Author, Noriega Street, Ocean Beach, San Francisco, 1985

 

EIGHT

AGAINST DERELICTION

San Francisco, 1983–86

The ocean has the conscienceless temper of a savage autocrat spoiled by much adulation.

—JOSEPH CONRAD, The Mirror of the Sea

BY THE TIME I MOVED TO SAN FRANCISCO, I HAD BEEN SUCCESSFULLY confining surfing to the sidelines of my life for a couple of years at least. It was 1983, early fall. I’d spent the previous summer in a roach-infested basement in the East Village, banging out a screenplay, sleeping on the floor. My railroad novel was still bouncing between publishers. The few interested editors wanted me to unpack the technical language, the railroad jargon, for the general reader, but that was where the poetry was, I thought, the elusive genius of place and workplace that I hoped to capture. I passed. In truth, I didn’t want to dive back into the manuscript for any purpose. I was afraid of what I might find—infelicities, corniness, yet more juvenilia.

I had been ricocheting around the country. Unable to afford rent, I stayed with Bryan in Montana, with my parents in Los Angeles, with Domenic in Malibu. My accounting, in Conrad’s sense, upon coming back to America had been neither triumphant nor disabling. There were Rip Van Winkle moments. I was unfamiliar with the telephone answering machine—now everybody had one. But I was really just glad to be back, and eager to work. Missoula had been splendid, everything exactly as I remembered it. Bryan was ensconced there, writing hard, back in the American swing. Not surfing. He seemed burnished, confident, older—the higher latitudes agreed with him. Nobody else could understand where I had been these last years. He and I could still talk all night. I went deer hunting in the mountains above the Blackfoot River on my twenty-ninth birthday. Still, I didn’t stay. Something told me I belonged in a city. Some hardheaded sprite of ambition, no doubt. I even considered L.A. But my old prejudices were too strong. I freelanced. Assignments trickled in, including that screenplay, which did pay the rent, even in New York. I still felt mentally flayed by my time in South Africa. But my reservations about American readers, about writing about politics—even writing about South Africa—passed.

I had a glorious new girlfriend: Caroline. She was from Zimbabwe. We had met in Cape Town, where she was an art student. Now she was a graduate student at the San Francisco Art Institute. She had joined me in New York, on that basement floor—it was the first place we shared. Caroline worked as a hostess at a restaurant on lower Fifth Avenue. We did not leave Manhattan once that summer. Our block was popular with junkies, drug dealers, and prostitutes. It was hot and grimy and we often fought. We were both hardheaded and short-tempered. But when she went back to school, I followed her.

 • • • 

THE FACT THAT San Francisco gets some of the best waves in California was for many years a secret. Santa Cruz, seventy miles south, was already a crowded surfing center when I went to college there, but among the thousands of people who surfed Santa Cruz only a handful ever ventured up to San Francisco. I had surfed Ocean Beach, the main spot in the city, a few times while I was railroading out of Bayshore Yard, which was near Candlestick Park. So I knew. Still, I didn’t understand what I was getting into by moving there. I had a contract to write a book—about teaching in Cape Town. We rented a flat in an unfashionable, foggy, mostly Asian neighborhood called the Outer Richmond. The room I used as an office had flocked lime-green wallpaper. I could see the north end of Ocean Beach from my desk.

From up there, on most days, Ocean Beach looked reasonable. Four miles long, perfectly straight, lots of swell, many promising sandbars. Prevailing winds were northwest, onshore, cold, the standard California afternoon sea breeze. But there were plenty of happy exceptions—mornings, fall, winter—when it was glassy or blowing offshore. The whole four miles was beachbreak, meaning it had no point of land or built obstruction—no reef or river mouth, no pier or jetty—to define it. The shape and whereabouts of the waves depended mainly on the configuration of the sandbars. That configuration changed constantly. All waves are too complex to diagram in detail, but beachbreaks are, among surf spots, an especially unpredictable species. And Ocean Beach, which receives an unusual amount of groundswell, mainly from the North Pacific—and is also raked by great tidal currents because San Francisco Bay, all four hundred square miles of it, fills and empties twice a day through the Golden Gate, just around the corner to the north—was as complicated a proposition as any surf spot I’ve seen. Had it been a book, it would have been something dauntingly difficult—continental philosophy, theoretical physics. Besides being complex, Ocean Beach got big. Not California big but Hawaii big. And it was cold-water, unmapped, and, once you got amongst it, frequently unreasonable.

 • • • 

I STARTED SURFING IT at the north end, a wind-protected, relatively gentle break known as Kelly’s Cove. Kelly’s had deep spots and some random wishwash outside but regularly produced thick green wedges that broke quickly across an inside bar. The waves were not things of beauty, but they had guts, and if you could decode some of their eccentricities, they offered occasional pitching backdoor barrels. Kelly’s was the most popular spot along the whole of Ocean Beach, but even it was never crowded. Heading south, the next stretch, known as VFW’s, was a broader field, with bigger waves and a wide array of bars. VFW’s was off the west end of Golden Gate Park. A graffiti-covered seawall stood above the beach.

The next three miles of Ocean Beach abutted on the Sunset District, which was a seedier version of the Richmond—low-rise, sleepy, a sloping grid of streets built in a hurry on sand dunes as wartime worker housing. The seafront there was a rough embankment pierced by dank pedestrian tunnels and topped by a battered coast road known as the Great Highway. Except on rare warm days, the beach was mostly deserted. Winos sprawled in the few sun traps; the homeless sometimes camped there briefly, before the wind and cold drove them away. At high tide, Korean fishermen in rubber boots wrestled with surf-casting rigs. The surf, as you moved south, got generally bigger, more intimidating, with the outer bars farther from shore. Seen from the water, especially when the surf was big, the streets running inland became lineup markers—they told you where you were. In the Sunset, they were named in alphabetical order, from north to south: Irving, Judah, Kirkham, Lawton, Moraga, Noriega, Ortega, Pacheco, Quintara, Rivera, Santiago, Taraval, Ulloa, Vicente, Wawona, and then the oddball, Sloat. You didn’t say you surfed Ocean Beach—you surfed Judah or Taraval or Sloat. South of Sloat Boulevard was the city zoo, beyond which sandy bluffs began to rise and the urban oceanfront—Ocean Beach—ended.

I found myself getting in the water most days that first fall. I was riding a secondhand 7'0" single-fin. It was a plain vanilla board, stiff but versatile, a good wave-catcher, stable and fast. I had an old custom-made wetsuit, now fraying and leaky, a relic from my prosperous brakeman days. I found a few sandbars that produced fine peaks, for a few days at least, on certain tides and swell angles, before the sand moved on. I was getting to know the board. It was well suited to the big open faces, knifing through the offshores, responsive at speed. But it was difficult to duck-dive—it was thick, and therefore hard to sink deep enough to escape incoming whitewater. Paddling out at Ocean Beach was nearly always an ordeal—yet another reason so few people surfed it—and my board’s extra volume did not make it easier. I tried to keep my go-outs short. I worked better after surfing, though. The icy water, the exertion, then thawing under a hot shower, left me physically quiet, able to sit without fidgeting at my desk. I slept better too. This was before the first big winter swells.

 • • • 

THERE WAS A SMALL CREW of local surfers. They were effectively invisible to the rest of the city. Indeed, native San Franciscans would tell you that there was no surfing in San Francisco. There was surf, of course, but the ocean, I was more than once informed, was too cold and stormy for surfing. In truth, it was usually too rough for learning to surf—the nearest beginner breaks were outside the city. And there was a contingent among the Ocean Beach regulars who had learned their chops elsewhere—in Hawaii, Australia, or Southern California—and had moved to the city as adults. These newcomers, who tended to be professional types, and who now included me, remained distinct in some ways from the homegrown surfers, most of whom grew up in the Sunset.

But both groups bought their wax and wetsuits at Wise Surfboards, a bright, high-ceilinged place on Wawona, a few blocks from the beach. Flanked by a Mexican restaurant and a Christian day-care center, it was the only surf shop in town. There was a long row of shiny new boards along one wall and racks of wetsuits in the back. If you were looking for someone to surf with, Wise’s was the place to start.

Bob Wise, the proprietor, was a tightly built, sardonic James Brown fan in his early forties. He ran, from behind the counter, a permanent bull session on the peculiarities of Ocean Beach, and of the guys who surfed it. It was a sort of surf-story jukebox, featuring a well-worn collection of tales: the time Edwin Salem found himself facing, in waist-deep water, a wave pushing before it the trunk of a redwood tree; the time the resin barrel blew up, burning off Peewee’s eyebrows. Business was usually slow, except when rich dope growers from up north came in loaded with cash and saying to their friends, “You want a board? Lemme buy it for you. You think Bobby might want a board? Let’s get him one too.”

One afternoon when I walked in, Wise was midstory, regaling a couple of customers. “So Doc, who can see the surf from his window, calls me up and says, ‘Come on, let’s go out.’ So I keep asking him, ‘But how is it?’ And he goes, ‘It’s interesting.’ So I go over there and we go out and it’s just totally terrible. So Doc says, ‘What did you expect?’ Turns out that when Doc says it’s interesting, that means it’s worse than terrible.”

 • • • 

WISE WAS TALKING about Mark Renneker. Renneker was a favorite topic of San Francisco surf banter, even something of a local obsession. He was a family-practice physician who lived a few blocks from Wise’s shop, on the oceanfront at Taraval. I actually knew Mark from college in Santa Cruz. He had come to San Francisco for medical school, and he had been urging me to move there for years, extolling the quality of the surf in letters, sending me photos of himself on great-looking waves that he described as merely “average.” I couldn’t tell if he was joking.

Now that I was in town, Mark and I surfed together often. He was crazy about Ocean Beach, and he had made an unusually thorough study of it. He made an unusually thorough study of everything connected to surfing. Since 1969, I discovered, he had been keeping a detailed record of every time he went out, recording where he surfed, the size of the waves, swell direction, a description of conditions, what surfboard he rode, who his companions (if any) were, any memorable events or observations, and data for year-to-year comparisons. His logbook showed that the longest he had gone without surfing since 1969 was three weeks. That happened in 1971, during a brief stint of college in Arizona. Otherwise, he had rarely gone more than a few days, and he had often surfed every day for weeks on end. In a pastime really open only to the absurdly dedicated, he was a fanatics’ fanatic.

He lived with his girlfriend, Jessica, who was a painter, on the top floor of a khaki-colored three-story building on the Great Highway. Across from their apartment, by the tunnel to the beach, was a sign: DROWNINGS OCCUR ANNUALLY DUE TO SURF AND SEVERE UNDERTOW. PLEASE REMAIN ON SHORE.—U.S. PARK POLICE. Mark and Jessica’s garage was filled to the rafters with surfboards—there were at least ten, most still on active duty, although on the tour I got, I noticed one collector’s item: a 7'0" single-fin, with pink rails and a yellow deck, shaped and originally ridden by Mark Richards, a four-time world champion from Australia. “It’s like owning Jack Nicklaus’s old golf clubs,” Mark said. The Richards was instantly recognizable to any reader of surf magazines. Mark Renneker hadn’t ridden it in years. Another five boards stood on their tails in the stairwell. Why did he need so many boards? For riding in different conditions, of course, and particularly for bigger waves, where equipment choice could be crucial. A keen student of board design, he even kept both halves of a cherished 7'4", shaped on the North Shore of Oahu and broken on a big day at Sloat, “for reference.” Big waves were Mark’s ruling passion.

On the wall at Wise’s shop was a framed photo of “Doc” dropping into an enormous, nearly vertical, mud-colored Ocean Beach wall. The face was at least five times his height. I had never seen anyone ride a wave that size in California. I couldn’t recall another photo of anyone doing so. The wave was North Shore scale—Waimea, Sunset. Except the water temperature was probably fifty degrees—cold enough to make the surface hard to penetrate, and a falling lip feel like concrete. And the spot was not a famous, well-mapped reef but a shifty, ferocious, obscure beachbreak. I hoped I would never see Ocean Beach that big. Meanwhile, that photo went a long way toward explaining the local obsession with Mark.

He was a hard guy to miss. Six-four, slim, wide-shouldered, with an unkempt brown beard and hair that fell halfway down his back, he was boisterous and imposing, with a big laugh that fell somewhere between a honk and a roar. For someone so tall, he was remarkably unselfconscious. He carried himself like a ballet dancer. Before he paddled out, he ritually performed a series of yoga stretches at the water’s edge. With people he liked, he was endlessly garrulous. There was always something going on with the waves, the wind, the sandbars, the lineup markers at Santiago that required detailed, spirited comment. Everybody knew when Mark was in the water. “Don’t you know the law of the surf movie?” he yelled to me, one morning, in mediocre waves.

I didn’t.

“There will never be good waves on the day after the night that a surf movie, or even surf slides, are shown!”

We had looked the night before at slides from a surf trip to Portugal that he had taken with Jessica.

