Barbarian Days

by William Finnegan

  As my mother became less steady on her feet, she walked faster. She had always walked fast, but this was different: a headlong tottering rush that made you want to run after her to prevent a crash. When she finally did fall, I blamed myself. We were coming home from the pulmonologist, and I left her alone, unsupported, for a few seconds on East 90th Street. I turned and saw her trying to negotiate a step that was too much for her. She toppled backward before I could reach her, cracking her pelvis. With that, she was bedridden. Mollie and I started spending nearly every evening with her. Old friends from California visited. Michael, who was now at the Los Angeles Times, came as often as possible. So did Colleen and her family. Kevin and his partner.

  Most nights, though, it was just us—Caroline was stuck on a long federal trial. We were a cozy trio: Moll curled up with a book, my mother and I reminiscing, or watching TV, or solving the world’s problems. My mother retained a keen interest in my projects, and she did not euphemize when I showed her drafts that she found sluggish. Her wryness was intact. She had always made wicked fun of clumsy savoir faire, and one of her bits was to stick her tongue in her cheek, bob her head, toss her hair, and say, “See ya tomorrow.” That was what people who didn’t have much going on, whose worlds were small, said to each other, airily, on parting. One night, as we gathered our things to go, she gave me the old head bob and, to my amazement, said it—“See ya tomorrow”—with an extra crinkle of sad amusement. So we were that family now. Our world had certainly shrunk. My mother was changing. She could look right through me now. Fearless love, unwavering. She and Mollie seemed to be, if possible, even more deeply in tune. My mother didn’t believe in the afterlife. This was it.

  Chronic nausea got her. It killed her appetite, and she wasted away. Her forward-lookingness faltered, finally. We scattered her ashes, and my father’s, at sea, off a place near Sag Harbor called Cedar Point, which they had often sailed past in their boat.

  • • •

  YOU HAVE TO HATE how the world goes on.

  • • •

  I FOUND MYSELF getting more reckless, even before my parents died. In Dubai, chasing a story about human trafficking, I stepped on the toes of Uzbek slavers and their local protectors and had to leave the emirate in a hurry. Reporting on organized crime in Mexico, I edged further into the lion’s den than I should have. This was the sort of work I had sworn off when Mollie was born. The same impulses were showing up in my surfing. I went to Oaxaca to ride Puerto Escondido, which is generally considered the heaviest beachbreak in the world. I snapped two boards and came home with a perforated eardrum. I wasn’t turning into a big-wave surfer—I would never have the nerves for that—but I was pushing into places where I did not belong. On the bigger days at Puerto, I was the oldest guy in the water by decades.

  What did I think I was doing? I liked the idea of growing old gracefully. The alternative was, after all, mortifying. But I rarely gave my age a conscious thought. I just couldn’t seem to pass up even a slim chance of getting a great wave. Was this some backward, death-scorning way to grieve? I didn’t think so. A few weeks after my sixtieth birthday, I pulled into two barrels, back-to-back, at Pua‘ena Point, on the North Shore of Oahu. They were as deep and long as any tube I had ridden since Kirra, more than thirty years before. Both waves let me out untouched. Being adjacent to that much beauty—more than adjacent; immersed in, pierced by it—was the point. The physical risks were footnotes.

  For obsessive before-it’s-too-late wave-chasing, Selya made an excellent companion. He turned forty and the leading-man parts started to dry up. He could still leap, and lift and catch his partners, and perform as well as he ever had, he said. But younger faces, younger bodies, were preferred. He had a big role in a 2010 Twyla Tharp show built on Frank Sinatra songs. The best number in the production, I thought, was his solo dance set to “September of My Years.” It was restrained, almost meditative, elegant, and nobody could miss the symbolism. “I wanted to make the solo very John,” Tharp told the Times. After 188 performances on Broadway, Selya took the show on the road as resident director, while still dancing in it. He was choreographing, teaching, writing a screenplay. And yet things were winding down for him as a dancer. I overheard someone at a party ask him about his upcoming projects. Selya mentioned an asteroid that was in the news; it was alarming people by coming too close to Earth. He was hoping for a direct hit, he said. That was his best-case career scenario.

