Barbarian Days

by William Finnegan

  Being out in big surf is dreamlike. Terror and ecstasy ebb and flow around the edges of things, each threatening to overwhelm the dreamer. An unearthly beauty saturates an enormous arena of moving water, latent violence, too-real explosions, and sky. Scenes feel mythic even as they unfold. I always feel a ferocious ambivalence: I want to be nowhere else; I want to be anywhere else. I want to drift and gaze, drinking it in, except maximum vigilance, a hyperalertness to what the ocean is doing, cannot be relaxed. Big surf (the term is relative, of course—what I find life-threatening, the next hellman may find entirely manageable) is a force field that dwarfs you, and you survive your time there only by reading those forces carefully and well. But the ecstasy of actually riding big waves requires placing yourself right beside the terror of being buried by them: the filament separating the two states becomes diaphanous. Dumb luck weighs heavily, painfully. And when things go badly, as they inevitably do—when you’re caught inside by a very large wave, or fail to make one—all your skill and strength and judgment mean nothing. Nobody maintains their dignity while getting rumbled by a big wave. The only thing you can hope to control at that point is the panic.

  I edged south slowly, toward Mark and the others, taking deep, regular breaths in an effort to slow my heart, which had been pounding unpleasantly since the moment I first thought seriously about paddling out. Mark took off on a wave as I approached the lineup. He screamed as he launched into a mammoth face and disappeared behind a seething brown wall. The takeoff spot, I noted, was directly off a big red graffito, PTAH LIVES. Bodkin, who was still sitting with Peewee, shouted my name, grinning widely. It was a grin that struck me as half wicked amusement at my safety-first route to the lineup, half congratulation that I was out there at all. Peewee simply nodded hello. Peewee’s blandness in the water was usually a blessing. His poker-faced virtuosity left psychological space for other surfers, which was something that many of them, I believed, appreciated. Sometimes, though—today, perhaps—I thought Peewee carried surf cool a bit far. Of course, he probably didn’t consider Outside VFW’s at this size a particularly scary place, and maybe didn’t realize that for me it was a stretch.

  As it happened, luck—and the right board—were with me that afternoon. I caught several big, good waves over the next couple of hours. I didn’t surf them particularly well—it was all I could do to keep the 8'8" pointed in the right general direction—but they were long, fast rides, and after each of them I managed to scramble back outside unscathed. Mark’s board was wonderfully stable and allowed me to get into waves early. I even caught what Mark later called “the wave of the day.” On another afternoon, on another board, I would probably have let it pass, but I found myself at the head of the peak alone, far outside, as a vast wave arrived. The wall stretched north for blocks, seemingly impossible to make, but by that point I had great faith in the bar and the channel. I got in early, using a small cross-chop on the face—what big-wave riders call a chip shot—to launch myself over the ledge. I had to fight off a little jolt of acrophobia as I jumped to my feet—the bottom of the wave looked miles beneath me. Halfway down the face, I leaned back hard into a turn, struggling to stay over my board as it gained speed across the water running up the face. My nerve wobbled a second time when I looked over my shoulder at the wall ahead. It was much bigger than I had expected: taller and steeper and more threatening. I turned away and concentrated, as if wearing blinders, on the few feet of rushing water immediately in front of me, carving long, gradual high-speed turns. The wave held up beautifully, and I made it easily, although the final, house-thick section next to the channel shot me out so fast that I had to abandon all pretense of control, all style, and simply stand there, knees bent, a gratified passenger.

  Peewee was in the channel, paddling past as I pulled out. He nodded. We began paddling back out together. My entire body was trembling. After a minute, I couldn’t help myself. I asked, “How big was that wave?” Peewee laughed. “Two feet,” he said.