Later that morning we were sitting in his study, warming up with coffee. Mark’s desk looked out on the ocean. His bookshelves were filled with medical texts (Cancer Epidemiology and Prevention), nature guides (Mexican Birds), books on the ocean, the weather, and hundreds of murder mysteries. On the walls were photos of Mark and friends surfing, along with faded posters for old surf movies—The Performers, The Glass Wall. A collection of surf magazines, going back decades and numbering in the thousands, was carefully stacked and cataloged. A weather radio was barking the latest buoy data. I sat leafing through old surf mags while Mark talked to Bob Wise on the phone.

Mark hung up and announced that Wise now had in his shop exactly the new board I needed.

I didn’t know I needed a new board.

Mark was incredulous. How could I be content with just one surfboard? And a battered old single-fin at that!

I couldn’t explain it. I just was.

This was becoming a routine with us. Mark was provoked by my perceived lack of seriousness, my casual half-assedness, about surfing. Wasn’t I the guy who had done the big safari, the circumnavigation in search of far-flung waves? I was. And he was the guy who had stayed put and gone to med school. But that didn’t mean that surfing was as central to my existence as it was to his. My ambivalence about the sport we shared appalled him. It was heresy. Surfing, to begin with, was not a “sport.” It was a “path.” And the more you poured into it, the more you got back from it—he himself was the exuberant proof of that.

I didn’t actually disagree. Calling surfing a sport did get it wrong at nearly every level. And Mark did seem to me to be an overgrown poster child for the upside of surf obsession. But I was wary of its siren call, its incessant demands. I was reluctant even to think about it any more than necessary. So I didn’t want another board. Anyway, I was broke.

Mark sighed impatiently. He tapped at the keyboard of his computer. “You’re funny,” he said, finally.

 • • • 

I KNEW I HAD GIVEN ungodly amounts of time and heartsblood to surfing. One of the surf mags published, in 1981, a list of what its editors reckoned were the ten best waves in the world. I was startled to see that I had surfed nine of them. The exception was a long left in Peru. The list included several breaks I had been deeply involved with: Kirra, Honolua Bay, Jeffreys. I didn’t particularly like seeing those names there. They were famous spots, but they felt like private matters. I did like seeing that the best wave I had surfed went unmentioned because the world didn’t know about it. Bryan and I, superstitiously, still never spoke or wrote the word Tavarua. We just said “da kine” and figured we’d get back there in due time.

One of the many splendid things about Caroline was her skepticism about surfing. The first time we ever looked at waves together, somewhere south of Cape Town, a few months after we met, she was appalled to hear me start jabbering in a language that she didn’t know I knew. “It wasn’t just the vocabulary, all those words I had never heard you use—‘gnarly’ and ‘suckout’ and ‘funkdog,’” she said, once she had recovered. “It was the sounds—the grunts and roars and horrible snarls.” She had since grown used to some of the insular codes and cryptic slang of surfers, even the grunts and roars and horrible snarls, but she still didn’t understand why, after spending hours studying the waves from shore, we often announced our intention to paddle out by saying things like, “Let’s get it over with.” She could see the reluctance—clammy wetsuit, icy water, rough, lousy surf. She just couldn’t see the grim compunction.

Once, in Santa Cruz, she caught a fuller glimpse of the thing. We were standing on the cliffs at a popular break called Steamer Lane. As surfers rode past the point where we stood, we could see the waves from almost directly above, and then from the back. For a few seconds, we saw an elevated version of what the riders themselves saw, and Caroline’s idea of surfing was transformed on the spot. Before, she said, waves to her had been two-dimensional objects, sheer and onrushing, standing up against the sky. Suddenly, she could see that they were in fact dynamic pyramids, with steep faces; thickness; broad, sloping backs; and a complex three-dimensional construction, which changed, collapsing and rising and collapsing, very quickly. The whitewater was concussive and chaotic; the green water sleek and inviting; and the breaking lip an elusive, cascading engine and occasional hidey-hole. It was nearly enough, she said, to make watching surfing interesting.

Caroline was in no danger of becoming an ocean person. She had been born and raised in a landlocked country, Zimbabwe. I sometimes thought that her cool, critical take on various American enthusiasms (self-improvement, self-esteem, some of the rawer forms of patriotism) came from having grown up in the midst of a civil war in then Rhodesia. She had fewer illusions about human nature than anyone else I knew. I later realized I was wrong about the war’s impact on her thinking. She just had uncommonly good sense and a deep, easily embarrassed modesty. What was important to her was making pictures—etchings, in particular. The copperplate process she used was elaborate and outrageously labor-intensive, almost medieval, and her classmates at the art institute seemed to be in awe of her draftsmanship, her technical knowledge, her obsessiveness, her eye. I certainly was. She often worked all night. She was tall, long-waisted, pale. She had a Pre-Raphaelite stillness to her, as if she had stepped out of a Burne-Jones painting into scruffy, postpunk San Francisco. With people she liked, she could be jolly, even bawdy, tossing a wicked impasto of British and African street slang. She knew, and found a surprising number of occasions to use, a Gujarati expression for masturbation. Muthiya maar!

With Caroline, San Francisco, 1985

In the late afternoons, we took to walking in the hills just north of our place. The park up there was known as Lands End, and the hills looked west into the ocean and north into the Golden Gate. Cypress, eucalyptus, and tall, gnarled Monterey pines helped break the cold sea breeze. There was an old public golf course, never busy, up there too. Somebody gave me three or four rusty clubs—I could carry them all in one fist—and I started playing, for laughs, during our walks, the few holes near our place. I knew nothing about golf, and we never saw the clubhouse, but I liked whacking the ball off the deep-shadowed tees, down the lush fairways, while the low sun made the hills glow before it fell into the Pacific. Caroline wore baggy sweaters and long, beribboned skirts that she sewed herself. She had enormous eyes and a laugh that pealed thrillingly in the twilight.

I was becoming domesticated. Not at Caroline’s behest—she was an expat art student, twenty-four, with no discernible interest in settling down—but by my own wary choice, with concessions small and extra-small to stability and convenience. I opened a checking account, the first of my life, at the age of thirty-one. I started paying U.S. taxes again, happily—doing so meant I was really back. I got an American Express card, ruefully vowing to be a model customer—my weak private reparations program for defrauding the company in Bangkok. I realized that in the thirteen years since high school, the longest period I had ever kept the same address was fifteen months. That was in Cape Town. Basta. Enough with itinerancy. I was writing my book in longhand, but if I ever had the money I would get a computer, just like everyone else, at least in the Bay Area, seemed to be doing. I had developed an avid interest in American politics, particularly foreign policy. I got an assignment that sent me to Nicaragua to profile a Sandinista poet for a magazine in Boston, and I came back feeling sick about the war we were funding there. I wrote a short piece for the New Yorker about Nicaragua and was electrified when the magazine ran it the following week.

Mainly, my head was in South Africa. I lived in my journals and memories, in thick piles of books and periodicals that I had never managed to read while living there—so much was banned—and in correspondence with friends in Cape Town. Mandy had been released from jail not long after I left, though not before she had missed her exams and failed her first year of college. In her letters, she sounded fine. She sent her sympathies to me and to everyone living in Reagan’s America. There were a fair number of South Africans in the Bay Area, some of them scholars, some of them dedicated anti-apartheid activists, and I fell gratefully into their company. I started to do a bit of public speaking—a college, a high school. I was painfully nervous, and unsure where to draw the line between journalism and activism when it came to something as patently unjust as apartheid. I wrote. My first plan for the book called for nine chapters. It eventually had ninety-one. I covered the lime-green walls of my study with butcher paper, and covered the butcher paper with notes, lists, flow charts, struggling to see the book that might be there.

 • • • 

WHEN THE FIRST early-winter swells began hitting, the Ocean Beach paddle-out got dramatically worse. Most surf spots have recommended routes, shore to lineup; many have channels where no waves break. Ocean Beach had channels, but they rarely stayed put. You could stand on the embankment as long as you liked, painstakingly charting where the waves were breaking, devising a surefire course—all that water rushing in had to return to sea somehow, and it would presumably dig a channel along the course it took, where fewer waves would presumably break—and then rush to paddle out there, only to find conditions so quickly changed that you never got past the shorebreak.

On smaller days, perseverance was usually rewarded. Bigger days were another matter. From the water’s edge, looking out across a stepladder of six or seven walls of cold, growling, onrushing whitewater, the idea of paddling out actually carried with it a whiff of lunacy. The project looked impossible, like trying to swim up a waterfall. It took a literal leap of faith to start. You threw yourself into the icy torrent and started plowing seaward. The waves as they approached sounded like bowling balls rumbling down a lane, and then like the crashing of pins as they slammed into and rolled over your bowed head and shoulders, inducing instant ice-cream headache. Long, strain-filled minutes passed. Little or no progress. The frisky, punishing waves came on and on. You tried to present the least possible resistance to the onrushing walls of whitewater, willing them past your body even as they snatched at you, sucking you backward. Breathing turned to gasping, then rasping, and your mind began to play ever-shorter loops, turning over the same half-nonsensical questions: Is perseverance rewarded? Is it even recorded? Meanwhile, underneath this aimless, half-hysterical activity, your brain struggled to detect the underlying patterns in the surf. Somewhere—upcoast, downcoast, or perhaps just beyond this next shallow spot—the waves might be weaker. Somewhere, the current must be running in a more helpful direction. The best available route would be obvious from almost any other vantage—from the embankment, or from that pelican’s airborne perspective—but from down in the maelstrom, where you sometimes spent more time underwater than out in the visible world, and often got just one foam-edged breath between waves, it merely danced cruelly in the imagination: the theoretical solution to an impossibly complex problem.

In fact, there was a basic structure to the Ocean Beach setup. On any day over five or six feet, particularly south of VFW’s, you normally surfed the outside bar, where the waves broke first. To get to the outside bar, you normally had to cross the inside bar, which was where waves tended to break the most relentlessly and the hardest. The guys whom one saw wash up in the shorebreak, defeated by the paddle-out, had usually been stopped by the inside bar. Between the two bars was, usually, a trough—deeper water, where you could sometimes cop a breather, let your vision clear, your sinuses drain, your arms come back to life, and plot a course across the outside bar.

But I wasn’t always happy to reach the trough. Crossing the inside bar sometimes took me to the limit. If you gave up soon enough, you would just wash in, but if you pushed past a certain point, that option vanished. If I started getting seriously worked, I usually abandoned my board entirely, relying on my leash. I simply clawed my way along the bottom, fistful by fistful of sand, coming up for one breath between waves. Frequently, there came a moment when I thought, No, never mind, this is getting too heavy, I want to go back to shore. But it was always too late then. The violence in the impact zone on the inside bar at Ocean Beach on a solid winter day was such that one’s wishes, one’s volition, meant little. It was not possible to turn back. Waves sucked you toward them with monstrous force. Fortunately, the scariest, most powerful wave, the one that seemed truly bloody-minded, always seemed to spit you out the back, into the deepwater trough, once it was through with you. That was why I found the trough increasingly a place of terror. I had suddenly lost all interest in surfing, but I could no longer head toward shore. Indeed, I now faced another test, across a wider field, of much bigger waves.

It helped to remind myself that the waves on the outside bar, however big, were generally softer than the shallow water bombs on the inside. Still, I now had to find an outside channel, which meant craning to read, from the crest of each swell moving through the trough, the horizon. What were the significant patterns in the faint, distant movements of blue-gray water half a mile out? And in the bumps beyond that? Where along the vast, undulating outside bar did the energy seem to be concentrating? Which way should I go? When to start sprinting? Now? Two minutes from now? How to avoid a frightening, deepwater pounding. The fear in these long trough moments was nothing like the concentrated panic I once felt at big Rice Bowl as a kid. It was more diffuse, queasy, contingent. Drowning was just a vague, unlikely possibility, the ultimate unwanted outcome, floating around the edge of things—a cold green specter, nothing more. If I made it across the outside bar intact, it would be time to surf, to find waves to ride. That, after all, was what we were out here for.

A word about bloody-mindedness. For most surfers, I think—for me, certainly—waves have a spooky duality. When you are absorbed in surfing them, they seem alive. They each have personalities, distinct and intricate, and quickly changing moods, to which you must react in the most intuitive, almost intimate way—too many people have likened riding waves to making love. And yet waves are of course not alive, not sentient, and the lover you reach to embrace may turn murderous without warning. It’s nothing personal. That self-disemboweling death wave on the inside bar is not bloody-minded. Thinking so is just reflex anthropomorphism. Wave love is a one-way street.

Was the surf at Ocean Beach worth the travail of the paddle-out? On some days, certainly. But only for some people. It depended on your tolerance for punishment, the state of your nerves, your ability to read the bars, your ability to surf large waves, your paddling strength, your luck on the day. There might be beautiful waves—big, bowling rights, long-walled lefts—but there were, I found, rarely consistent, well-defined peaks, making it difficult to know where to wait. If there were other people out, you could exchange surmises and lineup markers. As an Ocean Beach newcomer, I eagerly lapped up any tip. I had a ridiculous amount to learn. The camaraderie itself was a comfort. And yet I knew that, in bigger waves, safety in numbers, the “buddy system,” was generally useless. In my experience at least, when things got heavy, there never seemed to be anybody around, let alone in a position to help. Particularly at a wide-open, poorly defined break like Ocean Beach, you were emphatically on your own if you got into trouble. And I hadn’t even seen it big yet. In those first couple of months, the biggest day I surfed was what the locals might have called ten feet.

