Excerpts
Pieces of the book were published in the Atlantic Monthly in early 2008 (on river surfing in Munich) and mid-2010 (on surfing Indonesia), and in some other magazines.
But here’s a short segment from the start of the book.
2010
WHEN I WAS YOUNG, the George Freeth memorial in Redondo Beach, California, was a salt-bitten bust of a lifeguard who gazed with the stoicism you’d expect from an early surf hero into the deep mysteries of a concrete parking garage. His back was to the Redondo Pier. Most locals jogged or skated past the sculpture without examining the plaque, which read, disingenuously, first surfer in the united states, then related the story of how Freeth was paid by the Los Angeles real estate and streetcar magnate Henry Huntington in 1907 to lure people to ride the Red Line tram to Redondo Beach on sunny afternoons and watch a new kind of athlete trim the waves. “George Freeth was advertised as ‘The Man Who Can Walk On Water,’” according to the plaque. “Thousands of people came here on the big red cars to watch this astounding feat. George would mount his big 8-foot-long, solid wood, 200-pound surfboard far out in the surf. He would wait for a suitable wave, catch it, and to the amazement of all, ride onto the beach while standing upright.”
I remember passing the sculpture on my bike as a kid. Redondo Beach was, and still is, a glamour-resistant Los Angeles suburb. In the early ’80s the beach was drab and blighted with rusting Coppertone trash cans and piles of seaweed. So I wondered why it would have occurred to people in 1907 to come here and watch a man do something so normal: “ride onto the beach while standing upright.” Big deal. Could he do aerials? The surfers I saw in magazines—Martin Potter, Mark Occhilupo, Shaun Tomson—could all do aerials.
At the time I was a new and not very good surfer who walked to the beach some mornings before school with a lanky mathematician named Tim who had a dark sense of humor and an oversized Adam’s apple. Tim, with his brilliant technical mind and his nerdy leather briefcase, didn’t feel welcome at Mira Costa High. He tested out before graduation, I think during his junior year. Other kids who surfed, the California punks and spoiled rich sons of industry, floated in the lineup in expensive, colorful wetsuits and set a tone of cool neither of us could match. But Tim wanted to surf in contests. He pushed himself in the water the way he pushed himself in class, and under his influence I learned to appreciate the magisterial command of pros like Tom Curren and Mark Foo; the aggro wave-whacking styles of Occhilupo and Brad Gerlach; and the clever innovations of guys like Cheyne Horan, who won surf titles on boards he’d invented himself.
By then surfing was too far along for me to imagine any individual as the “first surfer” in America. Surfing was too obvious. It was an ancient sport in Hawaii; how come it took until 1907 to reach America? Didn’t native Californians—the Chumash, the Ohlone— surf? (Actually, no.) But my teenage skepticism was justified. Freeth was only the first celebrity surfer in California. The first men on record to surf North America were three Hawaiian princes who noticed that waves at the San Lorenzo River mouth in Santa Cruz were up to snuff. In the late nineteenth century, Jonah Kuhio Kalaniana’ole, heir to the Hawaiian throne, and his brothers David and Edward attended a military school in San Mateo, over the hill from Santa Cruz. They shaped their own boards from local redwoods and hauled them out to the beach one day in 1885 for a little fun. “The young Hawaiian princes were in the water,” wrote a local paper, “enjoying it hugely and giving interesting exhibitions of surfboard swimming as practiced in their native islands.”