  • • •

  WE MOVED TO NEW YORK that summer. It took me seven years to write the piece about Mark and Ocean Beach. More urgent topics—apartheid, war, calamities of different kinds—kept claiming my attention. These were serious matters, consuming as work, self-justifying as projects. Surfing was the opposite. Before I finished the Mark profile, I had published three books—two about South Africa, one about a civil war in Mozambique—plus the first installment of an ambitious book about downward mobility in the United States. I had gone to work full-time for the New Yorker, where I wrote, among other things, dozens of opinion pieces. This was another source of my hesitation. Here I was writing, often contentiously, about poverty, politics, race, U.S. foreign policy, criminal justice, and economic development, hoping to have my arguments taken seriously. I wasn’t sure that coming out of the closet as a surfer would be helpful. Other policy wonks might say, Oh, you’re just a dumb surfer, what do you know?

  But the biggest reason for my reluctance to finish the piece was a gnawing concern that Mark wouldn’t like it. I admired him and found him easy to write about, but he was a complicated character, with a plus-sized self-regard that annoyed, at best, many people in the little surf community I was also trying to depict. After I left San Francisco, he started editing a medical advice column for Surfer. His exploits and epigrams became a staple item in the magazine’s regional columns. The surf mags discovered Ocean Beach, partly through Mark’s efforts. Then, in 1990, Surfer published a phenomenal fourteen-frame sequence of a young goofyfoot, Aaron Plank, on a reeling, double-overhead left at O.B. Aaron was completely hidden from view for seven frames—about four seconds—and came out clean. It felt like the end of an era. The whole world knew about Ocean Beach now. There was even, I heard, a pro contest being held at VFW’s.

  But the strangest news I had of San Francisco through Surfer was a paean to Peewee, by Mark. “Quiet, seemingly egoless, he draws little attention to himself—until he paddles out and goes off,” Mark wrote. “Best spot on the beach—Peewee’s there. Best wave of the set—Peewee’s on it. Best wave of the day—Peewee got it.” Mark compared Peewee to Clint Eastwood, and the famous fin-busting incident was mentioned. It was a gracious, unambivalent toast. Had I misread their rivalry? Or was Mark just striking the right high note?

  I had been wrong, by the way, to fear Mark’s reaction to the news that I was leaving San Francisco. He never missed a beat. We took a last trip to Big Sur together, and he wished me luck. He never seemed to pass up an opportunity, though, once we had landed in New York, to let me know about all the great waves I was missing at Ocean Beach, or on the various surf trips I inexplicably declined to join him on—to Indonesia, Costa Rica, Scotland. In Alaska, he chartered a plane, explored hundreds of miles of coast, and, near the foot of a glacier, discovered and surfed magnificent waves, alone, off a beach marked with fresh grizzly tracks.

  I was wrong, too, about losing credibility as a political columnist by revealing that I surfed. Nobody seemed to care one way or the other.

  But I was not wrong about Mark’s reaction to the piece, when it was finally published. He hated it.

  Peter Spacek, Jardim do Mar, Madeira, 1995

  NINE

  BASSO PROFUNDO

  Madeira, 1994–2003

  MY LIFE HAD ASSUMED A SETTLED, MIDDLE-AGED SHAPE. CAROLINE and I were married. We had been in New York eight years. I was churning out work—columns, articles, books. Journalism. I had turned forty. We had made a world. Bought an apartment. Our friends were writers, editors, artists, academics, publishers. Caroline had set art aside and become, to her own lasting surprise, a defense attorney. She liked matching wits with “the government.” I relied more than ever on her warm, unsparing eye. She and I had come to the dance together. Nobody else could know the things we knew, the private language we had built. Before we got married, we had broken up for a while, lived apart. That felt like a near-death experience.

  My repo
rting took me all over, into civil wars and unfamiliar worlds. Some projects swallowed me whole for months and years at a time. Most of the stories I chased were dark with suffering and injustice, but some, like the first democratic elections in South Africa, were hugely gratifying. In the old struggle for my devotion between grown-up work and surfing, work had thrown a hammerlock on chasing waves. Then surfing, ever wily, twisted free. This reversal was abetted, even inspired, by a Rincon-trained regularfoot named Peter Spacek.