 • • • 

WAVE SIZE IS A TOPIC of perennial dispute among surfers. There is no widely accepted method for measuring the height of waves—no method widely accepted by surfers, that is. So the disputes are inherently comic—male-ego opera bouffe, usually, about whose was bigger—and I have always tried to stay out of them. For wave-height descriptions, I try to rely on the visual, with a rider providing the increments: waist-high, head-high, overhead. A double-overhead wave has a face twice as tall as the rider. And so on. But for waves without riders, or waves with deceptive optics, which is to say most waves, it often makes more sense to describe them in feet. Simply eyeballing a wave face, estimating the vertical distance from top to bottom—pretending, for the exercise, that a breaking ocean wave is a flat, two-dimensional object—yields a rough, honest number. But that number is disdained as too high by nearly all surfers, including me. Why? Because underestimation is más macho.

Actually, this question of what size to call a wave comes up only in some contexts, not others. I don’t remember ever debating, or even discussing, the size of a wave with Bryan, for instance. A wave was small or big, weak or powerful, mediocre or magnífica, scary or otherwise, to the exact degree that it was these things. Attaching a number to it added nothing. If a surf report had to be produced for someone who had missed it, some conventional shorthand (“three-to-five”) might come in handy, air quotes always implied. The crudity of the description was understood. But that was me and Bryan. At Ocean Beach, wave size calls were taken seriously. Big-wave spots have that effect on people. They induce self-seriousness and magnify insecurities.

Indeed, underestimation is practiced with the greatest aplomb on the North Shore of Oahu. There, a wave must be the size of a small cathedral before the locals will call it eight feet. The subscientific arbitrariness of the whole business is obvious from the fact that among surfers, wherever they live, there is no such thing as a nine-foot wave or a thirteen-foot wave. (Anyone who says there is would be laughed off the beach.) Ricky Grigg, an oceanographer and big-wave surfer, used to phone a friend who lived at Waimea Bay for surf reports when he lived in Honolulu. His friend’s wife, who could see the surf from her kitchen, could never grasp surfers’ irrational system of wave measurement, but she could estimate with fair accuracy how many refrigerators stacked on top of one another would equal the height of the waves, so Grigg used to ask her, “How many refrigerators is it?”

Wave size ends up being a matter of local consensus. A given wave, transferred intact somehow from Hawaii, where it was considered six feet, to Southern California, would be called ten there. In Florida it would be twelve, maybe fifteen. In San Francisco, when I lived there, a double-overhead wave was reckoned, for no good reason, to be eight feet. A triple-overhead wave was ten feet. A wave four times the height of a rider was twelve feet. Five times was fifteen feet, more or less. Beyond that, the system—if you could call it a system—disintegrated. Buzzy Trent, an old-time big-wave rider, allegedly said, “Big waves are not measured in feet, but in increments of fear.” If he said that, he got it right. The power of a breaking wave does not increase fractionally with height, but as the square of its height. Thus a ten-foot wave is not slightly more powerful than an eight-foot wave—because the leap is not from eight to ten but from sixty-four to a hundred, making it over 50 percent more powerful. This is a brute fact that all surfers know in their bowels, whether or not they’ve heard the formula. Two waves of the same height, for that matter, may differ enormously in their volume, in their ferocity. Then there is the human factor. As a variation on the old maxim has it, “Big waves are not measured in feet, but in increments of bullshit.”

When I was a boy, big waves were a big deal. There was a famous crew, including Grigg and Trent, who surfed Waimea, Makaha, and Sunset Beach. They rode long, heavy, specialized boards known as elephant guns—later simply guns. The mags and surf movies celebrated their feats. There were terrifying cautionary tales that every surfer knew, such as the time that two North Shore pioneers, Woody Brown and Dickie Cross, paddled out at Sunset on a building swell in 1943. When the sets got bigger, forcing them to paddle far out to sea, they saw that it would be impossible to return to shore—Sunset was closing out—and decided to paddle three miles west, to Waimea Bay, in hopes that the deepwater channel would still be open there. It wasn’t, and the sun was going down. Cross, in desperation, struck for shore. He was seventeen years old. His body was never found. Woody Brown later washed ashore half-drowned and naked. The exploits of Grigg, Trent, and company in the ’50s and ’60s were mythic sagas to the surfing masses—to gremlins like me. They were not the world’s best surfers, but they were intensely dashing. I loved astronauts when I was a kid, but the tiny coterie of big-wave surfers was an even cooler group.

Their heyday passed around the time of the shortboard revolution. People continued to ride huge waves, but they seemed to have hit a performance limit, as well as an upper limit to the size of the waves that could be caught and ridden. Anything bigger than what we called twenty-five feet seemed to move too fast; the physics got impossible. Very few surfers were interested in waves that size anyway. Matt Warshaw, the leading scholar of surfing—he’s the author of The Encyclopedia of Surfing and The History of Surfing, both hefty, authoritative tomes—puts the number of surfers ready to ride twenty-five-foot waves at less than one in twenty thousand. Others think it’s far fewer than that. Nat Young, the great Australian champion, a man whom Warshaw considers “perhaps the most influential surfer of the [twentieth] century,” and who in his prime was a swashbuckling ripper nicknamed the Animal, had no interest in riding waves over twenty feet. In a 1967 surf film, Young said, “I’ve only done it once, on one wave, and I don’t ever wish to do it ever again. If those guys can enjoy themselves while their hearts and guts are falling down a mineshaft, then I respect them and their courage. I just don’t think I could ever express myself while scared out of my wits.”

I was with Young, and with the other 99.99 percent. I had surfed alongside a few big-wave specialists on the North Shore, but I thought of them as mutants, mystics, pilgrims traveling another road from the rest of us, possibly made from a different raw material. They seemed bionic, suspiciously immune to normal reactions (panic, fight or flight) in the face of life-threatening peril. In truth, there was a wide middle ground of heavy waves that were not world-ending, not apocalyptically big, and we all negotiated a dark, highly personal fear line whenever a large swell hit. My own upper limit had been edging back for twenty years. I had ridden fairly big waves at Sunset, Uluwatu, outer Grajagan, even Santa Cruz—Middle Peak at Steamer Lane could throw some bombs. I had surfed aggressively, adrenaline-unhinged and unafraid, in big Honolua, in ten-foot Nias. I had even surfed Pipeline, a truly frightening, dangerous wave, a few times, though only on smaller days. But I had never owned a gun, and I didn’t want one.

 • • • 

MARK HAD THE COMPLETE BIONIC SWAGGER, in a rare antic hippie-doctor version. He said he had never been afraid of big waves. Indeed, he claimed that the common fear of big waves was unfounded. Just as people are more afraid of cancer, he said, than of heart disease, despite the fact that heart disease kills many more people, surfers are more afraid of big waves than of small waves, despite the fact that small, crowded waves injure and kill many more surfers than big waves do. I thought this theory was tripe. Big waves are violent and scary, full stop, and the bigger they are, generally speaking, the scarier and more violent they are. To anthropomorphize: big waves want, desperately, to drown you. Very few people surf them, and that’s the only reason they don’t kill more people than they do.

Just as everyone who surfs has a limit to the size of the waves he will venture among, the surfers who live in a place that gets big waves come to know, over time, one another’s limits. When I lived in San Francisco, the only other surfer whose range approached Mark’s was Bill Bergerson, a carpenter whom everyone called Peewee—an unlikely nickname, left over from the days when he was somebody’s younger brother. Peewee was a quiet, intense, exceptionally smooth surfer, probably the best pure surfer San Francisco had produced. His interest in big waves was not, however, indiscriminate. He did not try to surf every big day at Ocean Beach; he paddled out only when it was reasonably clean. Mark, meanwhile, would go out in borderline madness, when no one else would even consider it, and come in laughing. There were people who found this sort of thing annoying.

But Mark trained for big waves with a joyful masochism. One morning I found myself standing on the embankment at Quintara, watching him try to paddle out. The surf was eight-feet-plus, ragged, relentless, onshore, with no visible channels. Even the trough was not in evidence. Getting out looked impossible, and the waves looked not worth the effort anyway, but Mark was out there still, a small black-wetsuited figure in a world of furious whitewater, throwing himself into the stacked walls of onrushing foam. Each time he seemed to be making headway, a new set would appear on the horizon, bigger than the last and breaking farther out—the biggest waves were breaking maybe two hundred yards from shore—and drive him back into the impact zone. Watching with me was Tim Bodkin, a hyrdrogeologist, surfer, and Mark’s next-door neighbor. Bodkin was getting a huge kick out of Mark’s ordeal. “Forget it, Doc!” he kept shouting into the wind, and then he would laugh. “He’s never going to make it. He just won’t admit it.” At times we lost sight of him altogether. The waves rarely gave him a chance even to clamber onto his board and paddle; mostly he was underwater, diving under waves, swimming seaward along the bottom, dragging his board behind him. After thirty minutes, I began to worry: the water was cold, the surf was powerful. Bodkin, aglow with schadenfreude, did not share my concern. Finally, after about forty-five minutes, there was a brief lull. Mark scrambled onto his board and paddled furiously, and within three minutes he was outside, churning over the crests of the next set with five yards to spare. Once he was safely beyond the surf, he sat up on his board to rest, a black speck bobbing on a blue, windblown sea. Bodkin, disgusted, left me alone on the embankment.

Mark took to calling me at first light. I came to dread his calls. Dreams full of giant gray surf and a morbid fear of drowning would climax with the scream of the phone in the dark. His voice on the other end of the line at dawn was always bright, raucous, from the daylight world.

“Well? How’s it look?”

He could see the south end of Ocean Beach from his place; I could see the north end; he wanted a report. I would stumble, shivering, to the window, peering through blurry binoculars at a cold, wild sea.

“It looks . . . hairy.”

“Well? Let’s hit it!”

Other surfers also got these calls. Edwin Salem, a genial college student, originally from Argentina, and a protégé of Mark’s, told me that he used to lie awake half the night worrying that the phone would ring, and then panic if it did. “Doc only called me when it was big and he knew nobody else would go out with him. I usually would.”

I usually would too, up to a point not yet determined.

 • • • 

ON A CLEAR, CHILLY DAY in early November, Mark and I paddled out at Sloat. It was the first day of a small north swell, and the surf was confused—lumpy, harsh, inconsistent. He had persuaded me that before the waves had time to calm down and clean up, northwest winds—which, according to his weather radio, were already blowing twenty-five knots in the Farallon Islands, twenty miles offshore—would be here. Those winds, when they arrived, would wreck the waves completely, so this might be our only chance to surf this swell. Yes, we were the only surfers in sight, but that was because the others were expecting it to get better later, on the outgoing tide. They didn’t know about the northwesterlies.

“Or maybe they have jobs,” I panted.

“Jobs?” Mark laughed. “That was their first mistake.”

It was late morning, still nearly windless. My hands burned with cold. Even after we got outside, there was no chance to warm them in my armpits because there was a fierce current running north, meaning we had to paddle constantly just to stay in the same place off the beach. The current also meant that we were looking only for rights, which carried one south. I was breathing too hard to argue about employment. Mark had a work schedule built around surfing, with a variety of gigs and maximum flexibility. He constantly rearranged his practice around swells, tides, and wind. So he had plenty of work, which he described as highly fulfilling, and he had no trouble paying rent. I was a convenient person to surf with partly because my schedule was flexible. His disdain for the conventionally employed was in truth mostly a joke, meant to get my goat, which he enjoyed doing.

Mark’s disdain for marriage and children was even more pointed. “The rule about guys getting married: their readiness to ride big waves goes down one notch immediately,” he liked to say. “And it goes down another big notch with each kid. Most guys with three kids won’t go out in waves over four feet!”

The waves turned out to be better than they had looked from shore, and we both got a series of short, fast rides on good-sized waves. Their lumpiness gave them odd, unexpected speed hollows. Mark came flying out of one thick-muscled close-out chattering about needing a longer board. He was riding a 6'3". In the moments when the roar of the surf subsided, we could hear monkeys howling in the city zoo, beyond the beach embankment. But really San Francisco might as well have been in another hemisphere. Ocean Beach in the winter is a wilderness, as raw and red-clawed as any place in the Rocky Mountains. We could see traffic on the coast highway, but it was unlikely that the people in the passing cars saw us. Many of them would undoubtedly say, if asked, that there was no surfing in San Francisco.

Mark couldn’t resist a large, wrapping left. He took off and in a matter of seconds rode halfway to Ulloa. I caught the next wave, also a left, and was carried even farther north. Paddling back out, we were both driven still farther north by a set breaking south of us. We were now so far downcurrent that we decided to abandon Sloat for Taraval. The peak breaking over the sandbar at Taraval was shifty and sloppy, though, and we stopped catching waves. A better peak seeemed to be breaking at Santiago. Mark had an idea: let’s quit fighting the current. When it was this bad on an incoming tide, it turned into the Sloat-to-Kelly’s Express. Let’s just ride it north, he said, surfing whatever we found. I was exhausted, and therefore agreeable. We stopped paddling south, and soon the beach started streaming past. It was a goofy, hapless feeling, letting the sandbars come to us, instead of struggling to reach a takeoff spot and staying there. Water flows off a sandbar, and can make it difficult to maintain position at the bar’s outside edge, where waves will prepare to break, but the rushing, sinuous current was carrying us across all sorts of spots, at all sorts of angles, willy-nilly.

