Barbarian Days

by William Finnegan

  Bill and Pat Finnegan, Yosemite, California, 1990s

  It had been a sweet week. Nosing up the Chesapeake, we put into hamlets you would never find by road. We ate hard crabs, soft crabs, blue crabs, she crabs. Shot the breeze with waitresses and tackle shop owners. My father and I had always shared an affection, bordering on compulsion, for checking out obscure places. Each of our wives kidded us about all the aimless detours taken on family trips. My dad’s favorite part of making movies and TV was location scouting. My favorite part of my work is following my curiosity around the bend, over the next ridge, into the souk, hunting facts and asking questions, going where the story seems like it might be rich. One evening, moored to a can under an oak-covered bluff, sipping the one vodka tonic he allowed himself, Dad asked me about Somalia. He had read my piece about it, but he wanted to know what the place looked and felt like, how ordinary people got by, what they ate, how I got around. So I told him, and he listened so hard, in the deepening shadows of that peaceful cove, to my descriptions of bombed-out Mogadishu, and the long scarves the women wore, and the teenage gunmen I had to hire as bodyguards, and the heavy-weapon battlewagons known as “technicals” that they drove around and fought from and slept on at night. He took in the tragedy and every detail of this far-flung world with such unfeigned wonder, I felt honored to bring him the news. It was a place he knew he would never go, and I had gone, and he wanted to hear about it. If he had any worries about my safety, he kept them to himself. We had always been lucky—dumb but lucky, he liked to say. We had this unappeasable curiosity in common.

  The strangest place we found that week was called Delaware City. It was a small town at the Delaware River end of a canal that once ran to the Chesapeake—connecting Philadelphia and points north to Baltimore and Washington—before it was supplanted by a bigger, deeper canal built on a different route. Delaware City’s sleepy main street was a monument to its heyday: an impressive row of big, brick, nineteenth-century buildings. We ate dinner at a grand hotel built in 1828. We were the only customers in the place.

  That whole sail felt like time travel, down through layers of an older country, down through our own shared and not-shared history. I asked my dad if he had stayed in touch with anyone from Escanaba, his hometown. He shuddered, literally, at the thought. No. But wouldn’t it be interesting to turn up at, say, his sixtieth high school reunion, which would be coming up? No. He would rather cut off his right arm, he said. Why? “Because I would have to account for myself,” he said. “And what am I going to say, ‘Hollywood producer’?” I didn’t see what was so terrible about that. But I’m not from the Upper Midwest.

  At one point, tacking out of Annapolis, he said, “You’ve got the habit of leaving things unsaid, of shoving things under the rug.” I was startled, unnerved. “Maybe it’s inherited,” he added.

  I wondered what things he had in mind. He seemed to mean resentments. Did I have so many? Once upon a time, I had secretly blamed him for my miseries, for the anguish that plagued me through my college years after Caryn left. My notion was that his devotion to my mother, his emotional dependence on her, had set me a bad example, had given me a model for love that ended up devastating me. But I had abandoned that idea, that ludicrous resentment, long ago. There were plenty of things I was actually glad I had left unsaid. Still, the comment haunted me. It haunts me today. All the things I wish I had said when I had the chance.

  A moment recurs. We were motoring through the Delaware and Chesapeake Canal—the big one that does not come out at little Delaware City. A tremendous oceangoing tugboat thundered past us, pulling a barge. Dad, in a hooded slicker, stood at the rail, arms straight down at his sides, staring up at the boat as it passed, seemingly transfixed by the towering bridge and its red-and-white brightwork. I remember the boat’s name, Diplomat, gilded on its stern. On the aft deck, a brawny redheaded sailor was smoking, a young guy, with enormous arms folded across his chest. He seemed to be striking a pose as his gaze flicked across us. Dad seemed frozen in awe. I was struck by his raptness. Amused, touched. I admired his unselfconsciousness. But there was also something alarming about his motionlessness, his arms straight down like that.

