It was a shining February afternoon. The tide was low, and Ocean Beach, a four-mile-long north-south strip that accounts for nearly all of San Francisco’s seafront and is normally narrow and deserted, was wide and full of people. I stutter-stepped down the bank at the foot of Sloat Boulevard, surfboard in hand, and hurried across the sand. Off to my left, two young black men in 49ers warmup 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. They were also kicking the pillows around on the sand. 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 an ankle 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.
It was the third day of a solid west swell. Winter is the prime season for surfing Ocean Beach—it’s when the biggest waves and the cleanest conditions (little or no wind, orderly sandbars) coincide—but this joyful conjunction usually falls apart in early February, so each good day now was gravy. Conditions this afternoon were superb: six-foot waves, not a breath of wind. Unfortunately, the prolonged season had brought out unprecedented crowds, and half the surfers in Northern California seemed to be on hand. Ocean Beach didn’t normally suffer from the overpopulation that spoils most California surf spots. There were only a few dozen local surfers, and visitors were rare. My theory was that surfers from nearby towns and cities didn’t want to know about Ocean Beach, because, while it sometimes got great waves, it was just as often ferociously intimidating. But crowds of sixty or more had become common in the last couple of weeks. It was as if a whole layer of the regional surf population had decided that, with the major winter swells probably over and conditions still improbably clean, Ocean Beach could be safely raided. I understood this selective bravado, because I felt it, too, along with an immense relief at having survived another winter—this was my third—of surfing Ocean Beach. Still, I resented the horde whose spidery silhouettes I could barely see, gliding and thrashing in the glare beyond the shore break, as I prepared to paddle out.
The water was atrociously cold. I could feel it tracing the seams in my wetsuit as I danced through the shallows; my hands throbbed when I started paddling. The first wall of sandy, grumbling white water felt like a barrel of gritty ice cubes poured down my back. I gasped, and kept churning toward what looked like a channel—a passage where fewer waves broke. At this tide, the waves near shore had little power, and I made steady progress. But I still had to cross the inside sandbar—a shallow ridge about halfway between the shore and the outermost surf—where unridable waves broke with pulverizing force. The first wave I saw break on the bar as I approached looked as if a string of land mines had exploded inside it. Sunlight splintered in long shards behind a curtain of falling water, then blew through the wall like a million grains of glass. An instant later, there was nothing but angry foam. I could see no channel. My progress stopped. For a couple of minutes, the waves and I quietly banged heads. Then came a lull: no waves. I sprint-paddled straight at the bar. A thick, glistening wave made a delayed appearance, but I got to the bar before it did, and hurled myself with an involuntary cry through its harmless, shiny, icy crest.
Beyond the inside bar, in the deepwater trough that separated it from the outside bar, scores of people came suddenly into view. They were scattered for two hundred yards in each direction: sitting in clumps far outside, scrambling for waves, scratching to get back out. Two or three were actually on their feet, riding waves. All had passed the snarling mastiff of the inside bar—the price of admission to this green-gold world of glassy low-tide peaks. The channels through the outside bar looked wide and easy to read. I angled north, toward a field of open water. Slightly farther north, a surfer I didn’t recognize, riding a needle-nosed pale-blue board, caught a good-sized wave. He fought to keep his balance as the wave, which was about 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 is for an accomplished surfer what playing, say, Chopin’s Polonaise in F-Sharp Minor might be for an accomplished pianist. Intense technical concentration is essential, but many less selfless emotions also crowd around. Even in unchallenging waves, the faces of surfers as they ride 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 assumption, common among non-surfers, that riding waves is a slaphappy, lighthearted business—fun in the sun—is for the most part mistaken. The face of the stranger on the pale-blue board had reminded me, in fact, of nothing so much as the weeping, contorted faces of the pillow-beaters on the beach.
I slipped between the big, shifting peaks of the outside bar and arrived at the takeoff area, known as the lineup. I half knew a few of the people I could see there, but the crowd seemed amorphous, unfocussed—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 went to work. It was important, especially in a strange crowd, to make a good showing on one’s first waves, for they established one’s place in the pecking order. Blowing a takeoff or failing to catch a catchable wave usually sent one to the end of the queue for waves; this was an improvised but fierce arrangement, and in an aggressive crowd where waves were scarce one could easily be stuck there for the duration. I moved to a spot about fifteen yards inside a group of four or five surfers—a risky position, vulnerable to a big set, or series of waves, breaking farther out, but I was fit after a winter of paddling, and had the advantage of knowing the bars off this part of Ocean Beach. And, 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, sure-footed 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. A surf crowd is a delicate social unit. Everyone out there is starring in his own movie, and permission is required before you inflict your exploits on anyone else. Vocal instant replays and noisy exultation are not unknown, but they’re subject to a strict code of collective ego control. Young kids 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 teen-ager out on a big day—and the unwritten limits on garrulity among strangers there 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 there—the emotions that many of them were surfing through.
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?”
I headed for an empty peak slightly north of the school bus. I caught two quick waves there, and half a dozen people saw fit to join me. The jockeying 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 white water 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 Mann 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 delicate fabric of shared enterprise had settled over all of us out there, and I found that my resentment of the non-locals had faded. The tide, which was now 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. Heads turned. “Doc,” someone said, unnecessarily. It was Dr. Mark Renneker, on his rounds. Doc Hazard, as he was sometimes called, was the one San Francisco surfer whom non-locals were likely to know. His fame derived mainly from his exploits in giant Ocean Beach surf, but he was hard to miss in waves of any size. He was paddling alongside somebody I didn’t know, regaling him with the plot of a horror movie: “So the head starts running around by itself, biting people to death.” Before they reached the lineup, Mark interrupted himself, swerved, sprint-paddled north, wheeled, and picked off a wave that had somehow slipped past the rest of us. Ten minutes later, I saw him steaming in my direction again. There was, it struck me, a gawkiness about Mark; today, for instance, he was wearing an absurd-looking short-billed neoprene hood, with his beard jutting over the chin strap and his ponytail flopping out the back. But when Mark was on a surfboard his gawkiness was completely obscured by the power and precision of his movements. He paddled like a Grand Prix racer, always poised for agile cornering and breathtaking accelerations. Mark was six feet four but rode boards as short as six feet—a sign of rare strength and confidence. I watched him bearing down on me. 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,” he said.