Mark, who loved this kind of half-uncontrolled experiment, provided a running commentary on the bars we were traversing. Here was where that great peak broke last year—at Outside Quintara. And this was the lineup on giant days at Pacheco. See that cross on the mountain? You had to keep it above the church. And you could see that Noriega was starting to do something interesting: “On these pushy swells, it’s not really breaking outside and it’s not really breaking inside. The inside bar swings out here now, so that it’s breaking in the middle, and peeling off in both directions.”

He was right about the sandbars at Noriega. Surf was no longer breaking on the outside bars that we had been drifting among. We swirled slowly through a wide, waveless field. An otter popped up ahead of us, swimming on its back. It had a small, shiny red-brown head, with huge dark eyes. Otters weren’t common at Ocean Beach; it was as if this one had been summoned by our peculiarly passive behavior.

The current was now carrying us out to sea. I suggested we paddle toward shore. Mark reluctantly agreed to abridge our drifting experiment.

On the inside bar, as we continued our progress toward Judah, we found short, thick waves breaking with surprising power. I liked the quick, steep drops, and caught three straight high-adrenaline rights before stroking into a head-high mistake. My board stuck for a moment in the wave’s lip. Then I was launched into space. I tried to get away from my board, but dared not dive straight down—the inside bar was shallow. I hit the water awkwardly, twisted, and hit the bottom, softly, with one shoulder. I felt my board flash past, actually brushing my arms, which were over my face, in the moment before the wave landed on me. I got comprehensively thrashed, and finally surfaced, gasping, with what felt like several pounds of sand inside my wetsuit. I had been lucky—I could have been hurt. I scrambled back out, head ringing, nose streaming.

Mark had started surfing more cautiously. “When it’s dredging over a shallow sandbar, that’s when you break your neck,” he said. It was a paradox—that someone known for taking the most extreme risks was at the same time so prudent—but it was also true that Mark “made” a higher percentage of his waves (that is, exited from the wave still on his feet) than any other surfer I knew. He simply didn’t take off on waves that he didn’t believe he had an excellent chance of making, and once he committed himself to a wave he hardly ever made a careless or ill-considered move.

We reconvened after Mark caught a right and I got a long left. As we paddled back out, he announced, “November is big and stupid.” What he meant was that the surf at Ocean Beach in November was often large but rarely well ordered. But before he could say more we got separated as we rushed to avoid an approaching set. A few minutes later, he went on, “The correspondences between what you see on the weather map and what actually arrives at the Beach aren’t really established yet.”

In fact, there were great fall days at Ocean Beach, when the first north and west swells of the season met the first offshore winds. Those winds began to blow after the first snowfall in the High Sierras. Of course, fall surf benefited from the inevitable comparison with the months of fogbound, onshore slop that an Ocean Beach summer entailed. The first large swells of the season actually did arrive in November, though, often before the sandbars were ready to turn them into ridable surf. Winter was when the waves were best. In December and January, the combination of huge winter storm swells and local beach and weather conditions was frequently exquisite.

It would be cold—water temperatures could fall into the forties, and the air on winter mornings could be below freezing. I was considering investing in neoprene booties, gloves, and a hood, all of which some guys were already wearing. A broken leash and a long swim could spell hypothermia. Loss of sensation in hands and feet was already giving me trouble. I sometimes had to ask strangers to open my car door and put the key in the ignition, my own manual dexterity having been deleted by a surf. The passage of time itself could feel distorted: a couple of long sessions in cold water, hard winds, and big waves could make two days seem like two weeks.

We were now coming up on VFW’s, where the sandbars were a mess. We had drifted about three miles. But the tide was almost high now; the current seemed to be slackening. We had been out for at least two hours, my hands were numb, and no amount of mashing them under cold rubber wings would bring them back to life now. I was ready to go in.

We decided to hitchhike back to Sloat rather than walk. As we climbed the embankment to the highway, Mark suddenly turned and said triumphantly, “Feel that? Here come the onshores!” He was right. A sharp, dark windline was already moving into the surf on the outside bars, tearing off the tops of the waves. “Those other guys blew it,” Mark crowed.

 • • • 

MY OLD PALS Becket and Domenic both seemed to be letting surfing slip. Becket was back in Newport, running construction jobs, doing boat carpentry, delivering yachts. His brand of hide-your-daughters wharf-rat hedonism was ready to be patented, I thought. While his neighbors had I’D RATHER BE SAILING decals on their cars, he drove around Orange County in a work pickup with a bumper sticker that said, I’D RATHER BE PERFORMING CUNNILINGUS. On the wall in his office, when I went to visit, I was startled to find a framed photo of myself. It was the Grajagan shot, clipped from a surf mag, of me standing, board under arm, at the edge of the reef while an empty, backlit, fabulous-looking left roars past. Becket had tacked up a caption, “Chickens Do Surf.” The reference was to my ankles, which are skinny. “I know why you had to go around the world,” he said while I studied the photo. “It was because you couldn’t find enough things to be miserable about in this country.”

It was a theory, not without interest, and not so different from Domenic’s idea of my self-hating politics. Domenic, meanwhile, had taken his place in the world. He was directing high-end TV commercials. He had married an equally successful French commercial director. They kept an apartment in Paris, a house in Beverly Hills, a condo in Malibu. She had grown kids. Both Domenic and Becket still surfed, or at least owned boards, but neither seemed to be a full-fledged local at any spot. Southern California, with its miasmic crowds, would discourage that, I knew. Once I landed in San Francisco and entered my apprenticeship at Ocean Beach, I never thought of telling my old surf partners about the great uncrowded waves I had lucked into. I wasn’t trying to keep a secret. I just knew they wouldn’t be interested. Too much punishment for the occasional sweet ride. Too cold, too gnarly, too hard-core.

My mother had her doubts about San Francisco generally. This made her unusual in Los Angeles, where the natives traditionally wax romantic about their northern counterpart—Baghdad by the Bay, Tony Bennett’s lost heart, etcetera. She thought it was a fine place to visit but self-satisfied and somewhat stale, particularly since its hippie heyday. I once heard her call it “an old folks’ home for young people,” a quip that had some bite since Kevin and I were both living there. Kevin was now in law school, having bailed on the film business. He lived downtown, in a neighborhood called the Tenderloin. Neither of us was exactly slacking, but I did notice, on holidays when we all went home, how L.A. buzzed with a kind of acid élan, an endemic entertainment-industry-ambition frenzy that I had ignored while growing up there but could now safely appreciate. The Bay Area had nothing like it, at least not outside Silicon Valley, which held no interest for me but was obviously fizzing with brainpower.

I knew that my mom had gone back to work, and yet the reality never quite registered with me until I found myself watching a smiling, well-spoken filmmaker, Patricia Finnegan, accept an award in a hotel ballroom in Washington, D.C., for a movie she had produced. Was that my mother? She had started by volunteering at a nonprofit production company, found her feet quickly, and then she and my dad had started their company. They had their start-up struggles, but within a few years my mother was hiring my father as a line producer on movies-of-the-week. She had a sharp eye for story and got on famously—easily, productively—with writers, directors, actors, and network executives, which sounds simple but is actually a rare talent. She and my father were wildly busy. Colleen and Michael each took serious looks at the family business, and then went elsewhere—Colleen into medicine, Michael into journalism, both back east. Kevin, who had strong left-wing politics, would not be returning to Hollywood after law school. So we had all flown the show-business coop. I couldn’t tell if my finally getting some articles published here and there pleased my father, the old newswriter. The book I was writing, I thought, might surprise my parents. They still thought of my teaching in Cape Town as good works. But a large part of the book would be about my failure to help my students and the unintended consequences of my more benighted efforts.

The emotional disarray in which I departed southern Africa had not left me. I still had evil, agonizing dreams about Sharon. I had no contact with her, and I tried to hide my heartache from Caroline. But I sometimes wondered how it might color my account of the struggle for black liberation in South Africa.

Kevin, who had gone to college in San Francisco, was living with a categorically more serious nightmare. The HIV/AIDS pandemic was in its early stages, still poorly understood. In San Francisco young people were falling ill, terminally ill, by the hundreds, soon to be thousands. Caroline and I were new in town, and we didn’t know anyone who had tested positive, but Kevin’s friends and neighbors downtown were living in terror, and they were being cruelly cut down. San Francisco General Hospital opened the first dedicated AIDS ward in the United States in 1983. Within days, it was full. One of Kevin’s closest friends, a sweet young lawyer named Sue, who was his college roommate, and spent Christmas with us, died of AIDS. She was thirty-one. Most of the victims in the city were gay men, of course. Kevin, who is gay, was active in the movement to demand more resources for AIDS research and treatment, but he didn’t talk to me much about it. Our travels in Africa felt like they had taken place in another, less stark century. He seemed distracted, at best. I spared him my stories of near drownings on the inside bar at Ocean Beach.

 • • • 

I PADDLED OUT with Mark on a shiny, scary-looking day at Pacheco. It was hard to gauge the size of the surf because there was no one else in the water. We got out easily—conditions were immaculate, the channels easy to read—but then we misjudged conditions and took up a position that was too close to shore. Before we caught our first waves, a huge set caught us inside. The first wave snapped my ankle leash like it was a piece of string. I swam underneath that wave and then kept swimming, toward open ocean. The second wave looked like a three-story building. It, like the first wave, was preparing to break a few yards in front of me. I dived deep and swam hard. The lip of the wave hitting the surface above me sounded like a bolt of lightning exploding at very close range, and it filled the water with shock waves. I managed to stay underneath the turbulence, but when I surfaced I saw that the third wave of the set belonged to another order of being. It was bigger, thicker, and drawing much more heavily off the bottom than the others. My arms felt rubbery, and I started hyperventilating. I dived very early and very deep. The deeper I swam, the colder and darker the water got. The noise as the wave broke was preternaturally low, a basso profundo of utter violence, and the force pulling me backward and upward felt like some nightmare inversion of gravity. Again, I managed to escape, and when I finally surfaced I was far outside. There were no more waves, which was fortunate, since I was sure that one more would have finished me. Mark was there, though, perhaps ten yards to my right. He had been diving and escaping the unimaginable just as narrowly as I had. His leash had not broken, however; he was reeling in his board. As he did so, he turned to me with a manic look in his eyes and yelled, “This is great!” It could have been worse. He could have yelled, “This is interesting!”

I later learned that, from a record-keeping point of view, Mark had indeed found that afternoon’s surf interesting. He stayed out in the water for four hours (I made the long swim to shore, collected my board from the sand, and went home to bed), and he measured the wave interval—the time it takes two waves in a set to pass a fixed point—at twenty-five seconds. It was the longest interval he had ever seen at Ocean Beach. That didn’t completely surprise me. Long-interval waves move through the ocean faster than their shorter-interval cousins, reach deeper below the surface, and when they break drive more water forward because they have more energy. Mark’s journal entry for that session also showed, among other things, that my leash broke on the twenty-first day of that surf season on which Mark had surfed waves eight feet or bigger, and the ninth day on which he had surfed waves ten feet or bigger.

The thing to be feared most, I believed, was a two-wave hold-down. That was a drubbing so prolonged that you didn’t reach the surface before the next wave landed on you. It had never happened to me. People survived it, but never happily. I had heard of guys who quit surfing after a two-wave hold-down. When someone drowned in big waves, it was rarely possible to know exactly why, but I believed it often started with a two-wave hold-down. The biggest single reason I was so frightened by the third wave in that monster set that broke my leash was because the wave had two-wave hold-down written all over it. It was a rare slabby specimen for Ocean Beach, like the worst kind of inside-bar dredger—except two or three times the size. I didn’t understand where on the bars it was breaking or why—I still don’t understand it—but with its ultra-thickness I knew as I swam under it that there would not be much water left in front of it, meaning that it was very likely that if I got sucked over, I would have at least one encounter, possibly catastrophic, with the bottom, as well as an extremely long, possibly fatally long, hold-down. I didn’t know about the interval of the swell, but had gathered from the first waves we saw that it was exceptionally long. A two-wave hold-down in extremely long-interval waves would be, for obvious reasons, very long indeed.

Forty or fifty seconds underwater might not sound too bad. Most big-wave surfers can hold their breath for several minutes. But that’s on land, or in a pool. Ten seconds while getting rag-dolled by a big wave is an eternity. By thirty seconds, almost anyone is approaching blackout. In the worst wipeouts of my experience, I had no way of knowing afterward precisely—or even imprecisely—how long I had been held down. I tried to concentrate on relaxing, on taking the beating, not fighting it, not burning oxygen, trying to conserve energy for the swim to the surface once the flogging ended. I sometimes had to climb my own leash to the surface, my board being more buoyant than I was. My worst hold-downs were always the ones that I thought had come to an end—one more kick to the surface—before they actually had. The unexpected extra kick, or two, or three, still without reaching the surface, made the desperation for air, the spasm in the throat, feel suddenly like a sob, or a stifled scream. Fighting the reflex that wanted to suck water into the lungs was nasty, frantic.

