Barbarian Days

by William Finnegan

  Yes, I had been bewitched by surfing as a kid—trotting dreamily down a path at dawn, lit by visions of trade-blown waves, rapt even about the long paddle to Cliffs. The old spell had been broken, at times, or seemed to be. But it always lay there, under the surface, dormant but undestroyed while I knocked around the far world, living in waveless places—Montana, London, New York. I remembered the first time I accompanied Mark up the Mendocino coast, shortly after moving to San Francisco. The swell was big and scary, with a numbing northwest wind ruining every spot except Point Arena Cove, which was protected by a thick kelp bed. I nervously followed Mark out through the channel there, intimidated by the wind, the freezing water, and, especially, by the heavy-gauge waves plunging and grinding down the rock reef. Mark threw himself into the fray, surfing aggressively, and I gradually moved farther out along the reef, taking off on bigger and bigger waves. Finally, I took off on a very big wave, and nearly fell when the nose of my board caught a piece of chop on the takeoff. I recovered, barely, and managed to make the wave. Afterward, Mark, who had seen that takeoff from the channel, said he had actually been frightened for me. “That would have been really, really bad if you hadn’t made it,” he said. “That wave was a solid ten feet, and the only thing that got you down that face was twenty years of experience.” It was true that I had been surfing on pure instinct at that point, too intent to be scared, although the hold-downs out on that part of the reef did look to be brutally long. It was embarrassing to admit it but Mark’s assessment pleased me deeply. I was trying to figure out how to live with the disabling enchantment of surfing—and with Mark’s efforts to weave the spell tighter—but he had said a lot of things, I realized, that I found gratifying.

  He also said a lot of things that annoyed me. Once, on another trip to Mendocino, while we were surfing an exquisite little hidden cove, I had just ridden a wave rather well, I thought, and Mark had seen it. “You really got a rhythm going on that one,” he said as we paddled back out. “You need to do that more.” Giving unwanted advice in the water was a breach of what I understood as the surfing social contract, and the condescension of his remark only made it worse. But I held my tongue, which was not like me. It was ridiculous, I knew, to be so sensitive. But that was not actually why I didn’t tell him to shove it up his ass. It was because I was now planning to write about him. Since getting that assignment, I had changed. I had become less frank, less spontaneous. For me, this was no longer just a complicated surfing friendship. It was a writing project, it was reporting, it was work—indeed, a big opportunity. Speaking hotly could mess that up. So I tried to remain the unfazed observer. Mark’s own manic insouciance insulated him, I thought, from how other people felt. That and his abiding sense of entitlement and invulnerability.

  The seamlessness of his world fascinated me—its willed continuities and focus, its manifest satisfactions. My own life, by comparison, felt riven by discontinuities. Surfing, for a start, was like some battered remnant of childhood that kept drifting incongruously into the foreground of my days. Surfing bigger waves, especially, felt atavistic—a compulsive return to some primal scene to prove some primal fact of manhood. Peewee had also begun to fascinate me. His world, too, seemed seamless, but in a quite different way from Mark’s. The powerful continuities between his past and present, his childhood and adulthood, were links of place, of community, of character. They were so quiet. They didn’t seem to need to display themselves.

  • • •

  SLOAT LOOKED TO BE at least five refrigerators as I pulled up one Sunday afternoon in January. The waves breaking on the outside bar were difficult to see, though. The sun was shining, but the surf was generating a salt mist that filled the air on both sides of the Great Highway—a sharp-smelling haze like some essence from the bottom of the ocean. There was no wind, but gray plumes of spray rose nonetheless from the tops of the largest waves, lifted by the sheer mass and speed of their crests as they plunged. The inside bar was a maelstrom of dredging, midsized killer waves, their dark chocolate faces smeared with drifts of foam. The outside bar looked ill-defined, the swell confused, but the outside waves themselves were smooth and shiny, with clean peaks and sections looming randomly in the mist. Some of them looked ridable—loveliness amid lethality.