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 near the base of Santiago Street, 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.” An amateur meteorologist, Mark diligently monitored weather and buoy reports from the North Pacific, and he was usually right about what the surf would do. He was wrong about Santiago, though. The bars, we saw as we approached, were plainly sloppier than those we had left behind at Sloat. There was nobody surfing anywhere nearby. That was why Mark wanted to surf there, of course.
It was an old disagreement between us. Mark 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 helpful that way.
A block or so before we reached Santiago, I took off, over Mark’s objections, on a midsized wave, a detour that 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. I would see him later; there was going to be a slide show at his apartment that evening. Now shivering badly, I 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 wave 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. I was ready to try to paddle in—an ignominious maneuver. And, 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. Bill Bergerson, known around Ocean Beach as 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.
Surfing is not a spectator sport. There is an international contest circuit, and a handful of surfers earn a living from competition, but most of the professionals actually make ends meet by endorsing products—surfboards, wetsuits, or the output of one of the many companies in the surf-apparel industry. Contest surfing is seldom exciting to watch: the ocean cannot be relied on to provide memorable waves on an organizer’s schedule, and few of the world’s great surf spots happen to be natural amphitheatres.
One of the few times I’ve seen non-surfers get their money’s worth was on a minor Indonesian island about a hundred miles west of Sumatra, in 1979. Half a dozen of us, Australians and Americans, had found our way to a fishing village on the southwest shore of the island. Photographs of the wave that breaks near the village would later be splashed across the surf magazines, putting the spot on the world surfing map, but at that time it was known only to a small, malaria-ridden band. Two Swiss travellers—hearty types in hiking boots, who had come to the island to look at Stone Age fortifications—turned up in the village one day, and decided that it might be interesting to join us in the surf. They came out on borrowed big-wave boards and, following instructions, took up positions in a deep-water channel near the edge of the reef. The waves happened to be magnificent that day: big, powerful, flawless. The rides were long, fast, and extremely intense, and most of them ended in the channel right where the Swiss travellers bobbed like a pair of buoys, slowly turning orange in the equatorial sun. We would come screaming through the final, jacking section and skittering onto the wind-brushed flat, steering around them as we coasted out of the waves, too pumped up to reply when they applauded solemnly and said things like “Marvellous! How I admire you!” I wanted to try to explain to them that they were witnessing the culmination of years of hard search and sacrifice. But they clearly thought they were just watching a bit of sport. They weren’t even afraid of the waves. Two of the surfers there that afternoon had boards they had dragged thousands of miles—across oceans, through Asian cities and jungles—destroyed, snapped in half by the waves, but the Swiss observers just splashed blithely back toward the channel whenever we warned them they were drifting too close.
My girlfriend, Caroline, watched surfing for years, with no particular interest, until one day in Santa Cruz. 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 the side and then from the back. For a few seconds, we saw an elevated version of what the surfers 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 pyramids, with steep sides, thickness, broad, sloping backs, and an incredibly complex three-dimensional construction, which changed, collapsing and rising and collapsing, very quickly. It was nearly enough, she said, to make watching surfing interesting.
It was also nearly enough, she said, to make the desire to surf comprehensible. Caroline had never understood why, after surfers spent hours studying the waves from shore, they often announced their intention of going out by saying things like “Let’s get it over with.” But then she wasn’t there in Ventura, on a cold afternoon in 1964, when my father ordered me back into the water after a dismal session during which I had caught no waves. I was eleven years old, just learning to surf, still too small to get my arm around my battered, beloved old board. Three waves, Dad said, and we could go. My feet were bloody—it was a rocky shore, and this was before the invention of ankle leashes—and I was probably crying, and I wanted desperately to get warm and go home. But he had the car keys, not to mention the keys to manhood, and I bitterly paddled back out and caught my three waves, riding them in on my knees. My father has always claimed that I would never have learned to surf if it had not been for that episode. All I know is that over the next few years I lost all interest in other sports—especially team sports. By high school, when the other boys were doing or dying for the school, their parents cheering in the stands, my friends and I were skulking in Mexico, camping on lonely beaches and bluffs, looking for waves.
The only audience that matters to most surfers is other surfers, for they alone can truly appreciate what they are seeing. They have been through the special ordeal of learning to surf, and know what a good performance involves. Also, they share the obsession. Sunday surfers—people for whom surfing is a hobby, who keep their surfboards in the closet next to their skis and tennis racquets—undoubtedly exist. But every Sunday surfer who can stand up on his board was, at some stage, obsessed, for nothing less can get one through the hundreds of difficult, discouraging hours it takes to gain basic skills. And retaining those skills requires constant practice; in other words, competence presumes obsession. It also takes exceptional physical fitness. James Michener once reported, in a book called “Sports in America,” that the demands made on the muscles, lungs, and heart by surfing were roughly the same as those made by paddleball and slightly less than those made by badminton. Michener must have meant by “surfing” only the act of riding a wave, because if paddling out and catching waves are included—and it would be hard to surf without catching a wave—the level of fitness required for surfing is more like what might he needed for a combination of long-distance rowing, white-water kayaking, and ballet. Brian Lowdon, an Australian exercise physiologist, has published studies showing that surfers have a faster return to baseline pulse and respiratory rate after exertion than even Olympic pentathletes. (Lowdon’s studies fail to mention badminton players.)