Nothing physically unpleasant had happened under that third wave in the Pacheco set. And there was no wave behind it, so the two-wave hold-down that I feared if I got sucked back over would not have happened. Still, the near miss spooked me. I knew I was not ready for the consequences of getting hit squarely by a wave that consequential. I doubted I ever would be.

 • • • 

IT WAS ASTOUNDING TO ME that anyone learned to surf in San Francisco. I took to interviewing, informally, guys who had. Edwin Salem told me that when he was a kid he built a board rack to hitch to his bicycle, using scrounged plywood, two-by-fours, and wheels off a shopping cart. He would set off from the Sunset District two hours before the tide would be good at Fort Point because that’s how long it took to pedal there. Fort Point is a sloppy left under the south end of the Golden Gate Bridge. It gets crowded but is a relatively gentle wave. At twelve or thirteen, Edwin started riding the whitewater at Ocean Beach. Peewee, who was already one of the big guys there, told him that, before he could surf, he had to collect a lot of wood—good dry stuff for a bonfire that would be blazing when he came in. “I collected a lot of wood,” Edwin said. “And I took a lot of crap.” Slowly he became an Ocean Beach local.

Now in his midtwenties, Edwin was a smooth, powerful surfer with curly black hair and merry green eyes. He and I were out at Sloat, catching our breaths after a bruising paddle-out. It was cold, midmorning. The surf was fierce but mediocre; there was no one else out. The smell of fresh doughnuts drifted across the water from a bakery near Wise’s shop. On the horizon a container ship was steaming toward the Gate. We decided we were too far out. As we began paddling back toward the takeoff area, gliding watchfully over the swells, I asked Edwin about the surf in Argentina. I knew he still made occasional trips there to visit family. He laughed. “After this place, I couldn’t believe how easy it was to surf there,” he said. “The water was so warm! The waves were so mellow! There were girls on the beach!”

 • • • 

ON A VERY BIG DAY, the city itself looked different. The streets and buildings seemed glazed and remote, the lineaments of an exhausted sphere: land. The action was all at sea. One January morning in 1984, Ocean Beach was so big that San Francisco felt like a ghost town as I drove the few blocks to the coast. It was a dark, ugly day, drizzling and cold. The ocean was gray and brown and extremely ominous. There were no cars at Kelly’s or VFW’s. I headed south, driving slowly, so that I could watch the surf. It was impossible to say how big it was. There was nothing—no one—out there to provide any scale. It was twenty feet at least, probably bigger.

Sloat looked totally out of control as I pulled into the parking lot. The waves breaking farthest out were barely visible from the shore. Paddling out was unthinkable. There was no wind, but the largest waves were feathering slightly anyway, from the sheer volume of water they threw forth as they broke. The explosions that followed were unnaturally white. They looked like small nuclear blasts; watching them made my stomach churn. When Mark had phoned me earlier, he had said simply, “Sloat. Be there or be square.” But Sloat was out of the question. Mark pulled into the parking lot a few minutes after I did. He turned to me and opened his eyes wide—his way of saying that the waves were even bigger than he had thought. He cackled darkly. We agreed to look at the surf on the south side of a temporary construction pier that the city had built half a mile below Sloat. As we were leaving, Edwin pulled into the lot. Mark had also rousted him at dawn. The three of us drove into the dunes south of Sloat.

The swell was coming from the northwest—it was being generated by a major storm in the Aleutians—so the pier, which was four or five hundred yards long, was significantly diluting the power of the surf to its immediate south. The waves there looked barely half the size of the gargantuan stuff on the north side, and almost manageable. There was still the question of getting out, however. People sometimes paddled out underneath the pier—a regular rip current, carrying water that the surf had piled up near the beach back out to sea, had dug a deep trench under the pier, so that waves rarely broke there. But it was nasty under the pier. There were loose cables dangling, and huge iron sheets sticking up at odd angles under the water, not to mention the pilings themselves, which were closely spaced and did not budge when the surf slammed you into them. I had paddled out under the pier a few times, on days when getting out at Sloat had been beyond me, but I had sworn not to do it again. In any case, even paddling out under the pier looked impossible this morning. Broken waves were rumbling through the pilings like small avalanches through an iron forest. The only nonlethal way to get out today would be to sneak past the guard on the construction project, run out on the pier, and jump off the end, which was safely outside the surf.

“Let’s do it,” Mark said.

The three of us were now sitting in his van—a brawny, battered, trek-outfitted 1975 Dodge—parked on a dirt road just south of the pier. No one had said anything except “Oh my God!” and “Look at that!” for ten minutes. I had absolutely no desire to go surfing. Fortunately, my board was inadequate for these conditions; even Edwin’s 8'4" gun didn’t look big enough. Mark had two big-wave boards, both over nine feet, with him. He said that one of us could use one of them.

“This is why I don’t own a board over nine feet,” Edwin said. He gave a nervous laugh.

In fact, this was why most surfers didn’t own a board over eight feet; it might raise the question someday of actually going out in conditions that required that much surfboard. Once, in Wise’s shop, I had heard a surfer mutter as he and his friends studied a 10'0" gun on display, “This one comes with a free pine box.” The market for boards that serious was minuscule.

Mark jumped out of the van, went around to the side door, and began changing into his wetsuit. For the first time since I’d moved to San Francisco, I was ready to refuse to go out, and Mark seemed to realize it. “Come on, Edwin,” he said. “We’ve surfed bigger waves.”

They probably had, too. Mark and Edwin had a pact, informal but fierce, concerning big waves. They had been surfing together since they met, in 1978. Mark took an interest in Edwin’s welfare: counseling him about how to get along in the United States, encouraging him to go to college. Edwin, who lived with his mother—his parents were divorced—treasured Mark’s foster-paternal guidance, which came to include a running pep talk on the subject of big-wave surfing. Edwin had the physical equipment for big waves: he was powerfully built, a strong swimmer, a solid surfer. He also had steady nerves and a major endowment of youthful blitheness. Finally, there was the fact that he trusted—even worshipped—Mark. That made him an ideal apprentice in a program that, over several winters, had got him out into bigger and bigger—eventually into some very big—waves. Mark and Edwin’s pact consisted mainly of an unspoken understanding that Mark would not take Edwin out on days when he would probably drown.

Edwin was shaking his head lugubriously, unzipping his down-filled jacket. In most company he would make an unlikely Sancho Panza—he is over six feet tall, with square-jawed, leading-man looks—but it struck me, watching the two of them clamber into their wetsuits, that Mark could make any companion seem like a sidekick.

While Edwin fiddled with a leash that he was transferring from his board to the board Mark was lending him—a hefty, pale yellow 9'6" single-fin gun—Mark showed me how to use his camera. Then he took the board that he would ride—a magnificent, narrow 9'8" three-fin—out on the dunes, methodically rubbed wax on the deck, and did a series of deep yoga stretches, all without taking his eyes off the surf.

“Why do we do this?” Edwin asked me. His nervous laugh rose and fell.

Finally, Edwin was ready, and the two of them set off, trotting lightly past the guard’s trailer, disappearing behind stacks of mammoth sewer pipe, then reappearing a minute later out on the pier, still jogging—two lithe silhouettes, their big boards dramatic against a whitish sky. Beyond the pier I could see waves breaking off Sloat where I had never seen them break before. Farther north still, the ranges of gray-beige swells and white walls were a scene out of my surfing nightmares. The waves scared me even as I sat, warm and dry, in the van.

At the end of the pier, Mark and Edwin climbed down a ladder, flopped on their boards, and started paddling back toward shore. Their approach gave scale to the waves, which turned out to be less monstrous than I’d imagined. When Edwin quickly took off on a meaty left, it stood up about three times his height. The wave was mud brown and hungry-looking; I started snapping pictures. Edwin pulled into it well, but the wave suddenly lined up all the way to the pier, fifty yards north, closing out, and he was forced to straighten off. The whitewater exploded and engulfed him. A moment later, his board came cartwheeling out of the whitewater; his leash had snapped. The waves were breaking close to shore—there was no outside bar on the south side of the pier—and Edwin washed in quickly. He came chugging up the dunes, and he grinned when I told him that I’d got several shots of his ride. “It’s not too hairy out there, I don’t think,” he said. “Kind of closed out, maybe.” He wanted to borrow the leash from my board. I gladly gave it to him. The waves looked more than kind of closed out, and it was not getting any warmer—the air temperature was in the forties.

While Edwin started back out the pier, I noticed a tremendous set breaking on an outside bar perhaps two hundred yards to the north. With people in the water, it was now possible to say that Sloat was indeed twenty-foot-plus. But the set I could see breaking on the outside bar was more than gigantic—it was also phenomenally violent. The waves seemed to be turning themselves inside out as they broke, and when they paused they spat out clouds of mist—air that had been trapped inside the bus-sized tubes. I had never seen anything like it before, even on the North Shore: twenty-foot spitting tubes. Edwin was gesturing to Mark, trying to show him where a set on the horizon on the south side seemed to be planning to break. The thunder of the waves under the pier drowned out the roar of the larger waves farther away, and Edwin never glanced north, where the view would have stopped him cold.

Mark caught a couple of peaky ten-foot rights, both of which he made. I didn’t have a good angle on the rights for shooting pictures, though. And, photographically speaking, the situation south of the pier began to deteriorate after Edwin got back out. It started raining in earnest, and Mark and Edwin, whom I could barely see through the mist, caught no waves for half an hour. I stowed Mark’s camera, locked his van, and went home.

Shortly after I left, Edwin told me later, he caught another left. He made this one, but the following wave, a fifteen-foot peak that came crashing through the pier, caught him inside. My leash snapped, but this time he did not wash in to the beach. Instead, he was seized and carried by a powerful current straight into the pier. Terrified, he fought his way through the pilings, and came out unhurt on the north side. But there the current turned seaward and began to carry him toward the outside bar—the same bar where I had seen twenty-foot tubes turning themselves inside out and spitting. He swam toward shore, but the current was stronger than he was. He was already hundreds of yards offshore, weak with panic—but still south of the killer sandbar—when a freak deepwater set broke outside him. These were much softer waves than the ones breaking where he was bound, so Edwin stayed on the surface and let them hit him. The set washed him to the inside edge of the rip. There he managed to swim into the path of the whitewater rumbling in from the killer bar, which washed him farther inside. When he reached the beach, somewhere near Sloat, he was too weak to walk.

Mark found him there. Edwin was too shaken up to drive, so Mark drove him home. I don’t know whether he mentioned to Edwin what he had been doing while Edwin was fighting for his life in the water and lying gasping on the sand, but Mark later told me that he had grown bored with the long lulls south of the pier and had paddled through to the north side. He had stayed outside the killer bar, but had caught a couple of gigantic waves at Sloat, he said, before heading back south to look for Edwin. He had been worried after he found the board he’d lent Edwin lying on the beach, and very relieved when he finally found Edwin himself. Their pact had survived a severe test. Edwin, after Mark took him back to the apartment he shared with his mother, stayed on land for several days. He surfed little the rest of that winter, and I did not see him out in very big waves again.

 • • • 

ANOTHER COLD DAY AT SLOAT. Half a dozen people are out in eight-foot, high-tide glass. I’m on shore, warm and dry, hors de combat since tearing up my ankle two weeks before in a free fall at Dead Man’s, a cliffside left on the south side of the Golden Gate. I’m back in Mark’s van, again with the camera. I almost never take surf photos—I can’t sit still if the waves look good—but Mark has seen and seized another chance to put his camera in my hands. Nearly all surfers love shots of themselves in the act of surfing. To say that waves and the rides they provide are inherently fleeting events, and that surfers naturally therefore want mementos, doesn’t begin to explain the collective passion for self-portraits. I’m supposed to be shooting two or three guys, Mark and friends, but they aren’t getting many waves. The peak shifts south, taking the crowd along with it, and my subjects dissolve in a glittering field of light.

I should move south with them. I drag myself into the driver’s seat, start the engine, and feel suddenly like a kid wearing his dad’s overcoat: the sleeves fall to my knees, the hem brushes the floor. Mark is actually not much bigger than I am—an inch or two taller—but the seat feels strangely vast, even the steering wheel seems oversized, and the van itself feels less like a car than like some high-bridged, sure-ruddered freighter as I steer it through the puddles and potholes of the Sloat parking lot. From the driver’s seat, the van, its bed stacked high with surfboards, seems suffused with a big-cat-stretching sense of power, of rangy well-being and good health. From this surf-rinsed, king-of-beasts view of the world, I think, I too might be inclined to evangelize.