  I was surprised to see the Sloat lot full. It was Super Bowl day, the 49ers were playing, and kickoff was within the hour. Most of the cars, trucks, and vans were familiar, though: the Ocean Beach surf crew was out in force. Some of its members slouched behind steering wheels, others sat on the hoods of their cars, a few stood on the embankment above the beach. Nobody was in a wetsuit, and no boards had been unsheathed. But everyone was staring out to sea. I looked for a minute, and saw nothing. I rolled down my window and called to Sloat Bill, who was standing on the embankment, heavy shoulders hunched, hands jammed in the pockets of a ski jacket. He turned, regarded me for a moment from behind mirrored sunglasses, then cocked his head toward the surf and said, “Doc and Peewee.”

  I got out and stood on the embankment, shielding my eyes against the glare, and eventually picked out a pair of tiny figures rising over a massive silver swell. “Neither one of them’s taken off for the last half hour,” Sloat Bill said. “It’s really shifty.” Someone had set up a camera on a tripod, but he wasn’t bothering to man it; the mist made photography hopeless. “They’re both riding yellow guns,” Sloat Bill said. He kept his eyes on the horizon. He seemed miserable, I thought—even more gruff than usual. He was probably agonizing over whether to paddle out himself. Sloat Bill thought of himself as a big-wave surfer, and he did go out on some huge days. But he was a slow paddler, and often never got past the inside bar. He was powerfully built, with a great bull neck—he played competitive rugby, though he was over forty—and he could probably bench-press twice what I could, but fast paddling is not simply a matter of strength. Making a board glide on the surface is partly a matter of artful leverage, and pushing through waves is largely a matter of presenting the least possible resistance to them. Big waves demand a paradoxical combination—ferocity and passivity—that Sloat Bill had never seemed to master. He had only the ferocity. He rolled in the waves like a redwood log, or a canister of pure testosterone. He amused other surfers, very few of whom played rugby. He interested me, although I suspected that I irritated him. He once called me a communist during a poker game at his apartment. Worse, I had sometimes made it out on days when he had not.

  Today, I wasn’t tempted to try. These waves were far beyond my upper limit. I couldn’t see how Mark and Peewee had made it out—or how Peewee had been persuaded to try. It wasn’t his sort of surf—not clean. I stood with Sloat Bill a while, trying to keep Mark and Peewee in sight. They disappeared behind swells for minutes at a time. They paddled north constantly, barely holding position against a southbound current. After fifteen minutes, one of them suddenly appeared at the top of an immense wall, paddling furiously toward shore at the head of a peak that looked at least a block wide. A volley of sharp shouts and curses went up along the Sloat embankment. But the wave passed the paddler by; it stood sheer and black across the horizon for what seemed a long time, then silently broke, top to bottom. There were relieved shouts, and strangely bitter curses. The assortment of nonsurfers in the parking lot, on the embankment, on the beach all looked up in confusion. None of them seemed aware that anybody was in the water.

  I had somewhere else to be, across the city—at a friend’s house, where a group of people, none of them surfers, gathered each year to watch the Super Bowl. I asked Sloat Bill how long Mark and Peewee had been out. “Couple hours,” he said. “It took ’em thirty minutes to get out.” He didn’t turn his head.

  Twenty minutes later, I was still there, still waiting for something to happen. The mist was thicker, the sun was lower in the western sky. I was now going to miss the kickoff. A couple of big sets had come through, but Mark and Peewee had been nowhere near them. Although there was still no wind, the conditions wer
e, if anything, deteriorating. Huge rips had started moving through the outside bars, increasing their confusion. Soon the only question would be how Mark and Peewee were going to get back in.

  Finally, somebody caught a wave. It was a gigantic right, four or five times overhead, with a wave in front of it that blocked all view of the rider after the drop. Several seconds passed. Then the rider reappeared, fifty yards down the line and climbing the face at a radical angle, eliciting screams of surprise from the gallery. It was impossible to tell who was surfing. He rode all the way to the top of the wave, pivoted against the sky, then plunged out of sight again. There were appreciative cries and groans. “Fucker’s ripping,” someone said. The rider was in fact surfing the wave as if it were a third the size it really was. And he kept it up, wheeling and carving huge cutbacks, riding from the trough to the crest in unnervingly sharp arcs as the wave in front of his died down, affording an untrammeled view. It was still impossible to tell who it was, even after the yellow of his board became visible through the haze. I had never seen Mark or Peewee surf a wave that size with such abandon. The wave lost half its height, and all its power, when it hit the deep water between the bars, but the rider found a stray piece of steep swell that carried him cleanly across the trough and onto the inside bar. Somehow, as the wave jacked over the inside bar, he slipped down the face early enough to make a turn, and then drew a breathtaking line and ran for forty yards under a ledging lip, his arms outstretched against a backlit wall, before he finally straightened out, escaping the lip’s explosion by sailing far out onto the flat water in front of the wave. He stayed on his feet when the whitewater, its energy exhausted, finally caught him, and he worked it back and forth all the way to the sand.

