Barbarian Days

by William Finnegan

  But when I came to man’s estate

  With hey, ho, the wind and the rain

  ’Gainst knaves and thieves men shut their gate

  For the rain it raineth every day

  This stuff had lodged deep, obviously, beyond all critique. I sang until Moll was asleep, then tiptoed away.

  I wondered, as she got older, if she listened to the lyrics. We sang her to sleep, ritually, until she was eight or nine. I once asked her, just to see what she would say, about a line in the fourth verse of “Autumn to May.” It seemed she knew every word. The downy swan’s hatchling went from snail to bird to butterfly, she said. “And he who tells a bigger tale would have to tell a lie.”

  Mollie, Long Island, 2009

  • • •

  I WENT LOOKING, as a reporter, for the place in Los Angeles where I grew up. It no longer existed. The hills were covered with houses. Mulholland Drive was paved. New-tract saplings had turned into redwoods. Woodland Hills had become a mature suburb. I interviewed Mr. Jay, my favorite English teacher from high school. He said the school had gone to hell. Ethnic gangs fought in the parking lot. (Armenians versus Persians, he said.) Shakespeare classes were long extinct. Families who had the money now sent their kids to private schools. If I wanted to write about growing up in a newly minted bedroom community, which I did, I would need to go at least two valleys farther out.

  I made my way to the Antelope Valley, in northern L.A. County. All the discontents of sprawl were concentrated there, along with the fallout from a busted housing bubble, shrinking defense and aerospace industries, and shrinking public budgets for everything but prisons. There was a suffocating racial tension in the schools and an epidemic of methamphetamine abuse. I ended up writing about a number of teenagers who were washing around, trying not to drown, in this toxic exurban pond. My story focused on two warring skinhead gangs, one antiracist, the other neo-Nazi. It was difficult stuff, even before one of the kids I got to know stabbed one of his rivals to death at a party.

  This was not the place where I grew up, nor any kind of updated facsimile. This was a cold new world, all stark downward mobility. I found the reporting, which took several months, deeply disturbing, and I tried to take occasional breaks, and to time those breaks to coincide with promising surf forecasts. I would drive late at night to a little condo that Domenic kept then in north Malibu, let myself in, sleep, and in the morning ride a borrowed board at a nearby pointbreak. Those mornings were both cathartic and Edenic. Bougainvillea spilled down chalky cliffs. The kelp, the eelgrass, the gentle blue waves. Seals barked, gulls cried, dolphins breached. I felt spiritually poisoned—some acrid cocktail of anger, sadness, hopelessness—by the story I was working on. Surfing had never made more sense.

  It traces a bright memory thread through a motley of assignments. In 2010, when I needed a morning off from debriefing police torture victims in Tijuana, I knew a wave, a glossy left, just across the border, and that was where I ran. In 2011, I was in Madagascar with a team of reptile experts who were trying to stop poachers from driving a rare, golden-shelled tortoise into extinction. The team members could talk turtles, snakes, and lizards all day, all night. They could bushwhack, it seemed, indefinitely through killing heat if they thought a good specimen might be hiding under a rock out there. I realized at some point that Selya and I were much the same, minus the science and conservationism, about surfing. We could talk waves until any nonsurfers in earshot, starting with our wives, fled in horror. We did it on surf runs, over surf mags and videos, at sidewalk cafés on Broadway, trading shots of tequila, which Selya called “loudmouth soup.” The topic was inexhaustible, in our view, its finer points effectively infinite. In Madagascar, my companions decided to launch yet another expedition to see yet another tortoise, and I bailed out, going off the clock in a coastal town called Fort Dauphin, where I found a board—a beat-up but serviceable 6'6"—and surfed myself to exhaustion in rowdy, wind-ripped waves for three days until they returned.