  • • •

  TAVARUA HAD A LONG RUN as a dream wave. It was famous—famous in surf world, anyway—for its near perfection, but also for its exclusivity, for the fact that it was private. It was the one great wave on the planet that did not succumb to the tragedy of the commons. It didn’t become hideously crowded, effectively ruining it for everyone. The American-owned resort prospered. To surfers who objected to having a wave reserved for paying customers, the arrangement was a travesty. In principle, I sided with them. I had reported on privatization in different contexts, including municipal water in Bolivia and the maintenance of the Tube in London, and I was generally against it. I also had my own feelings about the resort, rooted in those prelapsarian days on the island with Bryan.

  As a surfer, however, I was as susceptible as the next fiend to the fantasy of great uncrowded waves. We all live in a fallen world, I rationalized. I yearned to surf it again. As things turned out, the Fijian government, by then a military dictatorship, killed the Tavarua fantasy in 2010 when it abruptly canceled its long-standing “reef management” agreement with the resort. The waves were thrown open to the public, which meant, in effect, surf-tour operators. Boats packed with surfers soon began racing to Tavarua from nearby hotels and marinas on any hint of swell, turning the lineup into the familiar Malthusian feeding frenzy.

  Before that happened, though, I became a regular resort guest. It started in 2002. The way the resort worked, groups of about thirty rented the whole place for a week, with most groups returning year after year, and that year a California-based group invited me to fill a spot. I didn’t think too hard about it. I was turning fifty, and Tavarua called to me from well outside the range of my convictions, such as they were, about privatization. I wanted to surf it again while I still could.

  The resort was low-key. Sixteen bungalows, communal meals. It seemed that the owners had done some blasting on the reef to open up the boat channel, but the wave out front was the same. Same rifling, too-good-to-be-true left flaring down the reef at hull speed. Surfing it was a sense-memory barrage. The blue swell breaking far up the reef, the intricate scrollwork on the face, the unforgiving coral. The critical moment that seemed to go on forever, the sensation of impossible abundance. I had lost a step or two in the twenty-four years since I last rode it, and the wave, particularly the takeoff, was as quick as ever. But I was crafty from long experience, and I could still make the wave, still ride it respectably. The lineup was no longer empty, of course. One had to share with fellow guests. But that was easy enough. The takeoff spot, which we had once found by using a crossed pair of extra-tall coconut trees, was now established by the reflection of a bar mirror in the resort’s restaurant.

  On the island, I gravitated to our old camping spot. The fish-drying rack where I had slept was gone, but otherwise the spot was unchanged. The view into the wave, the islands beyond. The rough sand, the soft air. The deadly snakes, the dadakulachi, were a rarity now. I felt delivered to a pampered new world. There was cold beer. There were chairs. There was a helicopter landing pad where the fishermen had once stacked dry wood for signal fires. I wondered what little Atiljan, who had slept in a nest of green leaves, was doing now. Was he a fisherman with kids of his own? Most of the workers at the resort were villagers from Nabila, but only one or two were ethnic Indians. Fiji’s democracy had been smashed by a series of military coups mounted by ethnic nationalists from the Fijian side. Ethnic Indians had been turned into second-class citizens. The Tavarua resort had curried favor with the military regime by staging a professional surf contest at a time when Fiji’s sporting links to the world had been largely severed by international sanctions. When I asked a gentle young bartender from Nabila what she thought about the government’s moves against democracy and ethnic
Indians, she shyly said that she supported the government. “They are for the Fijians,” she said.

  After I asked around about Bob and Peter, our onetime ferrymen—I learned nothing—a couple of older fellows from Nabila, now working on Tavarua, figured out who I was. They treated me like a long-lost cousin, and they had a good laugh at my expense. I was the American who had failed to start a hotel. Each week, the resort put on something it called “Fiji Night,” with drumming and kava and speeches in Fijian by village elders for the guests. I found myself threaded into these speeches, made part of the history of the island and the coming of surfing. None of my fellow guests noticed, but the Fijians in the show all nodded knowingly, chuckling, and then gave me sympathetic pats on the shoulder when we met on the island’s trails. I imagined that they knew at a glance that I really didn’t have the right stuff for starting and running a business in Fiji. One of the American surfer-founders had apparently provided the capital. He had long since withdrawn, selling out to other investors. The other founder was the tough guy, responsible for building this little empire in the tropical wilds. He now lived in California and visited only occasionally. He had a big house carved out of the jungle on the south side of the island.