There’s also the story from Richard Henry Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast about Hawaiian crewmen from a ship called the Ayacucho, which met Dana’s ship near Santa Barbara in 1835. It was Dana’s first California landing. A rowboat full of his shipmates was waiting in high evening surf for a chance to row in when a launch from the Ayacucho “came alongside of us, with a crew of dusky Sandwich-Islanders, talking and hallooing in their outlandish tongue. They knew that we were novices in this kind of boating,” so they showed the haoles how it was done. The Hawaiians had had outrigger practice, and outriggers are close ancestors of surfboards. Dana then sets down the earliest English description of riding California surf. “We pulled strongly in, and as soon as we felt that the sea had got hold of us, and was carrying us in with the speed of a race-horse, we threw the oars as far from the boat as we could,” imitating the Hawaiians, “and took hold of the gunwales, ready to spring out and seize her when she struck, the officer using his utmost strength, with his steering-oar, to keep her stern out. We were shot up upon the beach, and seizing the boat, ran her up high and dry, and, picking up our oars, stood by her, ready for the captain to come down.”
I agree with other people who have stumbled across this scene and found it hard to imagine surf-experienced Hawaiians passing “perfect Rincon or Malibu” in masted ships and not improvising a board—or just diving in—for a session of some kind in the water. “A surfer is a surfer,” wrote Ben Marcus (the surf writer, not the novelist), “and a wave is a wave.”
But George Freeth helped rescue stand-up surfing from the Christianized sickness of nineteenth-century Hawaiian culture and brought it to Redondo Beach. Like African music that crossed in ships to America and became the blues, and then jazz, and then rock, surfing would merge with the American landscape and become something new. After the pop explosion of the ’60s there would be no stopping it. I’d been vaguely aware of the sport’s imperial march in the years since I took it up, when stickers for Body Glove wetsuits and Quiksilver board shorts plastered on road signs and school desks were part of the provincial mood of Redondo, Manhattan, and Hermosa Beach—collectively known as the South Bay, a coastal suburb of Los Angeles—but it wasn’t until I saw the Quiksilver store in Paris and watched surfers in Munich, where people surf Isar River canals, that I noticed with a measure of dread that “surfing” is a big-business American export, up there with cowboys and Hollywood.
Munich doesn’t just have a plashing corner of the English Garden where you can put your board in the water and impress your girlfriend. It has a small but thriving surf scene, with dreadlocked German teenagers, local attitude, and an annual contest sponsored by Quiksilver. It’s as if European kids can’t think of their own way to rebel. And finding this scene made me wonder whether the migration of surfing from the Pacific to the four corners of the earth is good or bad—a symptom of the universal delights of a simple Polynesian sport or a warning that California has conquered the world.
§
Not to piss off Australians. Surfing by now is no less “Australian” than it is “Californian,” in the sense that it’s really Hawaiian. The sport is a national pastime in Australia because most of the white population lives along the coast. Broadcasters there can report on big waves and shark attacks without the irritating reflex in American TV to treat surf culture as a quaint activity in some province ludicrously distant from New York. The sport also has deep Australian roots. After Duke Kahanamoku gave a surf exhibition at a Sydney beach in 1915, “on a make-shift board [made] out of sugar pine,” lifeguards and hobbyists took up surfing on redwood boards and kayaklike surf skis, the way Californians did just after Freeth. In the 1950s surfing was still a trundling curiosity in Australia until a hipper, faster version arrived from California (with the “Malibu chip” board), and it’s the spread of modern surfing I’m curious about, the strange propulsion of it from America to just about everywhere.
The sport’s early roots are older than writing in Hawaii and therefore untraceable. But it goes back hundreds if not thousands of years. Some historians think it grew out of the way tired Polynesian fishermen ended long outrigger rides: Instead of paddling in to shore, they learned to catch the rolling surf, like their descendants on the Ayacucho. Canoe or outrigger surfing was normal across Polynesia, and bodysurfing as well as bodyboarding was known not just in the South Pacific but also in places as remote from each other as Africa and Peru. The Hawaiian habit of riding surf may have started in Tahiti, which is the source of early Hawaiian culture; in fact, some Tahitians could even stand on their boards. But stand-up surfing—on long, coral-smoothed koa or breadfruit slabs—evolved in Hawaii, where it became a universal recreation practiced by men as well as women, peasants as well as kings.