  As he started up the beach, board tucked under his arm, it was still difficult to tell who it was. Finally, it became clear that it was Peewee. At the moment of recognition, Sloat Bill stepped forward to the edge of the embankment and solemnly began to clap his hands. Others, including me, joined in. Peewee looked up, startled. His face filled with alarm, and then sheepishness. He turned and angled south across the beach, shaking his head, and climbed the embankment where no one could see him.

  • • •

  CAROLINE HAD FINISHED her degree. She was making etchings at night, selling prints in local galleries—images of captivity, wings trussed in boxes, extremely finely detailed. She got a day job as a secretary for a private investigator, then became an investigator herself. She staked out slumlords, interviewed prisoners, impersonated a bank official, a prospective tenant, a United Way canvasser. I went along once or twice as backup to dicey meetings. She tricked people into stating their names, then served them with subpoenas. People kicked the subpoenas down the stairs, believing that if the documents did not touch their hands, they had not been served. (Wrong.) I went along to make sure that they did not kick her down the stairs. (They tried. One bad guy who had been conned by the United Way bit chased her through the hills of Oakland. Luckily, she had been a sprinter at school.) She worked for lawyers. She became interested in American law.

  Caroline had come to the United States for the art world. She basically agreed with my mother about San Francisco’s mediocrity problem. If she had wanted to live in a pleasant, easygoing city, she could have stayed in Harare, with her parents and childhood friends. New York beckoned. And yet she was starting to look askance at an art career. A gallery in New York had taken some of her pictures, but to make a living as a printmaker she needed to sell her work for ever-higher prices. It all looked rather airless, precious, too detached for her liking from the basic roil of life. She was also not pleased with the idea that her formal education was complete.

  Her father, Mark, came to town on a business trip. He was a minerals trader, now managing Zimbabwe’s newly nationalized minerals exporting. He and Caroline stayed up late, drinking a gallon jug of cheap wine to the bottom and banging heads about the war. Their family had been among the few whites who opposed the government in old white-run Rhodesia. But Mark had done some sanctions busting for the rogue regime. Now his daughter wanted to know why. It was a difficult night, and a cruel hangover, but an overdue conversation. At some point, Caroline announced an intention to study American law. Mark offered to help pay for it, confident that with his art-minded daughter it would never come to that. (Wrong. JD, Yale, 1989.)

  My book about teaching in Cape Town would soon be published. I wanted to go back to South Africa before that happened. The government was expelling foreign journalists and refusing visas to those who had published work it didn’t like. I might not be on their radar yet. I managed to get a tourist visa. The New Yorker gave me an assignment to write about black journalists on a white liberal newspaper in Johannesburg. Shawn, the editor, seemed unconcerned that I still hadn’t given him anything about the surfing doctor, though it had been a year at least. New York was calling me too. But it wasn’t just serendipity that Caroline and I each wanted to go east. We had survived a rough start, and I could still be a tyrant, but our hearts had enfolded. We found the same things funny.

  • • •

  TOWARD THE END of our third winter in San Francisco, after a series of storms, the sandbar at Outside VFW’s began to break regularly for the first time since our arrival. I saw why the wave was a local legend. The bar was unusually long and straight for Ocean Beach, with a deep channel at its northern end. Northwest swells produced clean waves there, but only short rides. The waves hit the bar straight on; one had to take off very near the channel to make them. More westerly swells, on the other hand, struck the bar at a slight angle, making for long, fast lefts of exceptional quality. Since the bar began to break only when the swell was over six feet, Outside VFW’s was never crowded. I had watched it break several times, including a couple of frightening days when only Mark, Peewee, Tim Bodkin, and a scatter of other certified big-wave riders paddled out, and I’d actually surfed it a few times on marginal days, when it wasn’t breaking with much authority. Then, in early 1986, there came a seriously big and fairly clean day. I didn’t have the board for such waves. But Mark did. “You can use my eight-eight,” he kept saying, indicating the yellow gun in his van as he scrambled into his wetsuit. “I’ll ride my eight-six.”