Mark understood the surf-photo compulsion. He not only put on slide shows, and had pictures of himself tacked up all over his apartment; he also delighted in presenting friends with pictures of themseves surfing. I’d seen these photographs hanging in the homes of their subjects, framed like religious icons. He gave me one of myself half crouched inside a slate-gray barrel at Noriega. Caroline had it framed for my birthday. It was a great shot, but it frustrated me to look at, because the photographer, a friend of Mark’s, fired an instant too soon. Just after the moment recorded, I disappeared into that wave. That was the shot I coveted: the wave alone, with the knowledge that I was in there, drawing a high line behind the thick, pouring, silver-beaded curtain. That invisible passage, not this moment of anticipation, was the heart of the ride. But pictures are not about what a ride felt like; they are about what a ride looked like to others. This Noriega shot—I am looking at it now—shows a dark sea; my memory of that wave, meanwhile, is drenched with silver light. That’s because I was looking south while I navigated its depths, and when I slipped through its almond eye back into the world.

For me, and not only for me, surfing harbors this paradox: a desire to be alone with waves fused to an equal desire to be watched, to perform.

The social side can be competitive or a pure yearning for companionship or, most often, both. It was unusually strong, I found, in San Francisco. The community of surfers was small, and the loneliness of surfing Ocean Beach when the waves were aroused was huge. Tim Bodkin’s wife, Kim, let me know where I stood, community-wise, one fine spring morning. I was waxing my board in front of her place on the Great Highway. Several other surfers were heading through the Taraval tunnel. Kim had her infant son on her hip. She was bouncing him in the sunshine. (Mark had already predicted that Tim would stop surfing big Sloat next winter.) “So is the whole Doc Squad going out?” she asked.

“The what?”

“The Doc Squad,” she said. “Don’t tell me you haven’t heard of it. You’re a charter member.”

 • • • 

THE NEW ISSUE of Surfer lay on the counter at Wise’s. Normally I would snatch it up and start leafing. But the cover featured a familiar-looking blue left peeling in the background as a surfer leaped with his board off a boat in the foregound. “FANTASTIC FIJI!!” read the headline. The upper-right corner band screamed, “DISCOVERY!” It was, of course, Tavarua.

I wanted to throw up. And I didn’t know the half of it.

The Surfer article, it turned out, was not about the discovery of a great new wave but about the opening of a resort. It seemed that two California surfers had bought or leased the island, built a hotel, and were now open for business. They were offering exclusive access to perhaps the best wave in the world to a maximum of six paying guests. This was a novel concept: paying to surf uncrowded waves. Articles about the discovery of a great new spot were a surf-mag staple, but the unwritten rules about disguising its location were strict. Maybe the continent would be revealed, generally not the country, sometimes not even the ocean. People might figure it out, but only a few, and they would have to work at it, and then they would want to keep the secret themselves. Here those rules were all smashed. Crowds at Tavarua would be prevented by the resort and its agreement with local authorities. It would be a private wave. Book now. All major credit cards accepted. There was even an ad for the resort in the same issue of the mag.

Bryan, as it happened, was flying into San Francisco that week from Tokyo. He was freelancing for travel magazines; he had been on assignment in Hokkaido. I met his plane. On the drive from the airport to our place, I dropped the new Surfer in his lap. He started cursing quietly. He slowly got louder. Speculating about who had opened their big mouth was pointless. Our shared fantasy had been wrong. Tavarua had not been sitting chastely, transcendent waves roaring unridden down the reef, for six years after all.

Bryan took it harder than I did, or at least less passively—he wrote a cutting letter to Surfer. By feeling aggrieved, he told me, we were being dogs in the manger, yes, growling over straw that we weren’t using. Still, he thought the whole thing stunk, and so did I. Everything untrammeled in this world gets exploited, he said, and sullied and spoiled. His letter to Surfer asked the right questions about financial arrangements between the magazine and the resort, calling the editors pimps or, at best, morons.

It was strange to see Bryan in the flesh. We were still faithful, high-volume correspondents, such that I sometimes felt like I was living a second, more uproarious life in Montana—skiing hard, drinking hard, knocking around with rowdy, talented writers, who always seemed to mass there. Bryan was publishing a lot, articles and reviews, working on another novel. He was living with “a mean skinny woman,” as he called her, a writer named Deirdre McNamer, who wasn’t mean at all, and who would eventually do him the great favor of marrying him. His travel pieces took him all over the place—Tasmania, Singapore, Bangkok. Deirdre went along to Bangkok, where he showed her the Station Hotel, our old digs. Even he was shocked by its squalor. “How different a city is with money,” he wrote—this was on page fifteen of a letter to me from Southeast Asia. “It becomes air-conditioned, manageable, flowing.” Bryan’s letters were Whitmanic, volcanic, funny—even the ones racked with self-castigation, which were distressingly frequent. He once wrote that he had just realized that the hospitality we received back in 1978 from Sina Savaiinaea and her family in Samoa had cost them a lot of money, relative to their wealth, and that we had repaid them with trinkets rather than the cash that they desperately needed and were expecting but were too polite to mention. He was so horrified he couldn’t sleep. And I wasn’t at all sure he was wrong.

Bryan hadn’t surfed in a while. There was a small October swell. Mark loaned him a board and wetsuit. The wetsuit was too small, and Bryan struggled to pull it on, writhing in the gloom of Mark’s garage, with Mark and friends watching with entirely too much amusement. I helped Bryan get the thing zipped. In the water, he struggled again. The Ocean Beach whitewater was, as usual, relentless, and he was out of shape. I duck-dived next to him, making little unwelcome suggestions. We surfed twice during his stay, and he claimed to be elated to be back in the ocean. I waited for a slighting remark from some junior member of the Doc Squad, itching to slap them down. But nobody said anything. Bryan took Mark’s measure, and no doubt vice versa. Bryan’s least favorite people were the overweening.

Bryan and Caroline, meanwhile, spoke each other’s language. I noticed him jotting down throwaway remarks of hers—when she called me a “hyena” for skulking through the kitchen or she indignantly asked why a local fitness buff thought anyone would be interested in his “nasty body.” Bryan had brought us English-language tourist decals from Japan—WE MADE A FINE TOUR and WE TOOK A PHOTOGRAPH IN ALL—which we stuck on the fridge.

About a year after that visit, Bryan wrote a short piece about his softball team—the team was called Montana Review of Books—and sent me the manuscript. Did I think the New Yorker would want it? It was good, I replied, but not right for Talk of the Town. Too novelistic, too confessional. I was an expert, of course, having sold the magazine one thing. Bryan didn’t wait for my advice letter to arrive, though. He submitted the piece. William Shawn, the magazine’s editor, read it and called him, full of praise. He flew Bryan to New York, put him up at the Algonquin Hotel, and asked him what else he might like to write. Shawn published the softball piece immediately and gave Bryan an assignment for a two-part piece on—Bryan’s idea—the history of dynamite. When I heard from Deirdre that Bryan was in New York and why, I meekly asked that he not open the letter from me waiting for him in Missoula.

 • • • 

A VERY BIG late-winter day at VFW’s. Tim Bodkin and Peewee are the only people out. From the beach, the sea is just a blinding, colorless sheet of afternoon glare, intermittently broken by the black walls of waves. Mark was out earlier. When he came in, he called it ten to twelve feet and the northbound current “a killer.” A light northwest wind has come up since, marring the surface and rendering the waves a notch more dangerous and difficult to ride. Bodkin and Peewee are catching few waves. Most of the time, they’re invisible in the glare. The waves they do manage to catch are all massive lefts, breaking on an outside bar I have rarely seen break and have never before seen ridable. I don’t normally think of VFW’s as a big-wave spot. On small, clean days, it’s usually the most crowded stretch of the Beach. But this is the kind of day when Bob Wise says he gets a lot of phone calls from guys asking hopefully, “Is it small?” And when he tells them, “No, it’s huge,” they suddenly remember all the business they have in far-flung parts of the Greater Bay Area.

Eight or ten surfers watch from the seawall, nervous and grumpy. All seem to agree that the wind has ruined the surf, that there’s really no reason to go out now. An unusual amount of profanity—unusual even for surfers—is being used to discuss the waves, the weather, the world. People pace, fists plunged in pockets, laughing too loudly, dry-mouthed. Then Edwin, who has been silently watching the ocean from behind mirrored sunglasses, erupts. “I have an idea,” he announces. “Let’s form a support group. I’m not going out there because I’m scared to go out there. Why don’t we all just say that? ‘I’m not going out there because I’m scared to go out there.’ Come on, Domond, you say it.”

Domond, a noisy tough who works in Wise’s shop when he’s not driving a taxicab, turns away in disgust. So Edwin addresses himself to another homeboy, known as Beeper Dave, but he also turns away, grumbling and shaking his head. Everybody then ignores Edwin, who just laughs easily and shrugs.

“Set,” somebody growls. All eyes swing to the horizon, where the blazing sheet of the sea is beginning to lift in sickeningly large gray lines. “Those guys are dead.”

 • • • 

I DECIDED TO TRY to write about Mark. He was up for it. I sent a proposal to the New Yorker: a profile of this amazing urban big-wave surfer and physician. Shawn liked the sound of it. I got the assignment.

Things changed after that between me and Mark. I stopped being mortified that people might mistake me for one of his acolytes. I was his Boswell, don’t you know. I interviewed him about his childhood—his father was a psychiarist in Beverly Hills. I cataloged the contents of his van. I followed him around at work, sitting in while he examined patients. He had been a bit of a prodigy when we were in college. After his father developed a tumor, Mark, who was pre-med, started studying cancer with an intensity that convinced many of his friends that his goal was to find a cure in time to save his father. As it turned out, his father didn’t have cancer. But Mark kept on with his cancer studies. His interest was not in fact in oncology—in finding a cure—but in cancer education and prevention. By the time he entered medical school, he had created, with another student, a series of college courses on cancer and coauthored The Biology of Cancer Sourcebook, the text for a course that was eventually offered to tens of thousands of students. He cowrote a second book, Understanding Cancer, that became a bestselling university text, and he continued to lecture throughout the United States on cancer research, education, and prevention.

“The funny thing is, I’m not really interested in cancer,” Mark told me. “I’m interested in people’s response to it. A lot of cancer patients and suvivors report that they never really lived till they got cancer, that it forced them to face things, to experience life more intensely. What you see in family practice is that families just can’t afford to be superficial with each other anymore once someone has cancer. Corny as it sounds, what I’m really interested in is the human spirit—in how people react to stress and adversity. I’m fascinated by the way people fight back, by how they keep fighting their way to the surface.” Mark clawed at the air with his arms. What he was miming was the struggle to reach the surface through the turbulence of a large wave.

I asked Geoff Booth, an Australian journalist, surfer, and physician, for his professional opinion. “Mark definitely has the death wish in him,” Booth said. “It’s some extreme driving force, which I really think only a handful of people in the world would understand. I’ve only met one other person who had it—Jose Angel.” Jose Angel was a great Hawaiian big-wave surfer who disappeared while diving off Maui in 1976.

Edwin’s theory was that Mark was driven to surf big waves by the rage and futility that he felt when his patients died. Mark said that was ridiculous. Edwin’s other theory was Freudian. (He was from Argentina, remember, where psychoanalysis is a middle-class religion.) “Obviously, it’s erotic,” he said. “That big board’s his prick.” I didn’t even run that one past Mark.

 • • • 

I FINISHED my South Africa book. While waiting to hear from the publisher, I went to Washington to report a piece on U.S. policy toward southern Africa. Civil unrest in South Africa was in the headlines and the anti-apartheid movement was gaining traction globally. A group of conservative young congressmen, led by Newt Gingrich, judging correctly that apartheid was doomed, had staged a revolt against Reagan administration policy, which was basically pro-apartheid. A wave of Republican infighting ensued, and some of the principals were eager to talk. I had a sharp anti-apartheid ax to grind, but my poker face was getting better (still mixing metaphors, though) and the refinement of my understanding of power proceeded. I wore a cheap black suit, carried a new briefcase Caroline had given me, and tried to act like I knew what I was doing in the offices of congressmen and senators, the State Department, the Heritage Foundation. I found my way into the militarist fringe where Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, not yet a public figure, operated. I was green and awkward, but I loved the work: chasing leads, making connections, asking hard questions. It was my third or fourth piece for Mother Jones, a leftist monthly in San Francisco that was also trying to find its way in the bigger world. The revolt of the young conservatives in Congress succeeded. Reagan suavely reversed field on economic sanctions against Pretoria. His administration continued to rain death, though, on Nicaragua.

My new status as a reporter seemed to dawn slowly on the little community of San Francisco surfers. By then I knew most of the main dudes—and it was still all dudes in the water at Ocean Beach, no women—though few of them knew much about me. When word got around that I was writing about Mark, people looked at me differently, I thought. Some volunteered their takes. “He’s the biggest little kid on the Beach,” Beeper Dave said. He meant that in a good way. “One thing about Doc,” Bob Wise said. “He keeps open the idea that anything is possible.” Another view of Mark, until then invisible to me, also began to surface. The most vivid expression of it came from a stranger who paddled up to me purposefully at VFW’s. He was a tough-looking guy, long dirty-blond hair, a lot of street in his face, and he got much closer to me than surfing social etiquette allowed. Looking me full in the face, he snarled, “Doc’s a fuckin’ kook.” I said nothing, and after a long moment he moved away. Nice to meet you too. On the face of it, the remark was absurd. A kook, in surf dialect, is a beginner. But the point was the insult, which was about as strong as it gets in surf world, and the seething hostility. Noted.