  In 2012, a story took me to Australia. It was the first time I had been there since Bryan and I ducked out of Darwin. I was writing about a China-driven mining boom, and a mining magnate named Gina Rinehart. She was the richest person in Oz, floridly right-wing, and something of a national obsession. My reporting was partly in Sydney and Melbourne but mainly in Western Australia, where the iron ore and Rinehart were. I found Australia changed, less cheeky, less “Jack’s as good as his master,” more preoccupied with its billionaires—or maybe that was only because I was writing about one of them. I looked up Sue, my old pal from Surfer’s Paradise, who was living on the coast south of Perth. She, at least, was as cheeky as ever, bless her larrikin soul. She was a besotted grandmother now, living in a house full of books on a gorgeous bay. “Bet you never thought I’d make a quid,” she said, which was true. She had somehow turned an abalone license into a comfortable life. She advised me to remember that Rinehart, who impressed me as a paranoid bully, was the only woman in the man’s world of mine bosses, which I tried to do. Sue’s son, Simon, who lived nearby, loaned me a board and wetsuit and gave me directions to a beachbreak called Boranup. It was a country spot, with cold, clear turquoise water, white sand, big, brushy hills with no buildings in sight, and a scatter of surf trucks parked on the beach. The waves were four-to-six, peaky and clean, the wind offshore. I surfed for hours, slowly figuring out the bars. My last ride felt like a reward for effort: a long, smoking overhead left all the way into the shallows.

  • • •

  SURFING BLEW UP, I’m not sure when. It was always too popular, in my narrow view. Crowds were always a problem at well-known breaks. But this was different. The number of people surfing doubled and doubled again—five million estimated worldwide in 2002, twenty million in 2010—with kids taking it up in practically every country with a coastline, even if it was only a big lake. More than that, the idea of surfing became a global marketing phenomenon. Logos identified with surfing, slapped on T-shirts, shoes, sunglasses, skateboards, hats, backpacks, flew off shelves in shopping malls from Helsinki to Idaho Falls. Some of these billion-dollar brands started out as back-of-the-van boardshort vendors in California and Australia. Others were latter-day corporate concoctions.

  Actually, surfing imagery has long been used to flog product. Fifty years ago, Hamm’s beer signs showing Rusty Miller dropping in at Sunset were an American bar and liquor-store staple. In the industrial wastelands of New Haven, Connecticut, I once saw a billboard depicting a guy deeply tubed—also on a wave recognizably Sunset—with SALEM stamped in smoke rings on the wave face. Alcohol and tobacco companies, keen to have their names affiliated with a healthy, picturesque sport, were prominent contest sponsors in the early days of pro surfing. But the spooky and incongruous ubiquity of surf imagery today is something new.

  There are five blood-red surfboards bolted to a granite wall in Times Square. I’ve been cutting through Times Square in all weathers since 1987, when I first went to work for the New Yorker. But I only started feeling furtive there in the last few years. It’s partly those boards. They’re all single-fin pintails with an elegant, exaggerated, needle-nose shape. They’re not actually surfboards, they’re just décor—shop frontage for a Quiksilver outlet—but for me their stretched-teardrop outline recalls, viscerally, a time and place (Hawaii, my late teens) when boards with a very similar shape were all the rage in larger waves. Then there’s the video running on multiple big screens above the same shop. For anyone else on the street, I assume, it’s just more flashing eye candy. That turquoise wave reeling from screen to screen? I know that wave. It’s in eastern Java, off a jungle wilderness. Bryan and I camped there, in a rickety tree house, in another life. Why do they have to show that wave? And the young guy slouching in its depths? I know who he is. He’s an interesting character, mainly because of the things he declines to do with his talent. He doesn’t compete, or pull the obvious big maneuvers in the obvious situations. His
sponsors, including Quiksilver, pay him to slouch stubbornly, stylishly, a postmodern Bartleby admired in the world of surfing for his refusals. So why does it matter that I know at a glance just who that slacker threading a familiar Indonesian barrel on a video in Times Square is? Because I sometimes feel like my private life, a not-small corner of my soul, is being laid out for hawking, anything from consumer loans to light trucks, on commercial surfaces everywhere I look, including, lately, taxicab TVs.

  Surfers hope bleakly that surfing will one day become, like rollerblading, uncool. Then, perhaps, millions of kooks will quit and leave the waves to the die-hards. But the corporations selling the idea of surfing are determined, of course, to “grow the sport.” Some underground panache may be useful for marketing, but really, the more mainstream, the merrier. Meanwhile, thousands of entrepreneurs, most of them underemployed surfers, have opened beachfront concessions to teach surfing in dozens of countries. Coastal resorts now include surf lessons among their amenities. “Cross surfing off your bucket list.” It’s unlikely that surf schools for tourists will add many new faces to the crowded lineups where seasoned surfers battle for scarce waves. Still, I find it unsettling when random Manhattanites jauntily announce that they surf. Oh yes, they say, they learned how on vacation last summer in Costa Rica.