  It occurred to me that Mark might be trying to offer my life one last time to the pitiless gods of Ocean Beach. Maybe he already knew what I was trying to find the nerve to tell him—that I had decided to move back to New York. I had mixed feelings about leaving, but one of the biggest was relief. Each winter at Ocean Beach, I had had at least one bad scare—some heavy passage in big surf that troubled my sleep for many nights afterward. Bob Wise understood. “Surfers never do drown out here,” he once told me. “It’s tourists and drunk bikers and sailors who drown. But even the most experienced surfers get convinced they’re about to drown out here at least once a winter. That’s what makes Ocean Beach so weird.” Mark, who thrived on the weirdness, would not understand, I assumed. But I was glad to be getting away without drowning. I was also glad to be getting out from under Mark’s evangelizing gaze. I was tired of being a sidekick. Once upon a time, in Southeast Asia, Bryan had felt compelled to get away from me. But that was different. We were partners. I didn’t know how to tell Mark I was leaving. I didn’t want to hear about how I was swerving from the surfer’s path.

  Ten or fifteen guys were hanging out on the seawall. VFW’s—Inside VFW’s—was the most popular spot along Ocean Beach, and the guys standing around that day, making no move to go out, surfed there regularly. Among them was a beefy housepainter named Rich, who was one of the dominant surfers at this end of the beach. Rich scowled at me as I walked past, the yellow 8'8" under my arm. I realized I had never seen him out in waves over six feet. Today was eight to ten, at least. The swell was massive and fairly west. It was not immaculate—there was a little sideshore wind, and a raging rip—but several stunning lefts roared through, unridden, while we were getting ready to go out. Bodkin and P
eewee were already out and each had caught a couple of huge waves, but they were surfing conservatively and letting the ledgier sets go by.

  Paddling Mark’s board felt like paddling a miniature oil tanker. I kept an old single-fin 7'6" for big days, but I had been riding a 6'9" thruster most of the winter. Thick-railed and sharp-nosed, the 8'8" gun floated me high out of the water, and I had no trouble keeping up with Mark as we started out through the channel. The water was brownish green and very cold; the channel, which ran clear from the shorebreak out to sea, with no inside bar to cross, was choppy and spooky nonetheless, with huge swells sweeping in from both sides, forming fat, unpleasant A-frames that half broke before they vanished. There was a shallow outside bar to the north, where enormous waves leaped up and disemboweled themselves with a horrible growl. To the south, the last section of the long, winding left at Outside VFW’s wasn’t much more inviting. It too looked shallow and extremely thick. Mark and I paused to watch a smooth-faced wave pitch heavily over the last section of the bar, barely twenty yards from where we lay. Into the great dark barrel it formed, Mark bellowed, “Death!” The idea seemed to please him.

  I kept angling out as Mark turned left, cutting across the edge of the bar. Peewee and Bodkin were a couple of hundred yards south, and Mark made a beeline for them, but I circled far around, preferring to look like a coward rather than take a chance on getting caught by a big set. A small set rolled through. It was too far inside for any of us to catch, but even it thundered ominously when it finally broke. I found the scale of things out here thoroughly daunting. I did not look forward to seeing a big set. I checked my position against the shore as I slowly moved south. Huge-lettered graffiti on the seawall—MARIA and KIMO and PTAH—marked my progress. The shore looked, as it often did on big days, bizarrely peaceful and normal. A dark line of cypress trees rose beyond the seawall—a windbreak for the ocean end of Golden Gate Park—and two windmills rose above the trees. Just north, the cliffs were brushed with pink flowers and lined by a stone belvedere, from the ruins of the old Sutro mansion. It all looked so stable. I kept yanking my gaze back and forth, craning to see where I was, then craning to see if anything nightmarish was yet looming out at sea.