Not all surfers are robust young males; plenty of females and graying diehards surf, some of them well. Still, it’s not really a sport that the entire family—unless the family is a marine version of the Flying Wallendas—can enjoy. Hence the insular codes and cryptic slang of surfers, and the relegation of all non-surfers to alien status—“inlanders,” “chalk people.” Much of the tribe’s language isn’t even language. If you listen closely to surfers in the water, you are likely to hear little intelligible speech. Mainly, you’ll hear a strange, primitive chorus of whoops, war cries, karate shouts. The first time Caroline and I looked at waves together was months after we met, and 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.”
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 in the slides were on hand, so the audience was agitated. “That can’t be you, Edwin. You hide under the bed when it gets that big!” Mark convened these gatherings quasi-annually, provided most of the slides, and m.c.’d. “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 actually had the nasal, waterlogged quality it got after a long session. And, in fact, he had already told me that he’d come in from the surf—its steady thunder from across the Great Highway, the coast road where Mark lives, was supplying the bass line for this evening’s entertainment—only an hour before. “The moon rose just as it got really dark,” he said. “I went back to Sloat, and surfed there for another hour. 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 Mark—his hair was still wet. I just couldn’t imagine how anyone could surf by moonlight in waves as big and powerful as the ones that had been breaking at Sloat at dusk. “Sure,” Mark said. “Peewee and I do it once every winter.”
Peewee was there at Mark’s that night. Most of the surfers I knew by name in San Francisco were. Because the surf in and around the city is so formidable, few people learn to surf there—perhaps half of the city’s surfers come from elsewhere. These migrants, who tend to be middle class, remain distinct in some ways from the homegrown surfers, who tend to be working class, but the fifteen or twenty men at Mark’s that evening came from both groups. Ages ranged from the late teens to the mid-forties. With only three years’ seniority, I was probably the most recent arrival in San Francisco. Peewee, who was about the same age as Mark and I—early thirties—and who worked as a carpenter, was a lifelong local. Mark, who grew up in Los Angeles, was still regarded by some natives as a newcomer, but in fact he had been around for more than ten years—he had gone to medical school at the University of California at San Francisco—and during that time had probably logged more hours in the water at Ocean Beach than any three other people combined. He had also become a central figure in local surf society. At least, no one else, from what I had seen, ever put together evenings such as this and Mark did it with almost no visible effort.
“San Francisco is what I imagine surfing in Southern California was like in the fifties,” Mark once told me. “Great waves, not too many people, lots of eccentrics, and everybody pretty much knowing everybody else.” After the surf craze of the nineteen-sixties, Southern California surfing became a mob scene, with a cast of hundreds of thousands. An Ocean Beach denizen known as 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.” Sloat Bill, who qualified in my book as an eccentric, 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. There was room for argument about whether he had achieved that aim, but certainly he had made more money, after tapping market quotations into a computer plugged into his car’s cigarette lighter, than any of the rest of us ever did while sitting in the Sloat parking lot. Sloat Bill wasn’t at Mark’s that night, but Mark showed several slides of him anyway—taking gruesome spills. 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. Mark said he had two new sequences he wanted to show, and then he would turn the projector over to others.
The first sequence illustrated a recent expedition to a remote point break near Cape Mendocino, far up in Northern California. Mark and another San Francisco surfer, a gardener named Rob, had travelled the last ten miles to the surf on dune bikes, racing at low tide along what looked like an extraordinarily rugged wilderness coast. They had camped on the beach for three days. The surf looked very cold and scary, and nobody watching the slides volunteered for a return trip that Mark was planning. On the way home, he said, they had been forced to travel at night, because that was the only time the tide got low enough. There had been a lot of rain while they were camping, so the streams crossing the beach had become major obstacles, especially in the dark. Rob had inadvertently sailed off the bank of one stream and crashed, bending the forks on his bike and soaking the sparkplugs. The tide had started rising while they were trying to get the bike going again. Bob Wise, who owns and operates the only surf shop in San Francisco, had heard enough. He had changed his mind, he said. “Doc, please take me with you next time.”
The second sequence showed another North Coast exploit: Mark pioneering a fearsome surf spot known as Saunders Reef, in Mendocino County. Local surfers had been watching Saunders 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 what was plainly 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 local hangout had been alarmed to hear that he’d surfed Saunders, 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 local columnist described Mark as “a legendary super surfer from the Bay Area,” adding, perhaps 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 a little tricky showing these slides to this audience; it required a delicate 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, who suffers from asthma, complained that he was having trouble breathing, as he often does in February, an Ocean Beach homeboy known as Beeper Dave had muttered, “Now you know how us mortals feel.”
A parade of photographers with their slide carrousels followed Mark. There were water shots, some of them good, taken at a couple of the gentler San Francisco breaks. There were many blurry shots of giant Ocean Beach. Each time an especially frightening wave appeared on the wall, the youngest member of the audience, a teenager named Aaron Plank, snarled, “That’s disgusting.” Aaron, who was easily the most talented young surfer in San Francisco, was not yet a big-wave rider. Some old-timers showed slides from the seventies, featuring surfers I’d never heard of. “Gone to Kauai,” I was told. “Gone to Western Australia, last we heard.”
Finally, Peewee was prevailed upon to show a handful of slides from a recent trip to Hawaii. Taken at Sunset Beach, one of the best big-wave spots in the world, 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 probably the best pure surfer San Francisco had ever produced—and one of the few people from the city who were actually capable of surfing big Sunset Beach—said little, But he seemed amused by the crowd’s disappointment.