  I dreaded writing to Bryan about my visit. He was waiting for a report. As it turned out, he did not object, as I thought he would, to my availing myself of the resort’s privatized, commodified, and expensive waves. (Room and board ran about four hundred dollars a night.) He didn’t even seem to retch at my description of Fiji Night. What disgusted him most, strangely, was an image of a volleyball game between staff and guests. “I imagined ‘smile on face’ and pure venom inside,” he wrote. But his reaction to my report was complex and thoughtful, full of anger, jokes, jealousy, awe, and, as always, self-criticism. He vowed to make more frequent trips to the Oregon coast, where he occasionally went to surf.

  The resort’s owners had discovered a second wave, also a long left, out on an open-ocean reef about a mile south of Tavarua. They called the spot Cloudbreak, and it was actually what made the resort viable. The island wave, though world-renowned for its flawlessness, was too fickle to support a carriage trade with a one-week turnaround. It could easily go a week without breaking properly. (The owners had dubbed it, unforgivably, Restaurants.) Cloudbreak, which caught every passing swell, was far more consistent. Boats ran out there all day long, anchoring in the channel while guests surfed. Cloudbreak was bigger, shiftier, more rough-edged than the island wave, with many more imperfections. It had a number of different takeoff spots, and plenty of unmakable waves. But Cloudbreak had its own magnificence. I started rising in the dark, catching the first boat, and riding Cloudbreak at dawn, slowly figuring out lineup markers. The hills of Viti Levu, five miles east, could tell you, once you got some basic triangulations, where on the long, flat, brilliant reef you were.

  Author, Cloudbreak, Fiji, 2005

  I snapped a brand-new Owl out there that first week. The pieces went onto a large pile of broken boards rotting in the jungle behind the boatmens’ shack on the island. All those boards, I assumed, were Cloudbreak wreckage. The wave had bottomless reserves of deepwater power. It was like Madeira that way. But it didn’t scare me like Madeira did, partly because it was far more mapped out by other surfers in all conditions, but mostly because it had no rocks and cliffs. You could hit the bottom, particularly on the inside section, where it got as shallow as the island wave, but when you wiped out or got caught inside, you could always wash in across the reef. The violence dissipated, as it does most places, the farther you were swept in. At extreme low tides the reef came out of the water and you could actually stroll across it to a likely jumping-off spot. For that matter, there were lifeguards—the boatmen, who kept an eye on the guests. On big days they ran Jet Skis in the channel, swooping into the impact zone to pick up people in trouble. During that first week, a ski came for me twice. I waved it off both times—I was fine. I took Cloudbreak seriously, but my decade of Madeira trips, surfing places where washing in was often not a survivable option, had inured me, I realized, to more normal ocean perils.

  I would never spend the kind of time on Tavarua that I had on Madeira. With Mollie now the center of our lives, I had no wish to. We could barely afford the trips I did take. Still, I became a regular, hitting it year after year, spending six, eight hours a day out at Cloudbreak. The groups I went with were a mix. There were Republican contractors from Florida, with their hard-charging sons, and film-business people, with their hard-charging sons. Young hotshots from Hawaii traveling on their sponsors’ dimes. Some of the world’s top pros were frequently there. Domenic came a couple of times in the early years. He was living in Malibu, in a happy second marriage, with four young children. He still cackled at my self-mockery, and it was dreamy to trade waves with him in the South Pacific. Surf-centric trips without his family soon stopped making sense for him, though. Bryan and I never even broached the idea of his going back. I made some friends on Tavarua, notably two Californians, Dan Pelsinger and Kevin Naughton, who were nearly my age and, like me, still could not get enough. We started taking lower-budget surf trips together—Mexico, Nicaragua, Indonesia. But the trips I trained for, saved for, lived for, were Fiji.

  • • •

  “PEOPLE I KNOW in New York are incessantly on the point of going back where they came from to write a book, or of staying on and writing a book about back where they came from.” Thus A. J. Liebling, in “Apology for Breathing,” a short, terrific essay. Liebling was pretending to apologize for being from New York, a city he loved lavishly and precisely. Now I’m one of those New Yorkers incessantly on the point of going back where I came from. But with me it’s not a matter of packing up or staying on, but rather of being always half poised to flee my desk and ditch engagements in order to throw myself into some nearby patch of ocean at the moment when the waves and wind and tide might conspire to produce something ridable. That cracking, fugitive patch is where I come from.