  He channeled his fury into surfing. He turned days of Long Beach dribble into skatepark-style clinics, milking waist-high waves for every ounce of juice. Was it possible that he was still improving? His attention to the finer points of technique was unblinking. He was driven and endlessly patient, both. Smoothing out his style, making it look easy, while also pushing harder. He saw performance subtleties that I had been missing all my life. West Coast guys, after a successful wave, ran a hand through their hair on the pullout, according to Selya. Australians, in the same situation, made the same claim by wiping their noses. This seemed too silly to be true, but, watching a surf video, he would say, “Nice! Now wipe your nose,” and, right on cue, the rider would do it. “Stylin’.”

  Every nor’easter, if he wasn’t stuck in Denmark or Dallas, Selya was ready to run east or south, depending on the winds. He got subtle tips about which bars and jetties might be working from the Instagram posts of certain local pros, and they rarely steered us wrong. When Jackie was working out of town, Selya would go keep her company, but if she was anywhere near the coast he would take boards. He was in Boston for a series of swells that seemed to light up every cape in New England. His text messages were ecstatic.

  One of those swells was Hurricane Irene. I caught the front edge of Irene at Montauk. It was excellent. Then I ran home to spend the night of high winds with Caroline and Mollie. In the morning, with the storm passed inland and tearing up Vermont, the winds swung west and I, with my family’s permission, drove alone to New Jersey. East Coast surfers have a ghoulish relationship with Atlantic hurricanes, panting eagerly as they rain destruction on Caribbean islands and, occasionally, the U.S. East Coast itself. Irene was bad that way. (Sandy was far worse.) New Jersey hadn’t been hit hard, but when I arrived the beaches were still closed, pointlessly, on the governor’s orders. (Chris Christie to the public, pre-Irene: “Get the hell off the beach . . . You’ve maximized your tan.”) The surf was big and clean, the wind dropping. I parked a few blocks inland, tiptoed to the coast, and surfed for hours. My favorite wave in the East, a wailing right off a jetty, started to work in the late afternoon. It was almost too big, but I was alone in the water, which meant I could pick my waves carefully from the groomed, multitudinous sets. I picked the ones that tapered to the north. They were dark and throaty and ridiculously good. There were police lights flashing, red and blue, in the gloom on shore. The whole scene had the flavor of a dream—except my surfing dreams are always marked by frustration or fear or a special brand of anguished almost-remembering, never by great waves actually ridden. I didn’t know if the cops were waiting for me, but, to be safe, I stayed out till dark, and then paddled two jetties north and slipped ashore there.

  • • •

  I USED TO THINK of my work as the antithesis of show business. Now I’m not so sure. Seeing my dad on the set, or out on location, when I was young, was like seeing his other family. A movie crew is a world, full of emotion, purpose, big personalities. People thrown together, getting intricately, tempestuously involved, temporarily. Let’s get this thing made. Most of my projects—long narrative pieces, certainly—have a similar arc. I lash myself to people I want to write about. We knock around together, talk our way through their world. Then, at some point, it’s published, the story’s out, we’re done. Strike the sets. Sometimes we stay in touch, even become friends, but that’s the exception. Selya lives his version of this with every show. I’m lucky: I have a home team, the magazine where I’ve worked for decades. Most of my friends, now that
I think of it, are writers or surfers or both. I’ve always disliked mirrors, but when I catch my own eye in a reflection nowadays I often think I see my father there. He looks worried, even ashamed, and it pains me. He had so much drive. He once told me that it was all just fear of failure. When he was older, waking up in the hospital after a knee operation, he looked at me indignantly and said, “When did your hair go gray?”