As the slide party ended, I stuck around to help Mark clean up—and, watching the crowd drift off down the stairs, I suddenly recalled something that Kim Bodkin, the wife of a local big-wave surfer named Tim Bodkin, had said to me a few days before. I was clearly a charter member, she had said mock-innocently, of what she called “the Doc squad.” The remark had mortified me. It meant that I was seen as one of Mark’s acolytes. He did have acolytes—guys who wandered into his psychic gravitational field and found themselves orbiting around his fixed, surf-centered ideas about how to live. And it was true that since the day I moved to San Francisco, Mark had made himself my surf coach, health director, and general adviser, urging me on what he called “the surfer’s path.” And I had largely followed his lead—“played Doc’s games,” as Edwin Salem, another protégé, put it—letting his exuberance carry me along, letting him be the engine that powered my surfing life. But the fact was that I felt deeply ambivalent about surfing. I had been doing it for more than twenty years, yet I had long been reluctant to think of it as part of my real life as an adult. On balance, I seemed to spend as much energy these days resisting Mark’s exhortations as I did actually surfing. So it was dispiriting to hear that I came off as an eager follower. Mark was like the guru character in every Hollywood attempt at a surfing movie—the Kahuna. The last thing I wanted was a walk-on part as one of the slack-jawed chorus.
Really, it shouldn’t have mattered. Surfing wasn’t supposed to be about one’s standing in a company—about caste. In fact, I had spent years slogging through tropical backwaters in search of empty surf, looking for the purest possible encounter with the remotest possible waves. Still, some dogged essence of common vanity, of grubby society, had followed me everywhere. It was a paradox at the heart of my surfing: a desire to be alone with waves fused to an equal desire to be watched, to perform. The old Hawaiians, who institutionalized the spiritual side of surfing, had no illusions about its locker-room aspects: they loved to gamble on organized competitions. Of course, they were not, from all accounts, prey to self-conscious conflicts about their place in the world, or to a Western-style dichotomy between Society and Nature.
They didn’t have to cope with photography, either. The passion of virtually all surfers for photographs of themselves in the act of surfing approaches fetishism. To say that waves and the rides they provide are inherently fleeting events, and that surfers naturally therefore want mementos, barely begins to explain the mania for photographs. For a start, pictures are rarely about what a ride felt like; they are about what a ride looked like to others. Mark understood the surf-photo mania. He not only put on these slide shows, and had pictures of himself surfing tacked up all over the walls of his apartment; he also delighted in presenting friends with pictures of themselves surfing. I’d seen these photographs hanging in the homes of their subjects, framed like religious icons. I have one here—of me as I write. Mark likes to say that surfing “is essentially a religious practice.” What I’ve always had trouble deciding is just who or what is being worshipped.
Wave judgment is an ineffable skill. You’re sitting in a trough between waves, and you can’t see past the approaching swell, which will not become a wave you can catch. You start paddling upcoast and seaward. Why? If the moment were frozen, you could explain that, by your reckoning, there’s a fifty-fifty chance that the next wave will have a good takeoff spot (a point at which you can catch the wave and then have a reasonable chance of making it—of staying ahead of the breaking part of the wave—by angling to the left or the right) about ten yards over and a little farther out from where you are now. This calculation is based on: your last two or three glimpses of the swells outside, each glimpse caught from the crest of a previous swell; the hundred-plus waves you have seen break in the past hour and a half; your cumulative experience of three or four hundred sessions at this spot, including fifteen or twenty days that were much like this one in terms of swell size, swell direction, wind speed, wind direction, tide, season, and sandbar configuration; the way the water seems to be moving across the bottom; the surface texture and the water color; and, beneath these elements, innumerable subcortical perceptions too subtle and fleeting to express. These last factors are like the ones that the ancient Polynesian navigators relied upon when, on the open seas, they used to lower themselves into the water between the outriggers on their canoes and let their testicles tell them where in the great ocean they were.
Of course, the moment can’t be frozen. And the decision whether to sprint-paddle against the current, following your hunch, or to stop and drift, gambling that the next wave will defy the odds and simply come to you, has to be made in an instant. And the deciding factors are just as likely to be non-oceanic—your mood, your stance (those who surf with their right foot back, as I do, usually pursue and prefer “rights,” on which they face the wave as they angle across it, to “lefts,” which they must surf “backhand”), the state of your arm muscles, the deployment of other surfers. The role of the crowd is, in fact, often critical. Other surfers can signal approaching waves. You watch someone paddle over the top of a swell and you try to assess, in the last instant before he disappears, what he sees outside. It helps if you know the paddler—whether he is liable to overreact to the sight of a big wave, whether he knows the spot well. Or you may look down the line, upcoast or downcoast, at someone who may have a better view of what’s in store for you than you have, and try to gauge his reaction to what he sees. He may even try to signal which way you should be moving—to give you a jump on whatever is bearing down on you. For the most part, though, the crowd is just a nuisance, a distraction, distorting your judgment while you hassle and jockey to get a wave to yourself. When Mark paddles off to some dubious area, far from the crowd, he is partly just reclaiming his concentration on the ocean.
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 marginal phenomena, like double waves. Oceanographers have never been able to agree on an explanation of double waves, yet surfers have had to develop methods of analyzing and coping with them (double waves can be treacherous), and I’ve heard any number of theories. One holds that some waves get slowed up in their shoreward progress by outside reefs but leave enough water on the reefs so that the following waves move more quickly and then overtake them on the inside reefs. I tend to think, contrarily, that the two parts of a double wave are actually broken pieces of the same wave—one that has been refracted in its sweep along the coast in such a way that one section has slipped behind the other and run up on its back.
The science of surfers is not pure but heavily applied—and completely unsystematic. It is full of myths and superstitions—the widespread belief that a full moon brings big swells, for instance. It also suffers from a fatal anthropomorphism. When you are all wrapped up in surfing them, waves seem alive. They have personalities, distinct and intricate. They act, you react. It’s a tender, intimate relationship, and it can thus come as a shock when the wave turns out to be not only insentient but, on occasion, lethal. Wave love is a one-way street.