I saw Mark as a devoted pupil of Ocean Beach. But to some locals, I came to see, he was just a rich kid from L.A., and he was taking up too much psychic space. The social divide between blue-collar natives and white-collar newcomers wasn’t actually simple or clear. Many of Mark’s buddies were Sunset District homies. And there were plenty of Ocean Beach regulars whose stories didn’t fit in any category. Sloat Bill, for instance, was a commodities trader from Texas via Harvard. He got his nickname when, following one of his divorces, he moved into his car and lived for a month in the Sloat parking lot, vowing not to leave until he had mastered the harsh art of surfing Sloat. Whether he had achieved that aim or not, he had certainly made more money, tapping buy and sell orders into a computer plugged into his car’s cigarette lighter, than any of the rest of us did while sitting in the Sloat parking lot. Sloat Bill had recently moved back to San Francisco after a stint in San Diego, declaring, “Surfing down there was like driving on the freeway. Totally anonymous.”

 • • • 

THE SURFING SOCIAL CONTRACT is a delicate document. It gets redrafted every time you paddle out. At crowded breaks, while jockeying for waves with a mob of strangers, talent, aggression, local knowledge, and local reputation (if any) help establish a rough pecking order. I had competed joyously, on the whole, at Kirra, Malibu, Rincon, Honolua. But most spots, less famous, are subtler, their unwritten rules built on local personalities, local conditions. Crowded days were rare at Ocean Beach. They occurred, though, and the same sensitivities and decorum came into play then as they did anywhere else.

On a February afternoon, I paddled out at Sloat and found at least sixty people in the lineup. I didn’t recognize any of them. It was the third day of a solid west swell. Conditions were superb: six-foot-plus, not a breath of wind. Normally the winter bars began to fall apart in early February, but not this year. What had happened, I guessed, was that surfers from up and down the coast who usually didn’t want to know about Ocean Beach had decided en masse that with the major winter swells probably over and conditions still improbably clean, the feared O.B. could be safely raided. I understood this selective bravado, of course, because I felt it too, along with an immense relief at having survived another winter—this was my third. Still, I resented the horde. I got pounded on the inside bar, eventually slipped out, and started hunting for a peak to ride. The crowd seemed amorphous, unfocused—there were no conversations in progress. Everyone seemed intent on the waves, on himself. I caught my breath, chose a lineup marker—a school bus parked in the Sloat lot—and took up a risky position straight inside a group of four or five guys.

I was vulnerable there to a big set, but it was important, in a crowd, to make a good showing on one’s first waves, and after a long winter I knew the bars here better than these tourists did. As it happened, the next wave to come through held up nicely, shrugging off the efforts of two guys farther out to catch it, and handing me a swift, swooping, surefooted first ride. Paddling back out, I burned to tell somebody about the wave—about the great crack the lip had made as it split the surface behind me, about the mottled amber upper hollows of the inside wall. But there was no one to tell. Two black grebes popped out of the foam beside me, their spindly necks like feathered periscopes, their big, surprised eyes staring. I murmured, “Did you see my wave?”

Everyone out here was starring in his own movie, and permission was required before you inflicted your exploits on anyone else. Vocal instant replays and noisy exultation are not unknown in surfing, but they’re subject to a strict code of collective ego control. Young surfers sometimes misunderstand this part of the surfing social contract, and brag and browbeat each other in the water, but they generally cool it when older surfers are in earshot. The usual crowd at Ocean Beach was older than most—in fact, I couldn’t remember ever seeing a teenager out on a big day—and the unwritten limits on garrulity among strangers here were correspondingly firm. Those who exceeded them were shunned. Those who consistently exceeded them were hated, for they failed to respect the powerfully self-enclosed quality of what other surfers, especially the less garrulous, were doing out here.

I headed for an empty peak slightly north of the school bus. I caught two quick waves, and half a dozen people saw fit to join me. The hassling for waves got, for Ocean Beach, fairly bad. Nobody spoke. Each dreamer stayed deep in his own dream—hustling, feinting, gliding, windmilling into every possible wave. Then a cleanup set rolled through, breaking fifty yards outside the bar we were surfing. Huge walls of whitewater swatted all of us off our boards, pushing a few unlucky souls clear across the inside bar. The group that reconvened a few minutes later was smaller, and now had something to talk about. “My leash leg just got six inches longer.” “Those waves looked like December.” We settled into a rough rotation. Waves were given and taken, and givers were sometimes even thanked. After noteworthy rides, compliments were muttered. The chances of this swell’s lasting another day were discussed in general session. A burly Asian from Marin County was pessimistic—“It’s a three-day west. We get ’em every year.” He repeated his prediction, then said it again for those who might have missed it. The little group at the school-bus peak, while it would never be known for its repartee, had achieved some rude coherence. A light fabric of shared enterprise had settled over all of us, and I found that my resentment of the nonlocals had faded. The tide, which was rising, was unanimously blamed for a lengthy lull. The sun, nearing the horizon, ignited a fiery Z of sea-facing windows along a road that switchbacked up a distant San Francisco hillside.

Then a familiar howl and raucous laugh rose from the inside bar. “Doc,” someone said, unnecessarily. Mark was the one San Francisco surfer whom nonlocals were likely to know. He was paddling alongside somebody, regaling him with the plot of a horror movie: “So the head starts running around by itself, biting people to death.” Mark was wearing a silly-looking short-billed neoprene hood, with his beard jutting over the chin strap and his ponytail flapping out the back, steaming in my direction. When he was still ten yards away, he made a face and yelled, “This is a zoo!” I wondered what the people around us made of that observation. “Let’s go surf Santiago.”

Mark didn’t recognize the unwritten limits on garrulity in the water. He tore up the surfing social contract and blew his great, sunburned nose on the tatters. And he was too big, too witty, and far too fearless for anyone to object. Feeling compromised, I reluctantly abandoned my spot in the rotation at the school-bus peak and set off with Mark for the peaks breaking off Santiago, half a mile north. “‘A three-day west’!” Mark snorted. “Who are these guys? It’s going to be bigger tomorrow. All the indicators say so.”

Mark was usually right about what the surf would do. He was wrong about Santiago, though. The bars were sloppier than those we had left behind at Sloat. There was nobody surfing anywhere nearby. That was really why Mark wanted to surf there. It was an old disagreement between us. He believed that crowds were stupid. “People are sheep,” he liked to say. And he often claimed to know more than the crowd did about where and when to surf. He would head down the beach to some unlikely-looking spot and stubbornly stay there, riding marginal, inconsistent waves, rather than grub it out with the masses. I had spent a lifetime paddling hopefully off toward uncrowded peaks myself, dreaming that they were about to start working better than the popular break, and sometimes—rarely, briefly—they actually seemed to do so. But I had a rueful faith in the basic good judgment of the herd. Crowds collected where the waves were best. This attitude drove Mark nuts. And Ocean Beach, with its great uncrowded winter waves, did in fact bend the universal Malthusian surf equation. Freezing water and abject fear and ungodly punishment were useful that way.

I took off on a midsized wave, a detour I quickly regretted: the set behind my wave gave me a thorough drubbing, almost driving me over the inside bar. By the time I got back outside, the sun was setting, I was shivering, and Mark was a hundred yards farther north. I decided not to follow him, and started looking for a last wave. But the peaks along here were shifty, and I kept misjudging their speed and steepness. I nearly got sucked over backward by a vicious, ledging wave, then had to scramble to avoid a monstrous set.

The twilight deepened. The spray lifting off the tops still had a crimson sunset tinge, but the waves themselves were now just big, featureless blue-black walls. They were getting more and more difficult to judge. There were no longer any other surfers in sight. Now shivering badly, I was ready to try to paddle in—ignominious as that would be. When a lull came, that’s what I did, digging hard, struggling to keep my board pointed shoreward through the crosscurrents of the outside bar, using a campfire on the beach as a visual fix, and glancing back over my shoulder every five or six strokes. I was about halfway to shore, coming up on the inside bar, when a set appeared outside. I was safely in deep water, and there was no sense trying to cross the inside bar during a set, so I turned and sat up to wait.

Against the still-bright sky, at the top of a massive wave off to the south and far, far outside, a lithe silhouette leaped to its feet, then plunged into darkness. I strained to see what happened next, but the wave disappeared behind others nearer by. My stomach had done a flutter kick at the sight of someone dropping into such a wave at dusk, and as I bobbed over the swells gathering themselves for the assault on the inside bar I kept peering toward where he had vanished, watching for a riderless board washing in. That wave had looked like a leash-breaker. Finally, less than forty yards away, a dim figure appeared, speeding across a ragged inside wall. Whoever it was had not only made the drop but was still on his feet, and flying. As the wave hit deep water, he leaned into a huge, elegant carving cutback. The cutback told me who it was. Peewee was the only local surfer who could turn like that. He made one more turn, driving to within a few yards of me, and pulled out. His expression, I saw, was bland. He nodded at me but said nothing. I felt tongue-tied. I was relieved, though, by the thought of having company for the passage across the inside bar, which was now detonating continuously. But Peewee had other plans. He turned and, without a word, started paddling back out to sea.

 • • • 

LATER THAT EVENING, grunts and roars and horrible snarls filled the air in Mark’s apartment. Slides from the past couple of winters at Ocean Beach were being shown, and most of the surfers featured were on hand. “That can’t be you, Edwin. You hide under the bed when it gets that big!” Mark convened these gatherings quasi-annually. “This was the best day last winter,” he said, projecting a shot of huge, immaculate Sloat that elicited a deep general groan. “But I don’t have any more pictures of it. I paddled out after taking this one, and stayed out all day.” Mark’s voice had the nasal, waterlogged quality it got after a long session. In fact, he’d come in from the surf—its steady thunder from across the Great Highway was supplying a bass line for the entertainment—only an hour before. “The moon rose just as it got really dark,” he’d told me. “I went back to Sloat. All those kooks were gone. It was just Peewee and me. It was great.” I found this scene hard to picture. It wasn’t that I didn’t believe him—his hair was still wet. I just couldn’t imagine how anyone could surf by moonlight in waves as big as those that were pounding Sloat at dusk. “Sure,” Mark said. “Peewee and I do it once every winter.”

Peewee was there at Mark’s that night, along with most of the surfers I knew by name in San Francisco. Ages ranged from late teens to midforties. With only three years’ seniority, I was probably the most recent arrival in San Francisco. A slide of me surfing Ocean Beach the previous winter drew a couple of hoots but no insults—I hadn’t been around long enough for that. There was a sequence of Mark pioneering a fearsome outer reef in Mendocino County. Local surfers had been watching the place break for years, but no one had ever tried to surf it until, earlier that winter, Mark persuaded two big-wave riders from the area to paddle out with him. The wave broke at least half a mile from shore, on a shallow rock reef, and featured a horrendous drop, along with some troublesome kelp. Mark’s slides, taken by an accomplice with a telephoto lens from a mountainside, showed him cautiously riding deep-green walls two or three times his height. The trickiest part, he said, had actually come not in the water but in a nearby town that evening. People at the village hangout had been alarmed to hear that he’d surfed the outer reef, and suspicious, he said, until they learned that he had done it in the company of two locals.

It was surprising to hear Mark mention local sensitivities. They were a real issue—I once saw a clipping from a Mendocino newspaper in which a columnist described Mark as “a legendary super surfer from the Bay Area,” adding sarcastically, “I’m sorry I didn’t stick around for his autograph”—but I usually thought of Mark as impervious to such matters. Of course, it was also tricky showing these slides to this audience; it required a deft touch, even a measure of self-deprecation. Mark might disregard the finer points of the surfing social contract among strangers in the water, but Ocean Beach was home; here the strong drink of his personality needed sweetening. Earlier in the evening, when Mark complained that his asthma was bothering him, making it difficult to breathe, Beeper Dave had muttered, “Now you know how us mortals feel.”

A parade of photographers with their slide carousels followed. There were water shots, some of them good, and many blurry shots of giant Ocean Beach. Some old-timers showed slides from the ’70s, featuring surfers I’d never heard of. “Gone to Kauai,” I was told. “Gone to Western Australia, last we heard.” Peewee showed a handful of slides from a recent trip to Hawaii. Taken at Sunset, the renowned big-wave spot, Peewee’s pictures, which were of poor quality, showed some friends windsurfing on a small, blown-out day. “Unbelievable,” somebody muttered. “Windsurfing.” Peewee, who was one of the few guys from San Francisco actually capable of surfing big Sunset, said little. But he seemed amused by the crowd’s disappointment.

 • • • 

THERE WAS ANOTHER PHOTO on the wall at Wise’s shop when I first moved to San Francisco. It was flyspecked, curling, captionless, and incredibly beautiful. The photo showed a surfer—Peewee, according to Wise—trimmed very high on a seemingly endless backlit ten-foot left. The wave was lime green and wind-sculpted, and looked as if it must be somewhere in Bali, but Wise said it was at Outside VFW’s. The wave was so exquisitely proportioned that it made the 9'6" gun that Peewee was riding look like a shortboard. And the line he was drawing was out of a dream—too high, too fine, too inspired for real life.