  • • •

  SURFERS AROUND HERE—Long Island and Jersey locals—are strangely genial. I’ve never gotten used to it. There was a baseline reserve in California and Hawaii, an idea of cool in the water—what was worth saying, what level of ride or wave or maneuver merited a hoot of approbation—that I internalized as a kid and can’t unlearn. On this coast, people will hoot anyone, friend or stranger, for almost anything that looks halfway decent. I like the unpretentiousness, the lack of snobbery, and yet some unredeemed part of me recoils. Greater New York lineups are, against stereotype, mellow. I have never seen a threat or even an angry exchange, let alone a fight, in the water here. That’s partly because the crowds are never maddeningly terrible à la Malibu or Rincon, partly because the waves are usually not worth fighting over, but mostly it’s culture. A certain superciliousness and self-absorption that long ago became the norm on more celebrated coasts and islands in surf world have never taken root in these parts. It’s easy to strike up a conversation in the lineup with a stranger here—I’ve done it a hundred times. People are even eager to share detailed knowledge of their local breaks. Another transplant surfer I know calls it “urban aloha.” But it’s really more suburban or shore-town. At least I’ve never met anybody in the water who said they live in Manhattan. Brooklyn, a few times, yes.

  Selya is a local everywhere we go. He was born and raised in Manhattan, but he lived for a critical adolescent surfer-development period on the Jersey Shore, and he’s consummately at home on Long Island. In fact, Movin’ Out is a musical about blue-collar kids on Long Island, set to Billy Joel tunes. Selya played a prom-king type, Eddie, who ships out to Vietnam and comes home damaged. Heavily muscled, high-strung, charismatic, not tall, he looked the part, and became the character, and his dancing shot out the lights. When we first met, he asked if I knew the New Yorker’s dance critic, Arlene Croce. I didn’t. “I gotta put that lady on my payroll,” he muttered. I looked up her review of Movin’ Out. It called him “an utterly remarkable dancer.” Selya had spent much of his career at American Ballet Theatre, initially under the direction of Mikhail Baryshnikov, before moving to Broadway. He still had the ballet dancer’s duckwalk. I noticed that in an interview with the New York Times, he compared dancing and surfing. With music as with waves, he said, you are “yielding to something more powerful than yourself.” I thought he had that right.

  Chasing waves with Selya is like diving under the surface of this octo-megalopolis we call home. He knows shortcuts, in-jokes, dive bars, lore. He slips into a Broadway diner at dawn, orders an egg sandwich with the kind of regular-customer byplay you normally see only in a tightly edited movie. “Make it nice.” He listens to obnoxious two-guy sports talk radio with a faraway grin. I suspect he can talk each Mets pitcher’s mechanics as long as the shock jocks can. Like Peter, he’s a pleasure to surf with. He’s competitive and self-critical. He’s a much stronger paddler than I am these days, and he catches a ton of waves. His surfing is precise, aggressive, explosive—balletic. He’s also an unusually astute audience. On a cold winter afternoon in New Jersey, we’re surfing big, shifty waves at a spot we rarely ride. Our regular spots are too big today, all closing out. Late in the session, I paddle for a warbling, lurching set wave. I get hung up in the lip—cursing my heavy wetsuit, my weak arms—and then barely stick the drop, bottom-turning in a pressure crouch under a surprisingly tall, dark, heaving wall. I make the wave, pulling out in cliff shadow far inside. I’ve lost track of Selya. As I start back out the channel, wondering if he saw that drop, I get a glimpse of him way outside, bobbing over a swell in a last slanting column of sunlight. He has his back to me, but one arm raised high, fist clenched. That answers my question. He saw it.

  On another Jersey winter day, even bigger, and sloppier—the swell’s too east; our educated guess on this dash was not so smart—Selya says, “I’m not feeling it.” He stays on shore. He’s not a big-wave surfer. Neither am I. But I can’t face returning to the city completely skunked. So I suit up and paddle out. Water in the thirties, air in the thirties, an icy west wind. Evil brown ocean. I have an awful session—missing waves, getting blasted. The surf’s huge, by East Coast standards, but it’s not good. I wash in. Back at the car, Selya says, “Sorry about the stench of defeat in here.” I manage to convince him, I think, on the drive home that he missed nothing but punishment. As the Manhattan skyline lifts into view across the salt marshes and docklands of Newark Bay, Selya says, “Look at that. It’s like a giant reef. The rock and coral sticking up, all the sea life down in the cracks.”