It is also platonic, in that it trades heavily on the ideal. Surfers have a perfection fixation. Its origin is in the endless variety of waves, and in their ephemerality. Surfers seek a rare and specialized kind of wave. When a great break is discovered, world surfing attention focusses furiously on the reports, the photographs, the film. How good is it? How consistent? How difficult, how dangerous? Could I ride it? The ocean being what it is, no place is perfect. Every wave has its virtues and its flaws, and even at the same spot no two waves are ever exactly the same. No break is good on all tides and winds and swells—not to mention flat spells and storms. Still, great surf spots always arouse the fantasy. What if that magnificent wave keeps breaking just like that for another four hundred yards? What if the next wave is just as good? What if it stays that good, hour after hour, day after day? Surfers are always looking for better waves, and the platonic ideal, the perfect wave, keeps them travelling to the farthest reaches of the globe; it kept me on the ocean roads for years on end. There is a dense and growing lore, a grand arcanum of the world’s waves, which complements the localized jargon, the cabalistic code through which surfers trade the secrets of their avocation.
Local surf cultures, meanwhile, sprout and flourish near virtually every ridable break on earth. In some places, such as southern Brazil, surfing is a rich boy’s sport, taking the social place of polo or the hunt. In most places, it’s a multiclass affair, as it was originally, in old Hawaii. I’ve surfed with yuppie architects and stolid crab fishermen in Ireland, with the sons of campesinos and the sons of oligarchs in Central America. Everywhere, though, one finds the same complicated, passionate attention to minute details of local waves, weather, and coastline. Surfers are like farmers or hunters in their rapt absorption in nature’s vicinal habits and vagaries. Ask a voluble local about seasonal variations at his home break, and he’ll still be diagramming offshore canyons in the dirt an hour later.
The best-known surf spot in San Francisco is actually not at Ocean Beach but at Fort Point, underneath the Golden Gate Bridge. In “The Surfer’s Almanac: An International Surfing Guide” (1977), by Gary Fairmont R. Filosa II, Fort Point sounds uninviting. “San Francisco Bay is polluted and infested with roving Navy gunboats equipped to sink surfers amid the strong currents, so be cautious,” Filosa writes. Although powerful currents do run past Fort Point, and the rocks there can be dangerous, it is in fact the closest thing to a reliably gentle break in the city. (The deadly gunboats have apparently been retired.) Tourists line the seawall on sunny days, trying to get the bridge in the background of their surfing snapshots. The setting is spectacular, and the novelty of surfing in what is technically not the ocean but a bay increases in the springtime, when, after heavy inland rains, the water is fresh to the taste. The wave itself is undistinguished, though. There are other surf spots, farther out the Golden Gate—notably Dead Man’s, a low-tide point break that is experts-only—but the main arena is around the corner to the south, off the windswept desolation of Ocean Beach.
A couple of blocks from the south end of Ocean Beach, in the Sunset District, stands Wise Surfboards, a bright, well-managed place, with a long row of shiny new boards along one wall and racks of wetsuits in the back. The shop is a hangout for the Ocean Beach crew, and Bob Wise, a tightly built, sardonic James Brown fan in his early forties, presides over a permanent bull session. It is a sort of surf-story jukebox, featuring a well-worn collection of tales, most of them essentially slapstick: 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 is usually slow, except when rich dope-growers from up north come 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.”
I used to spend time in Wise’s shop, and during the years I lived in San Francisco there was an old photograph taped to the wall behind the counter. It was fly-specked, curling, captionless, and incredibly beautiful. The photograph showed a surfer—Peewee, according to Wise-trimmed very high on a seemingly endless backlighted 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, an Ocean Beach sandbar that hadn’t broken in years. The wave was so exquisitely proportioned that it made the nine-foot-six-inch big-wave “gun” that Peewee was riding look like a short board. 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 San Francisco, more photographs began to appear on the wall in Wise’s shop. The first several were all big wood-framed prints under glass. They, too, were Ocean Beach surfing shots, but they all had typed captions listing the exact date and place taken, and also the rider, who was in every case “Doc.” All the photographs showed Mark riding gigantic waves on days when, it was said, nobody else had been willing to paddle out.
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. That was how they looked, at least, from the channel where I paddled.
“Do you want to hear my latest metaphor?” Mark asked me. “ ‘Life is a run-on sentence. The object is to punctuate it with experiences.’ You stick in a comma here, a comma there. You try to figure out where to put a semicolon. It takes balls to put in a period. If you want to get profound, you stick in a few question marks. And, of course, if you’re the impatient type you can always take the sophomoric route—this is what I do—and just throw in exclamation points all over the place. ‘Hey! Wow! Did you see that!’ ”
Mark does throw in exclamation points nearly everywhere he goes, and is notably unafraid of appearing sophomoric. He is a passionate fan of punk rock, horror movies, video games, and movie theme music. In the eighteen years I’ve known him, I’ve never seen him wear a necktie. Like any self-respecting adolescent, he scorns marriage (he and Jessica Dunne, a painter, have lived together since college and are famously monogamous, but that’s different, somehow), parenthood (known to reduce one’s willingness to surf big, dangerous waves), and steady employment (proved to reduce one’s ability to go surfing on short notice). “A basic orientation for many people is their group of friends as adolescents,” he once told me. “As adults, they constantly check themselves against that group: who succeeded, who failed, who swerved in what direction. Among my friends, there was a strong belief in the surfer’s path. Most people swerved from it sooner or later. That’s why I loved the moment in ‘Big Wednesday’ when the two old surf buddies get together. They don’t surf much anymore, and they’re sad about that. They wonder what’s become of their old friend Leroy, the masochist, and one of them says, ‘I heard he was living up north, riding big waves.’ Now, that’s not a bad epitaph.”