  Mollie has our attention in a way that’s different from what my parents paid me. She is adored, included, closely attended, carefully listened to. I used to worry that we were overprotective. When she was five or six, she and I were diving under waves on Long Island. I misjudged a bigger wave and lost her little hand. The moments after I came up and she was not in sight were for me a solid wall of panic. She surfaced a few yards away, looking scared and betrayed and crying, but no, she didn’t want to go in, thanks. She just wanted me to be more careful. I was more careful. I remembered my fetal meditations under the booming brown waves at Will Rogers, before I could even bodysurf. Was anybody watching for me to come up? I never thought so. Certainly you only learned your way around waves by getting your ass kicked for every mistake. But I couldn’t imagine letting my darling take her lumps that way. Luckily, although she likes to porpoise around, she has no interest in surfing. She does have, allaying my worries, a wide streak of independence that needs no encouragement. When her parents drop her at summer camp, they are the forlorn ones. She started riding the crosstown bus to school, alone, at twelve, with quiet joy. We’ve drawn the line, for now, at the subway.

  Do I not think of my daughter when I take stupid chances? I do. In March 2014, I ran out of air, unexpectedly, under two waves at a once famous break called Makaha, on the west side of Oahu. It was a rainy, windless day. I had just finished a teaching gig in Honolulu and had a few hours before my flight home. Makaha was big, the reports said—ten to fifteen feet—but it sounded more manageable than the North Shore, and so I headed there. From the beach, all you could see was whitewater and mist. The ridable waves were outside somewhere, beyond the foam curtain. I hadn’t brought my gun to Hawaii, which was a mistake, I now saw. There were a few guys paddling out, angling through a wide, easy channel to the south, but they were all on massive big-wave boards. I had a thin, four-finned 7'2" that I loved—it was the board that had carried me through those two barrels at Pua‘ena Point the winter before, with the inside fins holding the scooped-out lower face like lancets—but it was obviously not the right board for today. I paddled out anyway. I figured I would regret not going out more than I would regret going out—and regret it in the corrosive, self-hating way that I still recalled from not paddling out at Rice Bowl when I was fourteen. It would be different, of course, if I could see the waves. At Puerto Escondido, on the biggest day I saw there, I never considered paddling out. People were surfing, but I would have drowned. I could see that plainly. At Makaha, a less fearsome break, I at least had to see what was out there.

  It turned out to be weirdly beautiful. The channel, which was just big, smooth, well-spaced swells, felt momentous, orchestra-warming-up. The lineup, when it came into view, was an unexpectedly spacious field, quite uncluttered, at least during a lull, with a small clump of guys out at sea and another, smaller clump of guys maybe two hundred yards farther up the point. The near clump was gathered to ride the Makaha Bowl—an enormous end-section that was constantly featured in the mags and surf movies of my youth. The far clump was for Makaha Point, a rarely photographed wave. The two spots are connected, on big days, by an extremely long, hard-breaking wall that is rarely, if ever, makable all the way across. The Bowl lost its cachet long ago to hollower big waves that break closer to shore. The Point retains a strong underground rep. I took a cautious route to the Bowl, staying out in deep water to the south. Smaller waves, which were not small at all, were steadily breaking across the inside, obscuring the shore. I kept a wary eye on the horizon. The rain was light, the sea surface glassy and pale, almost white—the same pale gray as the sky. Approaching swells were darker. The darker they were, the steeper they were. It was all on an unusually precise black-and-white scale.

  The group at the Bowl was, on average, old. A couple of guys were at least my age. Nearly everybody was on a gun. The mood was both giddy and serious, not unwelcoming. I got the impression that these guys, most of them West Oahu locals, lived for these waves. I followed the pack, moving out as big sets approached. When the swells turned dark far out at sea, I sprinted for the channel. As waves got ready to break, the faces turned practically black. My board was completely inadequate. There were only two or three guys who really wanted the biggest waves. An older Hawaiian on a huge yellow gun stroked calmly into several monsters. I caught three waves in three hours. I made all three, but each drop was late, and exceedingly sketchy, my board fluttering under my feet. On all three drops, despite myself, I screamed. My waves weren’t especially big, and I didn’t surf them especially well.

