, was weak. If the wave hadn’t hit a patch of deep water and paused for a beat, he would have been buried by the first section. He managed to steer around it, though, and then pull into the next section and set a high line across a long green wall. By the time he passed me, he was in full command, perhaps one turn from the end of an excellent ride. But his face, I saw in the moment he shot past, was twisted with anguish, and with something that looked like rage. Riding a serious wave takes, even for an accomplished surfer, intense technical concentration. But many less selfless emotions also crowd around. Even in unchallenging waves, the faces of surfers as they ride often become terrible masks of fear, frustration, anger. The most revealing moment is the pullout, the end of a ride, which usually provokes a mixed grimace of relief, distress, elation, and dissatisfaction. The face of the stranger on the pale blue board had reminded me of nothing so much as the weeping, contorted faces of the pillow beaters on the beach.

  None of this interior Sturm und Drang went with the slap-happy, lighthearted idea of surfing—fun in the sun—that’s always seemed widespread among nonsurfers, and now that I was planning to write about it I found myself wondering how much of the actual thing I could hope to convey to outsiders. There were guys who didn’t grimace while riding waves, of course, whose style seemed to extend to a serene countenance, even a slight inward smile. But in my experience those individuals were rare.

  And then there were great surfers, the fabulously gifted. They were by definition exceedingly rare—although pro surfers were slowly, as the popularity of surfing increased and an international contest circuit matured, getting more common. For them, surfing was a sport, with training, competition, sponsorships, the lot. In Australia they were treated like other professional athletes; champions were even subject to public adulation. Not so in the United States, where the average sports fan knew essentially nothing about surfing, and where even surfers paid little attention to contest results and rankings. The best surfers were admired, even revered, for their style and ability, but the important thing we shared with them was esoteric, obsessive, not mainstream but subcultural, certainly not commercial. (Some of this—not much—has changed in recent years.)

  The main thing we shared, at every level of talent, was a profound absorption in waves. Mark liked to say that surfing “is essentially a religious practice.” But there was too much performance, too much competition (however unstructured), too much appetite and raw preening in it for that description to ring true to me. Style was everything in surfing—how graceful your moves, how quick your reactions, how clever your solutions to the puzzles presented, how deeply carved and cleanly linked your turns, even what you did with your hands. Great surfers could make you gasp with the beauty of what they did. They could make the hardest moves look easy. Casual power, the proverbial grace under pressure, these were our beau ideals. Pull into a heaving barrel, come out cleanly. Act like you’ve been there before. Make it look good. That was the real fascination, and terror, of photos of oneself. Do I look good? If this was a religion, perhaps it didn’t bear thinking about what was being worshipped. “Muthiya maar,” Caroline sometimes trilled over her etching plates as I swapped stories with other surfers over beers.

  All surfers are oceanographers, and in the area of breaking waves all are engaged in advanced research. Surfers don’t need to be told that when a wave breaks actual water particles, rather than simply the waveform, begin to move forward. They are busy figuring out more arcane relationships, like the one between tide and consistency, or swell direction and nearshore bathymetry. The science of surfers is not pure, obviously, but heavily applied. The goal is to understand, for the purpose of riding them, what the waves are doing, and especially what they are likely to do next. But waves dance to an infinitely complex tune. To a surfer sitting in the lineup trying to decipher the structure of a swell, the problem can indeed present itself musically. Are these waves approaching in 13/8 time, perhaps, with seven sets an hour, and the third wave of every set swinging wide in a sort of dissonant crescendo? Or is this swell one of God’s jazz solos, whose structure is beyond our understanding?

  When the surf is big, or in some other way humbling, even these questions tend to fall away. The heightened sense of a vast, unknowable design silences the effort to understand. You feel honored simply to be out there. I’ve been reduced on certain magnificent days—this had happened to me at Honolua Bay, at Jeffreys Bay, on Tavarua, even once or twice at Ocean Beach—to just drifting on the shoulder, gawking at the transformation of ordinary seawater into beautifully muscled swell, into feathering urgency, into pure energy, impossibly sculpted, ecstatically edged, and finally into violent foam.

  • • •

  I HAD TO ADMIT THAT, in part, Mark had succeede
d with me. I was surfing more than I would have. I had acquired a couple of new boards—three-fin designs known as thrusters—and a better wetsuit, reducing my hypothermia problem. We made surf runs north and south. When Ocean Beach was big and blown out, we headed to Mendocino County, where Mark knew some sheltered spots. In summer, when O.B. was hopeless, he took me to his favorite south-swell reefbreak, in Big Sur. His generosity seemed effortless, his natural element. He had appointed himself my surf coach, health director, and general adviser. Now he was sitting happily for his portrait. I was thinking more about surfing, if only because I had volunteered to write about it. But was I taking surfing more seriously? Not really. I was taking more notes, but going surfing still felt like something I did basically because I had always done it. Surfing and I had been married, so to speak, for most of my life, but it was one of those marriages in which little is said. Mark wanted to help me and surfing patch up our stubborn, silent marriage. I didn’t think I wanted it patched up. Having a sizable tract of unconsciousness near the center of my life suited me, somehow. I almost never talked about surfing except with other surfers. It contributed little to how I saw myself. I was reluctant to think of it as part of my real life as an adult, which I was now busy trying to kick-start. Journalism was ferrying me into worlds that interested me far more than chasing waves.

  But something odd was happening. Setting aside my ambivalence, I was letting Mark’s exuberance carry me along, letting him become the engine that powered my surfing life. In some ways, I realized, I had let Mark thrust himself between me and surfing, antically filling the foreground, haunting my dream life with his fantasies, rending my winter night’s sleep with a screaming phone. I even let him preside over primordial moments, his Mephistophelian cackle providing a lifeline from the yawning space of my fear in big waves to some rock face where the psychic crampons held. It was a reporter’s passivity, this yielding to an alter ego, but on this story it was disfiguring. I hardly recognized myself in the mirror of the Doc Squad.