Mark’s résumé doesn’t actually resemble Leroy the masochist’s. It runs for nearly a dozen pages and includes, in the list of his publications, honors, and degrees, “Understanding Cancer,” a best-selling university text that was first published while Mark was in medical school and is now in its third edition. He does his best around Ocean Beach to appear unemployed and on permanent surf call, but the truth is that he holds down several medical jobs, including a post as assistant clinical professor at U.C. San Francisco. His specialty is family practice. He sees his patients at an inner-city clinic, and he says that they are the only thing that keeps him from fleeing San Francisco for half the year—spring and summer, when the surf at Ocean Beach is almost always poor. “But it’s O.K.,” he says, “because that’s where I get my strength, my metaphors—from my ongoing relationships with my patients.” Mark works one overnight shift a week on a geriatric ward at a San Francisco hospital. What metaphor does he derive from the geriatric ward? Mark pauses. “It’s all about conveyance,” he says, finally. “The souls have already departed the bodies, I think, of some of the people there, and I can only surmise that they continue living only because they have some important unsolved problem.” For his own models for aging well, Mark looks to older surfers—he calls them “elders.” Doc Ball, a lifelong surfer and retired dentist in Northern California, now in his eighties, is a favorite. “He’s still stoked,” Mark says. “He still skateboards!”
Peewee agrees that Mark is 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 disagrees 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, in the upper Sunset, with Peewee warily watching me take notes. “The surfing life just breeds a lot of derelicts,” he said. “It’s such a great sport it corrupts people. 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 grew up in the Sunset. He learned to surf on borrowed boards at Pedro Point, a beginners’ break a few miles south of San Francisco. It took him five years to work up to Ocean Beach, which, he recalled, was an even more formidable spot in the days before ankle leashes. As a teen-ager, he met some surfers who lived near the water and let him keep his board at their house, and he started riding his bicycle to Ocean Beach daily. His memories of his early surfing years are filled with names I’ve never heard before—Jimmy Holt, Rod Lundquist, the Valera brothers—and with a little kid’s awe of the big guys. Lundquist “was ahead of his time,” Peewee recalled. “He used to surf the Beach on huge days alone. No leash. No wetsuit. He wore Speedo trunks. Rode a long board. He left to go teach college in Santa Cruz.” Peewee eventually became a big guy himself—over six feet, broad-shouldered, with the poker-faced, blond good looks of a B-Western gunfighter. He also became a superb surfer. But he never managed to ditch the nickname that his older brother’s friends hung on him when he was small.
He also seems 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. I wasn’t sure why I had revealed this to Peewee, except that I felt direly confused about surfing myself, and was trying to sort it out. As one who had been struggling for several winters with Mark’s contention that to miss a swell was a far greater sin than to miss a deadline—Mark’s favorite expression was, in fact, “You really missed it”—I got more comfort than Peewee knew from his simple description of the inevitable conflict between surfing and work.
Peewee’s self-effacement was so thorough that it was easy to misread him as remote. Even I could see, though, after knowing him awhile, that his terse exterior hid, and not very well, an acute shyness, which, in turn, hid, somewhat more effectively, an old-fashioned sensitivity. He was 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 a lot of 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, riding a three-finned board, 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 palm of his hand, broke off each of its fins. Surfing is difficult, if not impossible, without fins. The definned one paddled in. Years later, Ocean Beach regulars who hadn’t seen this incident were still asking those who had to tell it again. (A basic orientation for many people is still their group of friends as adolescents.)
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 where all the elevators inside the bridge were; 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 him 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.
Mark was more voluble, naturally, about big surf. He, too, believes that big waves are less dangerous than most people think, but he talks about the ocean’s behavior in extreme situations—and the human response to it—in clinical, even scientific terms, emphasizing factors such as galvanic skin response and certain chemicals released by the liver. “Time slows down when you’re out in big waves—not just while you’re riding a wave but the whole time you’re out,” he says. “Your mind keeps playing survival messages. Your concentration is absolute. It’s the possibility of death.” This is also, according to Mark, what happens to people who have cancer, and even to those around them. Lives are suddenly viewed from vital new perspectives; the possibility of imminent death concentrates the mind and spirit. There are psychologists who say that ferocious concentration on one activity for a period of time can lead to a heightened sense of well-being, even to euphoria, and Mark believes it. Surfing big waves, he says, leaves him “feeling like I’m going to explode with joy.”
Although death by surfing pleasure seems to pose no threat to Peewee, he and Mark have shared many extraordinary moments in the water. Every surfer has a limit to the size of the waves he will venture among, and during the years I lived in San Francisco it chanced that their separate upper limits were in a range not broached by anyone else at Ocean Beach. Thus, while they were an unlikely pair, and were quite competitive (on a bad day, the best word that Mark had for Peewee was “laconic”; the key term in Peewee’s description of Doc, meanwhile, was “ego”), they were often the only two people willing to paddle out on the days that Mark liked to call “epic.”
Mark’s upper limit seemed at times not to exist. He had a great ambition, for instance, to be the first to surf an infamous shipping hazard known as the Potato Patch, several miles off the Golden Gate. He once persuaded Peewee to go out there with him in a speedboat, on a day when Mark estimated that the waves they found were between twenty-five and fifty feet. (Peewee thought they were twenty to twenty-five.) Certainly they were the largest waves that either of them had ever seen. Nobody got out of the boat, and Peewee renounced any ambition to ride the Patch. It wasn’t even a surf spot, he said. But Mark went out there again, on a smaller day, a couple of years later, and actually took off on a wave. He never got to his feet, but he wrote about the experience for a surfing magazine, and he still hopes to surf the Patch someday.
“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. But his interest in big waves was not indiscriminate; he didn’t try to surf every big day that came along. Mark would go out in anything, no matter how big, no matter how ugly; Peewee surfed big waves only 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, because plenty of surfers around the city believed they had seen Peewee ride waves larger than fifteen feet. It was also notoriously difficult to estimate the size of a wave you were riding. What was the biggest surf he had ever seen ridden at Ocean Beach?