During my second or third winter in the city, more photos began to appear on the wall at Wise’s. They were all big, wood-framed prints under glass of Mark surfing giant Ocean Beach, with typed captions listing the exact date and place taken and identifying the rider.

Mark and Peewee were the fire and ice of San Francisco surfing, the oversold thesis and the understated antithesis. They were like two opposed theories of character formation. In Peewee’s case, experience seemed to be about removing superfluities; in Mark’s case, it was all accumulation. More boards, more milestones, more spots conquered. Virtually everything with him hinged on surfing, from childhood to old age. Recalling his L.A. youth, he told me, “Among my friends, there was a strong belief in the surfer’s path. Most people swerved from it sooner or later.” For his models for aging well, he looked to older surfers—he called them “elders.” Doc Ball, a lifelong surfer and retired dentist in Northern California, then in his eighties, was a favorite. “He’s still stoked,” Mark said. “He still skateboards!”

Peewee agreed that Mark was preternaturally youthful. “He’s like somebody who’s twenty or twenty-two, with that much stoke about surfing, that much enthusiasm,” Peewee told me during a rare conversation. But Peewee disagreed about the long-term benefits of the surfing life. As he put it, “The biggest locals can be the biggest derelicts.” We were sitting in a Chinese restaurant near his house, with Peewee warily watching me take notes. “It’s such a great sport it corrupts people,” he said. “It’s like drug addiction. You just don’t want to do anything else. You don’t want to go to work. If you do, it’s always ‘You really missed it’ when you get off.” As a carpenter, Peewee said, he had some job flexibility, and he tried to take a month off each year to go surfing someplace else, like Hawaii or Indonesia. But there was no way that he could surf as avidly as he had surfed while growing up—not without risking dereliction.

Peewee learned to surf on borrowed boards at Pedro Point, a beginner’s break a few miles south of San Francisco. It took him five years to work up to Ocean Beach. He was a Sunset District kid, in awe of the big guys from his era. Eventually he became a big guy himself—over six feet, broad-shouldered, with the poker-faced, blond good looks of a B-western gunfighter. But he never managed to ditch his nickname. He also seemed never to have lost the unassumingness of the novice. Getting him to talk, over tepid tea in an emptying restaurant, was the journalistic equivalent of paddling out at Sloat on a mean day. My request for an interview had no doubt startled him. Peewee knew me as a face in the water, a recent Ocean Beach regular, one of Mark’s crowd. Now, suddenly, I was a reporter. That didn’t mean I was dispassionate. As someone who had been struggling for several winters now with Mark’s contention that to miss a swell was a far greater sin than to miss a deadline, I got more comfort than Peewee knew from his simple description of the inevitable conflict between surfing and work. Of course, it was an argument as old as Hiram Bingham—the missionary who saw surfing as barbaric and nearly strangled it in its cradle in Hawaii.

Peewee’s self-effacement was so thorough that it was easy to misread him as remote. Even I could see, though, after a while, that his terse exterior hid an acute shyness, which in turn hid an old-fashioned sensitivity. He had been a straight-A student in school—I learned this not from him but from others—and an English major at San Francisco State University. He also took science courses in college, including an oceanography class in which the instructor once averred that the big winter swells that hit the Northern California coast came typically from the south. This notion is solidly false. The instructor refused to be corrected, and Peewee let it slide.

When letting foolishness slide became impossible, though, he was capable of taking a memorable stand. Once, on a crowded day at VFW’s during my first winter in San Francisco, a local surfer was behaving badly—stealing waves, jumping the queue, and threatening anyone who objected. Peewee warned him once, quietly. When the guy kept it up, then nearly decapitated another surfer with a clumsy pullout, Peewee invited him to leave the water. The miscreant snarled. Peewee knocked him off his board, turned his board over, and, with small, sharp blows with the heel of his hand, broke off each of his three fins. The guy paddled in. Years later, Ocean Beach regulars who hadn’t seen this incident were still asking those who had to tell it again.

Peewee was a locals’ local. He was one of those guys who, when you surfed with them at Fort Point, under the Golden Gate Bridge, could look up and tell you how many workers were entombed in its pilings; how long the lines of men waiting for work were during its construction, back in the Depression, and how much they were paid; and how much the present-day maintenance workers, some of whom were friends or relatives, earned. Peewee was a union carpenter, and often served as the job steward on construction sites. When I asked about that, he said simply, “I believe in the construction unions.” He was equally closemouthed on the subject of big waves. He preferred them to small waves, he said, because they were uncrowded. “Crowds can get tense,” he said. “In big waves, it’s just you and the ocean.” Peewee was known around Ocean Beach for his iron nerves in big surf, but it took him a number of years, he said, to build up to facing very big waves. “Each new wipeout makes you realize, though, that you’re actually safer than you thought. It’s just water. It’s just holding your breath. The wave will pass.” Did he never panic? “Sure. But all you have to do, really, is relax. You’ll always come up.” In retrospect, he said, the times when he had thought he was drowning were not in fact such close calls.

“Doc’s kind of building a reputation here,” Peewee conceded, ten years after Mark started surfing Ocean Beach. What about Peewee himself? “I’m kind of maintaining a reputation here,” he admitted. Still, he only surfed big waves when they were clean. What was the biggest wave he had ridden at Ocean Beach? “The biggest wave I’ve taken off on out here, I didn’t make,” he said. “The wave was perfect—my board was just too small. It was an eight-four. I only got about three-quarters of the way down the face. I fell, and I got sucked up and over. It was the scariest moment I’ve had. I thought I’d never stop free-falling. But it wasn’t so bad.” How big was it? “Twelve feet,” Peewee said. “Maybe fifteen.” He shrugged. “I hardly try to measure waves in feet anymore.” That was just as well, I thought, because plenty of surfers around the city believed they had seen Peewee ride waves larger than fifteen feet.

 • • • 

WHILE WE JOUSTED, groveled, and gloried in a world invisible to other San Franciscans, we were still in the city, and it sometimes came to us. One shining day, at low tide, Ocean Beach was wide and full of people. The surf was good, and I was hurrying across the sand, board under arm. Off to my left, two young black men in 49ers warm-up jackets were silently putting a pair of miniature remote-control dune buggies through their paces; they wove and whirled and fishtailed in the sand. Off to my right, a group of white people were beating the hell out of pillows with yellow plastic clubs. As I passed, I could hear screaming and cursing: “Bitch! Bitch!” “Get out of this house!” Some people were weeping. A chubby man in his forties was pounding a sheet of paper laid on a pillow. When it flew off, he chased it down, bellowing, “Get back on there, you bitch!” Near the water’s edge, I found another middle-aged man, gazing out to sea, his yellow club at his feet, a beatific expression on his face. He eyed my board as I knelt to strap on my leash. I asked about the pillow beaters, and he said they were engaged in something called the Pacific Process. Thirteen weeks, three thousand dollars. This exercise, he said, was called Bitching at Mom. I noticed he was wearing work gloves. Hey, no use getting blisters while beating the bejeezus out of Mom.

Later, out in the water, I saw a surfer I didn’t know drop in late on a big, glassy peak. He was riding a needle-nosed pale blue board and he fought to keep his balance as the wave, which was twice his height, jacked and began to pitch. He didn’t fall, but he lost speed in the struggle to keep his feet, and his first turn, now deep in the wave’s shadow, was weak. If the wave hadn’t hit a patch of deep water and paused for a beat, he would have been buried by the first section. He managed to steer around it, though, and then pull into the next section and set a high line across a long green wall. By the time he passed me, he was in full command, perhaps one turn from the end of an excellent ride. But his face, I saw in the moment he shot past, was twisted with anguish, and with something that looked like rage. Riding a serious wave takes, even for an accomplished surfer, intense technical concentration. But many less selfless emotions also crowd around. Even in unchallenging waves, the faces of surfers as they ride often become terrible masks of fear, frustration, anger. The most revealing moment is the pullout, the end of a ride, which usually provokes a mixed grimace of relief, distress, elation, and dissatisfaction. The face of the stranger on the pale blue board had reminded me of nothing so much as the weeping, contorted faces of the pillow beaters on the beach.

None of this interior Sturm und Drang went with the slap-happy, lighthearted idea of surfing—fun in the sun—that’s always seemed widespread among nonsurfers, and now that I was planning to write about it I found myself wondering how much of the actual thing I could hope to convey to outsiders. There were guys who didn’t grimace while riding waves, of course, whose style seemed to extend to a serene countenance, even a slight inward smile. But in my experience those individuals were rare.

And then there were great surfers, the fabulously gifted. They were by definition exceedingly rare—although pro surfers were slowly, as the popularity of surfing increased and an international contest circuit matured, getting more common. For them, surfing was a sport, with training, competition, sponsorships, the lot. In Australia they were treated like other professional athletes; champions were even subject to public adulation. Not so in the United States, where the average sports fan knew essentially nothing about surfing, and where even surfers paid little attention to contest results and rankings. The best surfers were admired, even revered, for their style and ability, but the important thing we shared with them was esoteric, obsessive, not mainstream but subcultural, certainly not commercial. (Some of this—not much—has changed in recent years.)

The main thing we shared, at every level of talent, was a profound absorption in waves. Mark liked to say that surfing “is essentially a religious practice.” But there was too much performance, too much competition (however unstructured), too much appetite and raw preening in it for that description to ring true to me. Style was everything in surfing—how graceful your moves, how quick your reactions, how clever your solutions to the puzzles presented, how deeply carved and cleanly linked your turns, even what you did with your hands. Great surfers could make you gasp with the beauty of what they did. They could make the hardest moves look easy. Casual power, the proverbial grace under pressure, these were our beau ideals. Pull into a heaving barrel, come out cleanly. Act like you’ve been there before. Make it look good. That was the real fascination, and terror, of photos of oneself. Do I look good? If this was a religion, perhaps it didn’t bear thinking about what was being worshipped. “Muthiya maar,” Caroline sometimes trilled over her etching plates as I swapped stories with other surfers over beers.

All surfers are oceanographers, and in the area of breaking waves all are engaged in advanced research. Surfers don’t need to be told that when a wave breaks actual water particles, rather than simply the waveform, begin to move forward. They are busy figuring out more arcane relationships, like the one between tide and consistency, or swell direction and nearshore bathymetry. The science of surfers is not pure, obviously, but heavily applied. The goal is to understand, for the purpose of riding them, what the waves are doing, and especially what they are likely to do next. But waves dance to an infinitely complex tune. To a surfer sitting in the lineup trying to decipher the structure of a swell, the problem can indeed present itself musically. Are these waves approaching in 13/8 time, perhaps, with seven sets an hour, and the third wave of every set swinging wide in a sort of dissonant crescendo? Or is this swell one of God’s jazz solos, whose structure is beyond our understanding?

When the surf is big, or in some other way humbling, even these questions tend to fall away. The heightened sense of a vast, unknowable design silences the effort to understand. You feel honored simply to be out there. I’ve been reduced on certain magnificent days—this had happened to me at Honolua Bay, at Jeffreys Bay, on Tavarua, even once or twice at Ocean Beach—to just drifting on the shoulder, gawking at the transformation of ordinary seawater into beautifully muscled swell, into feathering urgency, into pure energy, impossibly sculpted, ecstatically edged, and finally into violent foam.

 • • • 

I HAD TO ADMIT THAT, in part, Mark had succeeded with me. I was surfing more than I would have. I had acquired a couple of new boards—three-fin designs known as thrusters—and a better wetsuit, reducing my hypothermia problem. We made surf runs north and south. When Ocean Beach was big and blown out, we headed to Mendocino County, where Mark knew some sheltered spots. In summer, when O.B. was hopeless, he took me to his favorite south-swell reefbreak, in Big Sur. His generosity seemed effortless, his natural element. He had appointed himself my surf coach, health director, and general adviser. Now he was sitting happily for his portrait. I was thinking more about surfing, if only because I had volunteered to write about it. But was I taking surfing more seriously? Not really. I was taking more notes, but going surfing still felt like something I did basically because I had always done it. Surfing and I had been married, so to speak, for most of my life, but it was one of those marriages in which little is said. Mark wanted to help me and surfing patch up our stubborn, silent marriage. I didn’t think I wanted it patched up. Having a sizable tract of unconsciousness near the center of my life suited me, somehow. I almost never talked about surfing except with other surfers. It contributed little to how I saw myself. I was reluctant to think of it as part of my real life as an adult, which I was now busy trying to kick-start. Journalism was ferrying me into worlds that interested me far more than chasing waves.

But something odd was happening. Setting aside my ambivalence, I was letting Mark’s exuberance carry me along, letting him become the engine that powered my surfing life. In some ways, I realized, I had let Mark thrust himself between me and surfing, antically filling the foreground, haunting my dream life with his fantasies, rending my winter night’s sleep with a screaming phone. I even let him preside over primordial moments, his Mephistophelian cackle providing a lifeline from the yawning space of my fear in big waves to some rock face where the psychic crampons held. It was a reporter’s passivity, this yielding to an alter ego, but on this story it was disfiguring. I hardly recognized myself in the mirror of the Doc Squad.

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 were, 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 Peewee 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.

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.