The supreme pleasure of surfing is a truth that can be felt by anyone willing to take a bit of a risk, cross that line in the sand, and plunge into the deep, dark blue ocean. Catch a wave and you’ll be sitting on top of the world, the Beach Boys said. It may have been just a corny song lyric, but it was also true.
Go back to the ancient Polynesians and then through the centuries and the decades and the years and think of all the weird, wild, and wonderful things surfing has inspired: Listen to Dick Dale rocking out on “Miserlou”—that’s Dick setting aside his Stratocaster to play that trumpet solo, too—and get the chills at one of the great rock’n’roll performances. Check out Sean Penn as Jeff Spicoli “talking about Cuba and having some food” and laugh at one of the comic icons of the twentieth century. Listen to the Clash’s “Charlie Don’t Surf” and think of Robert Duvall as Colonel Kilgore leading his all-American surfing soldiers.
Surfing is an image of pure romance, a wave rolling through the centuries, carrying a rhythm and a message and a lifestyle from ancient Polynesia to the twenty-first century. It’s a true image, a truth that can be heard when Jack Johnson strums his ukulele onstage in front of ten thousand; a truth that can see been in the delirious, joyful surfing and water antics of Laird Hamilton; a truth that can be experienced vicariously in the beautiful surfing movies of Stacy Peralta, Dana Brown, Thomas Campbell, and Chris Malloy.
Think of Frankie Avalon’s manic Potato Bug, John Philbin’s underdog Turtle, Brian Wilson getting a C on a surfing sonata in high school. Think of a thousand high school and college marching bands doing the most famous drum beat in the world from “Wipeout.” Think of a bunch of kids from Minnesota rocking a midwestern dancehall with “Surfin’ Bird.” Where did it all come from? Add together a thousand years of surf art, poetry, songs, movies, and fashion, and there is so much energy and creativity and innovation coming from this thing people do at the beach. Where does that energy come from?
Go out and catch a wave, and you’ll begin to understand. That weird energy comes from the waves themselves, because there are few stranger energies on earth than a wave.
To catch a south swell at Malibu or a north swell at Maverick’s or a nor’easter on Long Island or a west swell at Pipeline is to tap into the final few moments of something wild. These waves were all spawned by storms a world away, across the equator, in the Southern Ocean or the Gulf of Alaska or the Indian Ocean or in the hurricane lanes of the Atlantic. The intensity of the storms that produce these waves is scarcely to be credited; they spawn lines of energy that roll through the immense friction of the ocean without losing energy, the chaos of that storm lining up like little soldiers as it moves across the equator, traveling for a week and thousands of miles to show up on beaches and cause havoc on land. When the surf is up, responsible men and women go berserk, betray their spouses, abandon their work and studies, forsake everything to run to the ocean and grab some of that energy.
There must be something to it, because so many people have caught the surf fever, tapping not only into that weird and wild ocean rhythm, but also all the rhythms it has inspired in human culture—music, movies, fashion, art.
That cultural wave that has rolled through the centuries, from the Polynesian’s sport of kings to today has been great inspiration over the years:
Kumai! Kumai! Ka nalu nui mai kahiki mai,
Alo poi pu! Ku mai ka pohuehue,
Hu! Kaikoo Loa….
“The above diversion is only intended as an amusement, not a test of skill, & in a gentle swell that sets on must I conceive be very pleasant, at least they seem to feel a great pleasure in the motion which this Exercise gives….”
“Where was solid water beneath it, is now air, and for the first time it feels the grip of gravity, and down it falls, at the same time being torn asunder from the lagging bottom of the wave and flung forward….”
Wave-Rider, 1930s (Voyageur Press Archives)
Surfing Nirvana: Rick Griffin’s colorful centerfold in 1972’s Tales From the Tube defined 1970s surfing stoke. (Used by permission of Ida Griffin/Steve Pezman Collection)
“The great Kahoona showed me the first time how to get on my knees, to push the shoulders up and slide the body back—to spring to your feet quickly, putting them a foot apart and under you in one motion. That’s quite tricky….”
A papapapapapapapapapapa oo ma mow mama papa oo mow mow….
“Charlie don’t surf!”
“All I need are some tasty waves and a cool buzz, and I’m fine….”
So many songs and words and dances and tributes produced over the centuries, but it all goes back to the first recorded sighting—and then beyond into prehistory—Captain James Cook walking down a beach in Otaheite, on the other side of the world, thousands of miles and thousands of perils away from England, with a million things on his mind—the safety of his crew, the success of his mission, a knighthood if he pulls it off. There is Captain Cook exploring the world with the weight of it on his shoulders, stopping to watch a lone Polynesian man getting his kicks from the same ocean, without a care in the world:
“I could not help concluding that this man felt the most supreme pleasure while he was driven on so smoothly by the sea….”
Exactly.