“The day after Thanksgiving, sometime back in the seventies,” Peewee said. “Outside VFW’s. Breaking top to bottom. It was twenty feet, if you have to measure it. Bigger than anything Doc has surfed here. There were three guys out. Only one of them, Bones, was from the city. He lives in Hawaii now. This was before Doc moved here.”
The size of waves is a topic of constant dispute among surfers. Some measure the wave face from the lowest point in the trough, producing dimensions that sound impressive—except that underestimation is más macho. Underestimation is practiced with the greatest aplomb on the North Shore of Oahu, in Hawaii, the big-wave capital of the surfing world. On the North Shore, a wave must be the size of a small cathedral before the locals will call it eight feet. The arbitrariness of all this is obvious from the fact that among surfers 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, the premier big-wave spot on the North Shore, 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. In San Francisco, the standard unit of measurement is the height of a man. A “double-overhead” wave is one that looks, from shore, to be twice the height of someone riding it. And a double-overhead wave is, for no good reason, reckoned to be eight feet. A triple-overhead wave is ten feet. A wave four times the height of a rider is twelve feet. Five times is fifteen feet, more or less. Beyond that, the system disintegrates. Peter Cole, a veteran big-wave rider, got it right when he wrote that big waves are best measured not in feet but in increments of fear.
Sloat looked to be at least five refrigerators as I pulled into the parking lot 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 lethalness.
I was surprised to see the Sloat lot full. It was Super Bowl day, the 49ers were playing, and kickoff was within the hour. A high percentage 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 that I could see 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, I noticed, 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 try to paddle out himself. Sloat Bill thought of himself as a big-wave surfer, and he went 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 hull neck—he still 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 cannister of pure testosterone. He amused other surfers, very few of whom played rugby. He fascinated 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. Indeed, I couldn’t see how Mark and Peewee had made it—or how Peewee had been persuaded to try. It wasn’t his sort of surf—not clean. I stood with Sloat Bill awhile, 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 non-surfers 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 every 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-five 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 us an untrammelled 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 freak piece of steep swell that carried him cleanly across the flat spot 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 backlighted wall, before he finally straightened off, 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 white water, 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.
I had been bewitched by surfing since I was a kid. I had often wanted to break the spell; Mark, meanwhile, wanted to deepen it. I remembered the first time I accompanied him up the Mendocino coast, shortly after moving to San Francisco. The surf was big and scary, with a numbing northwest wind ruining every surf break except Point Arena Cove, which was protected by a thick kelp bed. I gingerly followed Mark out through the channel there, intimidated by the wind, the freezing water, and, above all, the heavy-gauge waves plunging and grinding down the rock reef. Mark threw himself into the fray, of course, surfing aggressively and noisily enjoying himself, 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 indeed, 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 that 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, but somehow 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—and I realized that he had said a lot of things that pleased me deeply.
He had also said a lot of things that infuriated me. Once, on another trip to Mendocino, while we were surfing a beautiful little cove we called Secrets, 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 an outrageous breach of what I understood as the surfing social contract, and the condescension of his remark only made it worse. It was ridiculous, I knew, to be so sensitive, and yet surfing was always this strangely private exhibition—something Mark couldn’t help but know. He was insulated in some ways, though, from how other people felt. His manic insouciance in public places, for instance, owed much to the fact that no one wanted to mess with a guy his size. I had noticed that, while pushing through a crowd, he didn’t tap people on the elbow to get past but, instead, wrapped his huge hands around their shoulders and gently shifted them out of his path, seemingly oblivious of the rapid sequence of surprise, irritation, and intimidation he left in his wake. But the true source of his endless self-assurance was not his height, I thought, but his abiding sense of entitlement and invulnerability.
A good part of my enchantment in San Francisco was with the seamlessness of Mark’s world, its willed continuities and focus, its manifest satisfactions. My own life felt riven by discontinuities. Surfing, specifically, was like some great, battered remnant of childhood that kept drifting incongruously into the foreground. More specifically still, surfing big waves felt atavistic, a compulsive return to some primal scene to prove some primal fact of manhood. Over the time I had been surfing Ocean Beach, I had become fascinated by Peewee as well. His world also seemed oddly seamless, although in a quite different way from Mark’s. The powerful continuities between his past and his present, between his childhood and his adulthood, were links of place, of community, of character. They were so quiet. They didn’t seem to need to display themselves.
Early in the spring of my third year in San Francisco, after a series of storms, the sandbar at Outside VFW’s began to break regularly for the first time since I had moved to the city. 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—before I ever had to face the question of paddling out myself on a big, serious day. It was Mark, of course, who forced the issue. “You can use my eight-eight,” he kept saying, indicating the yellow gun in the back of his van as he scrambled into his wetsuit. “I’ll ride my eight-six.”
It occurred to me that Mark might be trying, for his own reasons, to offer my life one last time to the 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. Maybe he was hoping to punish me for attempted desertion. 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 which 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. Still, justified or not, I was glad to be getting away without drowning. I was also glad to be getting out from under Mark’s evangelizing gaze. I had heeded his general advice to take surfing more seriously, but there were other things I took more seriously still. It was a shame that riding waves was unlikely to be a mainstay of my daily round in Manhattan, but in truth I was bored with California. I was also, when it came to surfing, tired of being a sidekick. I just didn’t know how to tell Mark I was going. 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 most of the people standing around watching the waves that day, and making no move to go out, surfed there regularly. Among them was an older guy, a housepainter named Rich, who was one of the dominant surfers down at this end of the beach. Rich scowled at me as I walked past, the yellow eight-eight under my arm, and 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 seven-six for big days, but I had been riding a three-fin six-nine most of the winter. Thick-railed and sharp-nosed, the eight-eight 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 shore break out to sea, with no inside bar to cross, was choppy and spooky nonetheless, with huge swells sweeping into it 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 disembowelled 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 ceaselessly around the edges of things, each threatening to overwhelm the dreamer. An unearthly beauty fills the world, in scenes that seem mythic even as they unfold. The experience usually arouses in me a ferocious ambivalence: I want to be nowhere else; I want to be anywhere else. I want to drift and gaze, drinking it in, but know, at the same time, that maximum alertness is crucial. Truly big surf 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 whisker-thin. Dumb luck weighs heavily, painfully. And when things go badly, as they inevitably do—when you’re caught inside by or fail to make a very large wave—all your skill and strength and judgment mean nothing. Nobody maintains his 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 sifting 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; in fact, I believed that if the rider of that remarkable wave at Sloat on the day of the Super Bowl had turned out to be Mark people would not have applauded. 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 eight-eight 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 extremely 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 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 millrace 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 I were 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 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, not unkindly. “Two feet,” he said.