  He and I met in Montauk, the old fishing village at the east end of Long Island. A surf-magazine editor had given me an address for Peter in a beachfront subdivision known as Ditch Plains. It turned out to be a shingled summer-rental bungalow with a note duct-taped to the front door. There was a Herbie Fletcher longboard, the note said, under the front porch. I should paddle out on that. Below the note was a casual, expert drawing of small, crowded waves. Ditch Plains sits, for surfing purposes, at an interesting spot. It’s the easternmost settlement on the ocean coast of Long Island. To the west stretch more than a hundred miles of beachbreaks, all the way to Coney Island, in New York City. It’s a remarkably flat, sandy coast. But the sand turns to rock at Ditch, and the last four miles out to Montauk Point are reefbreaks and pointbreaks scattered off a shale-cliffed, roadless shore. In summer, Ditch is a popular family beach, with burrito wagons parked in the dunes and a long, gentle left that breaks along the line where the sand bottom turns to rock. It’s a good beginner’s break. I had never been moved to surf there.

  The waves looked chest-high, crumbly, soft. It was a sunny late-summer afternoon. There were probably forty people out, by far the biggest surf crowd I had seen on the East Coast. It was the first time I had been on a longboard in decades. Surfing had endured a longboard revival in the ’80s, driven mainly by older guys who could no longer manage shortboards. Longboards require less strength and agility. They catch waves more easily. But longboarders catch waves so early that at many spots they had started crowding out more high-performance boards. For me, it was a point of pride to keep riding a shortboard as I staggered into my forties. Reverting to a longboard would be, I thought, like using a geriatric walker—your dancing days were over. I planned to put it off as long as possible. I knee-paddled around the pack at Ditch and caught a wave outside. It felt odd, maneuvering a ten-foot board, but the ancient moves came back one by one, and by the end of the ride I was cross-stepping gingerly, mostly ironically, toward the nose. When I kicked out, a guy was sitting on the shoulder studying me. He was a hawk-nosed fellow about my age, with dark blond hair down past his shoulders and a goatee. “They didn’t tell me you were a longboarder,” he squawked.

  Peter was an illustrator, and the editor who had connected us wanted us to collaborate on an article about chasing a hurricane swell up the East Coast. I had surfed a few hurricane swells on Fire Island, but most of my surfing now happened on trips—to California, Mexico, Costa Rica, the Caribbean, France. And most of those trips could also be described, to be brutally frank, as vacations. So I was still surfing, but not really. I wasn’t even dialed in to the waves around New York City.

  After I straightened him out on the longboard question, Peter and I agreed that the swell-chasing article idea was lame. Way too much driving, on a coastline we both found incoherent. Then he started introducing me to Montauk. “It’s my little paradise,” he said. He didn’t mean Ditch Plains, but the uncrowded reef- and beachbreaks in both directions. Peter lived in Manhattan, and had been sharing summer rentals in Ditch for years, but he was still learning the more obscure, fickle spots around Montauk. He was originally from Santa Barbara, and had lived in Hawaii. The first time we scored good waves together, on a solid fall swell at a rock reef east of Ditch, I found the smoothness and power of his surfing startling. It wasn’t a style you saw often on the East Coast, where small waves and short rides tend to produce jerky, ungraceful surfing.

  That night over dinner he showed me a surf-mag travel piece that had him fired up. The waves in the photos were dreamy: big, deep-hued, knee-weakeningly clean. Their location, following surf-mag convention, was not named, but the editors had not worked hard to disguise the place, and Peter said he knew where it was. “Madeira,” he said. “Like the wine.” He opened a map. The island sat out in the North Atlantic winter swell window like a bull’s-eye, six hundred miles southwest of Lisbon. He wanted to check it out. So did I, suddenly.