  Indeed, this is a book about that myth-encrusted place.

  A Web editor at the New Yorker, having marked my many sudden desertions of my post, suggested I try a blog about surfing around New York. I thought that sounded good. Truancy and production shortfall could be turned into salty copy, introducing readers to, as a deck-line might put it, an underworld of urban wave-chasers. Our queer devotions, frustrations, little triumphs, and large peculiarities, plus a few waterfront characters, plus photos, could probably keep a blog burbling along. I saw myself mentally composing pithy, arcane posts while straggling home, half-frozen, on the Van Wyck Expressway.

  As a courtesy, I ran the blog plan past the guys I surf with most. “No,” said one. “Absolutely not,” said another. They didn’t want our spots exposed. They didn’t want to be outed as my sidekicks. Blogs were lame. Objections sustained, plan shelved.

  I generally let people know when I’m working as a journalist. Memoirs are morally blurred that way. Most private citizens don’t expect to be written about, particularly not by their intimates. I’ve always, more or less, kept journals. But the notion of a book about my surfing life, particularly about the unsuspecting people I’ve chased waves with, is relatively recent. Few of my companions were warned.

  Already embarked on the writing, I ran the idea, expecting the worst, past my New York surf crew. We were crawling home on the Van Wyck. They were surprisingly enthusiastic. For some reason, a book was to them less objectionable than a blog—less present tense, perhaps, less inherently privacy betraying.

  “Will John be in it?” asked the Lobbyist.

  He meant Selya, who was driving.

  “I am a mere footnote,” Selya said.

  Not true, as it turns out.

  But here’s a true footnote: Barack Obama didn’t believe me when I told him where I went to junior high school. This was in early 2004, before he was very famous. I was writing a story about him and I had been teasing him about
his having gone to Punahou School, which is the top prep academy in Hawaii. We were sitting in a Caribbean-themed restaurant in a small shopping center in Hyde Park, Chicago. “No effing way,” he said, laughing. (He didn’t actually say “effing.” But we weren’t on the record.) I did, of course, go for a while to Kaimuki Intermediate. But nobody there knew that I would write about them. Our lives were off the record. That’s the tricky part. Facts are easy.

  • • •

  MY DAD’S RAPTNESS at the boat rail wasn’t just raptness. It was Parkinson’s. The symptoms came on slowly, then not slowly. The disease carried him away from us, mentally. His life became a torment. He didn’t sleep for a year. He died in November 2008, in my mother’s arms, with his children around him. They had been married for fifty-six years.

  My mother was flattened, as I had never seen her, by my father’s final year. Always thin, now she was gaunt. She resumed going out—to concerts, plays, movies—with friends, with me. She was still an enthusiast—I remember how intensely she liked Winter’s Bone, how thoroughly she hated Avatar—but her lungs began to fail her. She had bronchiectasis, a respiratory disease. It causes, among other things, shortness of breath. It sapped her strength. A lifetime of Los Angeles smog was implicated. We took her on vacation to Honolulu, renting a house in the old neighborhood near Diamond Head. Her room looked out on the water. Her three granddaughters curled up on her big bed with her. She could not have been happier, she said.

  She and I had a funny moment the following summer. It was the last time she went to the beach—a cool, sunny afternoon on Long Island. She was so frail that we bundled her in blankets and tucked her in a sun trap, out of the breeze, overlooking the waves. Her granddaughters were tucked around her for extra warmth. I mentioned that the waves, though terrible, looked ridable. The west wind was kicking up a running, waist-high right just off the sand. “Go surfing,” my mother said. I didn’t have a board with me. But Colleen had a longboard in her truck. It was an enormous, ancient log, bought at a yard sale for purposes undetermined. Caroline, though rolling her eyes, gave me the nod. I ran out and caught a few waves. The log was ideal for racing the shorebreak, and I flew down the beach, throwing old-school moves on the ratty little waves till I crashed on the sand. I ran back to our little encampment in the dunes. My mother’s blue eyes were bright. I felt about ten years old—showing off for Mom—and she said, grinning, “You looked just like you did when you were little.” It was the antique longboard. Everyone else was chatting and laughing. Had they seen my waves? “No,” my daughter said. “Go get another one.”