  Selya’s work takes him all over, and he contrives to surf between shows on tour. In Brazil, in Japan, he’s found boards and waves. He once dashed from London to Cornwall, a five-hour drive, to surf. Last year, from Denmark, he texted me cell phone shots of tiny gray, horrible-looking North Sea slop: he was all over it, clambering across jagged rocks. He does an annual gig with Ballet Hawaii, in Honolulu, in December—the heart of the surf season on the North Shore. He and his wife, Jackie, who’s a Broadway singer, flee to Puerto Rico when they can. In 2013 they rented a house in the northwest corner of the island, which is surf country, during surf season. I bunked with them there during a swell so solid that I was very glad I’d brought my 8'0" Brewer gun.

  We sometimes chase waves far from home. A few years ago, with a bunch of other surfers, we chartered a boat out of West Java. Surfwise, the trip was a bust. We anchored for ten days off an uninhabited island in the Sunda Strait that’s known to get great waves. It was the height of the swell season in Indonesia, but the surf stayed small. Selya brought a bag of DVDs—some Steve Buscemi movies and a complete set of The Office, the British original, with Ricky Gervais. He screened them at night, on a tiny portable player, in the sweltering hold where we all slept, and Gervais became the unlikely trip mascot. Selya knew the scripts by heart. You could hear him in the lineup, cracking himself up with favorite lines, nailing the bumptious provincial accent of David Brent, the office manager played by Gervais, while we paddled in circles, chasing mediocre waves. Selya is a connoisseur of cringe. He loves the ingenuity of desperate efforts to maintain dignity in the face of humiliation. “I identify,” he explains. Toward the end of the trip, I came down with an apparent malaria relapse. I’ve had them, infrequently, over the years. Fever and severe chills. There were no thick blankets on board—we were anchored at six degrees south. So Selya loaned me, when the chills got bad, a velour leisure suit—black, with red piping—that he’d brought for the plane rides. I curled up in my bunk, freezing, groaning, dressed as a Jersey wiseguy. I sweated through the leisure suit. It was okay, Selya said. We could burn it if we ever got back to land.<
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  Peter Spacek was on that trip. When I got sick, he kept an eye on me. He hardly surfed—the waves weren’t worth it—but he did a lot of sketching: close studies of reef life, boat life, and the many species of fish he caught. He and I collected broken chunks of bright blue and red coral for our daughters.

  • • •

  MY FATHER SAILED HIS BOAT to Florida for the winter. It wasn’t necessary—most boat owners in the Northeast just haul out—but he was mostly retired now, he had the time. I joined him in the spring for a northbound leg, starting in Norfolk, Virginia. We sailed the length of the Chesapeake Bay, then down the Delaware River, around Cape May, and up the Jersey Shore. Rounding Cape May, coming out of Delaware Bay, we had our traditional near disaster. A large fleet of small white-hulled fishing boats appeared to be working the shoals off the cape. It was a cold, clear morning. We wondered what could be running, to attract so many boats. The “boats” turned out to be breaking waves. We were nowhere near shore, but the depth sounder started reading twenty feet, fifteen, ten, and suddenly the breaking waves were all around us. I was at the helm, dodging waves, frantically trying to find deeper water. That boat drew six feet, and I saw the sounder’s reading drop to five, four, three. At that stage, I had the boat heeled hard over, wallowing in the troughs just to keep the keel out of the sand. The waves weren’t big, but they weren’t whitecaps—they were breaking waves in chest-deep water. We could see the bottom. It was pale. It would have been a very bad place to run aground, in forty-degree water, miles from shore. Somehow, we got off the shoal. We motored out to sea, reviewing our charts. Yep, there they were. Horrendous hazards. The shipping channel hugged the Delaware shore. After a week of sailing carefully through shallow bays and narrow canals, we had seen open ocean and, idiotically, relaxed. We were too shaken to laugh. We sailed slowly to Atlantic City, tied up the boat, and took a Greyhound bus to New York.