  • • •

  WE MADE OUR FIRST TRIP in November 1994. Madeira was a shock to the senses—sheer green coasts, tiny cliff-hugging roads, Portuguese peasants studying our boards suspiciously, waves surging heavily out of deep ocean. We drove through gorges and forests, over high, vertiginous ridges. We ate prego no pão (a garlic steak sandwich) at roadside cafés and tossed back espressos. We clambered up seawalls and down embankments. There didn’t seem to be any other surfers around. On the north coast, off a village called Ponta Delgada, we found a big left. It was messy and, like every spot we saw, it broke too close to hungry-looking rocks. But the wave cleaned up as it swung into the lee of the point, and the inside wall was long, fast, and powerful. I caught a series of screamers. Peter, paddling past me, growled, “Would you please stop ripping?” I liked his naked competitiveness. He surfed better than I did, usually, and at Delgada he was venturing alone out into a windblown, blue-water zone beyond the point, hunting for monsters that I wanted no part of. But, unlike me, he was having bad luck with wave selection. He also had, unlike me, a girlfriend on shore watching.

  Alison had been a surprise addition to the trip. She and Peter had only recently met. She was thin, strong, acerbic, endlessly game, black-haired, also a commercial illustrator. They both drew constantly—in cafés and airport lounges, crosshatching away, she reaching over to add ink to his work in progress. “Don’t be afraid of black!” They faxed their work from hotels and car-rental agencies to clients back in the States. The two of them were stylish, low-maintenance, nothing-daunted travelers. But they could be mercurial. The day after we arrived in Madeira, before we had found waves, they announced that they wanted to go back to mainland Portugal, which had looked more fun. That was out of the question, I said. I was silently horrified. What was wrong with these people? Peter had started sporting a beret—another bad sign. Then we started getting waves. First at Ponta Delgada, and then, a few miles east of there, we found a chunky, consistent reefbreak that Peter named Shadowlands. The cliff there was so tall—nearly three thousand feet—that the winter sun never reached the shore. We wore thin wetsuits—long arms, short legs—and slowly worked out how to thread the surprise barrel section at low-tide Shadowlands.

  But the main wave region was the southwest coast, where northwest swells swept around the island’s western end and were smoothed into long, orderly lines. From our surf-mag source, we knew where to look. There was a village called Jardim do Mar—the Garden of the Sea. It sat out on a small, storybook headland. Off that headland, if the photos were to be believed, a great wave broke. The first time we checked it, the wind was wrong and the surf was small. I went exploring the coast (vertical, deserted, stunning) west of Jardim by surfboard, not expecting to find waves, while Peter and Alison hiked along the rocks. He lugged a board, just in case. At a rugged, boulder-strewn promontory called Ponta Pequena, we stumbled on a surprising setup: clean, fierce little rights wrapping into a shallow cove. Peter and I got amongst it. For chest-high waves, the penalties for falling were unusually high, and Peter left a fair amount of blood on the rocks. I had another lucky outing. Afterward, in his drawings of our first Ponta Pequena session, I saw that Peter had been once again keeping score. He got 1.5 barrels while I got 5, according to a box score included in the drawing. Also, he got hurt and I did not. All while his girlfriend watched.

  One reason I liked these little contests Peter devised, it occurred to me later, was that I always seemed to win them. Otherwise, Peter probably wouldn’t have mentioned them. Beneath his skater grunge presentat
ion (he still skateboarded, at forty-plus, around his neighborhood, TriBeCa), he had quietly perfect manners. His parents were Czech immigrants who fled Eastern Europe when he was small, and some of his uncommon civility came, I guessed, from them: an Old World upbringing in the wilds of California. The rest, though, was him. But I loved the way he tapped into the showing off and one-upmanship of surfing and turned it into straight-faced gags. I had surfed with too many guys with whom the latent competition was loaded, and therefore never mentioned. Peter’s hero at art school had been R. Crumb, and he and the master shared an affinity for lampooning awkward truths.

  For Madeira, I had bought a big-wave board, a gun, the first I had owned. It was an 8'0" squashtail thruster, thick and dartlike, built for pure speed. It was ostensibly shaped by an old North Shore hand named Dick Brewer. Brewer was the best-known big-wave shaper in surfing, and I doubted that he had done more than design and sign my board. I had bought it off the rack at a surf shop on Long Island. It was a mystery what the Brewer was doing there—Long Island would probably never see, even on the biggest hurricane swells, waves that required such a board—but I took its appearance as a sign. Peter urged me to get it and I did. He also brought a gun along.