There are no such waves in my world now. On summer weekends, I surf Fire Island, where conditions are most often ridiculous, never very good, certainly never scary. I find myself copying out a passage from “Beyond Good and Evil.” “We moderns, we half-barbarians,” Nietzsche writes. “We are in the midst of our bliss only when we are most in danger.” I remember, ambivalently, that bliss. Surf kitsch, meanwhile, is everywhere. The Mutant Ninja Turtles shout “Cowabunga!” and somebody’s T-shirt on Central Park West touts “Surfeteria, A Bar and Restaurant for Retired Surfers” over a long list of California surf spots. I follow the T-shirt down the street, trying to read the list. I realize I’ve surfed every spot on it. Why is my youth being recycled as farce this way? And in such rapacious detail! In France, I discover, any product that can possibly be packaged in a surfing motif is. Cigarettes, cars, cognac—all invoke le surf. Even the national-lottery game cards for a while featured an image of a surfer on a wave.
On late-night television, I stumble upon a surfing contest. Two red-hot kids are tearing apart one-foot waves in conditions that can only, be described as funkdog. They are, moreover, hassling one another, each paddling around frantically trying to trick the other into committing “interference”—a call by the judges which apparently costs one valuable points. The waves are not worth riding, let alone hassling for. And the announcer gets everything wrong, calling maneuvers by the wrong names, getting excited over ordinary moves while overlooking extraordinary ones, and, in the midst of his misnarration, taking journalistic indirection to new heights: “And the California regular-footer and former world champion pulls a radical roller coaster here at the United States Surfing Championships at Huntington Beach, California.” He keeps calling his color co-host “Robert Bartholomew,” and the co-host, a great Australian surfer known as Rabbit Bartholomew, never bothers to correct him. Neither does Bartholomew bother to point out that the surf we are watching is contemptible. It’s obviously part of the deal that he must pretend that this obscene parody of surfing is very exciting. I remember surfing with Bartholomew at his home break in Queensland when he was doing things on waves that the rest of us could not yet comprehend. I comprehend him too well tonight.
The surf magazines have discovered San Francisco—partly through the efforts of Mark, who started editing a medical-advice column for Surfer shortly after founding, at a conference he organized in Fiji, the Surfers’ Medical Association. His views and big-surf exploits have become a staple item in the magazine’s regional columns. Young surfers all dream of seeing themselves in the surf mags, and it seems that Mark has finally found, in middle age, a way to get himself in. Aaron Plank, the hottest young surfer in San Francisco, made it in through the front door: a phenomenal fourteen-frame sequence in which he is completely hidden from view for seven frames—about four seconds—and then emerges cleanly from a double-overhead Ocean Beach left. This sequence was part of a 1990 Surfer article about San Francisco that smelled to me like the end of an era. The whole surfing world knows about Ocean Beach now. There is even, I am told, an annual pro surfing contest at VFW’s.
But the strangest news I’ve had of San Francisco through Surfer—to which I still subscribe—was a paean to Peewee, by Mark. “Quiet, seemingly egoless, he draws little attention to himself—until he paddles out and goes off,” Mark writes. “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 compares Peewee to Clint Eastwood, and the famous fin-busting incident is mentioned.
I was wrong, by the way, to fear Mark’s reaction to the news that I was leaving San Francisco. He never missed a beat. He hasn’t passed up any opportunities since then, though, to let me know about all the great waves I’m missing at Ocean Beach, where last winter was surely the best in living memory, or on the various surf trips I’ve inexplicably declined to join him on—to Indonesia, Costa Rica, Fiji, Scotland. When I last spoke to him, earlier this month, he had just returned from Alaska, where he had 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.
The last time I was in San Francisco, I went by Wise’s shop and found the same crew lounging around the counter, telling many of the same stories. The photographs of Mark on the wall had multiplied, however, into dozens of well-framed, captioned shots of various locals surfing big Ocean Beach. It seemed that Mark and company had founded a new club—the Double Overhead Association. To be a D.O.A. member, you had to provide a picture of yourself on an Ocean Beach wave that was at least double-overhead. The pictures went up on Wise’s wall. I half wished I could join, and I was pleased to see that a photograph I had taken—of Edwin Salem on a huge, rainy day south of Sloat—was up there. I looked for the beautiful shot of Peewee at Outside VFW’s, but it was gone. Wise said he didn’t know what had become of it.
On the wall by my desk in New York a photograph hangs: me half crouched inside a slate-gray barrel off Noriega Street, Ocean Beach. Mark gave Caroline the photograph; she had it framed for my birthday. It’s a great shot, but it frustrates me to look at it, because the photographer fired an instant too soon. Just after the moment recorded by the camera, I disappeared into the wave. That’s the shot I covet: the wave alone, with the knowledge that I am 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 it looked like to others. This picture shows a dark sea; my memory of that wave is drenched with silver light. That’s because I was looking south while I navigated its depths, and as I slipped through its brilliant almond eye back into the world. ♦
(This is the second part of a two-part article.)