  There were a couple of cleanup sets: twenty-foot walls breaking way outside, in deeper water. We were all caught inside. I stayed calm, diving early and deep. One of those tore off my leash. A lifeguard on a Jet Ski, idling in the channel, dashed into the impact zone when boards or leashes broke. He retrieved my board from inside. As he handed it over, he gave me a long look, but all he said was, “You okay?” I was half-ecstatic, thanks. I was scared, and on the wrong board, but I was seeing things out there that I would never forget. On the black wave faces, the colors of boards became important. The guy on the red board is not going. The guy on the orange board is going. See his orange board stuck on the black face, trying to get traction to make the drop. The old Hawaiian on the yellow board was painting the most brilliant, passionate strokes across the tallest, blackest walls. Some waves, just as they broke, went cobalt at the top, under the lip. Others, the big set waves that barreled in the peak, went a different, warmer shade of navy blue in the shadowed part of the maw. It was as though, at that point, the gray sky was no longer part of the color scheme, as if the ocean was providing its own submarine hues.

  Then there were the guys at the Point. They were shortboarders. The waves up there were not quite as big as the Bowl behemoths, but they were long, long, roping gray walls, with these tiny figures falling out of the sky, pumping down the line, deep in the shadows under the lip, ripping huge, heaving waves with a kind of respectful abandon, surfing at the very highest level. Who were these guys? I was too scared to paddle up there, and I would never in this life surf like that, but seeing these things filled me with joy.

  My little fiasco at Makaha came partly from impatience, partly from watching those shortboarders, and partly from a deeply foolish leap of faith. I was like a somnambulist, regressing. I left the channel edge of the Bowl, where I had been hunting last-second on-ramps, and paddled deep into the impact zone. Big gorgeous waves, coming down from the Point, were regularly roaring unridden through there. They looked catchable, possibly, on my board. They were empty because their takeoff point was in a no-go area, inside the Bowl and upcoast—the absolute wrong place to be when a big set came. I snuck over there on a little bet with fate: that I would snag a great wave before the next big set came. It was a bad bet, a lazy bet, and I lost. The waves that caught me inside were mountainous. I thought I might be okay because the water still felt deep. I swam down hard, but couldn’t escape the turbulence. Great columns of violence fired downward and pummeled me. I didn’t panic, but I did run out of oxygen. I had to climb my leash long before I thought it was safe to do so. It was difficult to catch a breath when I surfaced—there was too much foam and whiplashing current. But I only had time for a couple of breaths because the next wave was bigger and already breaking, preparing to obliterate me. That was when I had a very clear thought about Mollie. Please. Let this not be my time. I am needed.

  It was age, I later decided. My quick calculations, my solid intuitions about my own lung capacity were off. I survived that second wave, obviously, but ag
ain ran out of oxygen many seconds before I expected to. The interval that day was long, which helped me avoid a two-wave hold-down, which I would probably not have come up from. As it happened, the third wave was smaller. I scrambled back to the channel. I felt peaceful afterward. Ashamed of myself, deeply exhausted, but newly decided not to do this again—not to bend my neck, not to commend my soul to the ocean at its most violent in the hope of some absolution. My nose was still dripping seawater in the taxi home from Newark.

  • • •

  IF I’M NOT on the road or surfing locally, I try to swim a mile a day now in a basement pool on West End Avenue. This humble routine, and the dry-land workout that goes with it, are my surf salvation. Back when I could get away with it, I subscribed to Norman Mailer’s view that exercise without excitement, without competition or danger or purpose, didn’t strengthen the body but simply wore it out. Swimming laps always seemed to me especially pointless. But I can’t get away with that attitude now. If I don’t swim, I will be a pear-shaped pillar of suet. My regular slog through the chlorinated cross-chop of the water aerobics class is all that stands between me and a longboard-only existence. Forget big-wave-level lung capacity. I just want to be able to paddle, and pop to my feet. When I first felt too old to surf, whipped and discouraged in Madeira in the ’90s, I had never swum a lap or touched a barbell. I’m more physically fit now than I was then. But the pop-up still gets trickier, more effortful, every year. This isn’t even maintenance, as Selya would say. It’s just trying to slow the rate of decline.