In the beginning, when I was 14 years old, I embraced surfing, not because it was healthy, or even fun, but because it was a way for girls to like me. Or so I thought.
My older sister, Jackie, had told me that girls like surfers and, at 13, that mattered more than anything to me. And so, I dressed like a surfer: Bing Surfboards T-shirt, white Levi’s, Converse tennis shoes. I also spoke like a surfer, using repurposed words like “stoked” and “bitchin,” which is somehow a good thing.
And while I could not articulate it then, I know now that we were forming a fraternity, where surf knots and pre-skin cancer served as a type of secret handshake.
But none of that was really surfing. Surfing was something else, something as ancient as mankind and divorced from the fashion of all ages. A big blow in the Aleutians creates this phenomenon known as a north swell, raining hammers down on the faithful in the most pleasant way imaginable.
And there we are, froze to life by the dawn’s early light while the rest of the world luxuriates in an extra hour’s sleep. We awaken to a life shared by creatures that kill to live, never giving a thought to those unworthy even of their most mundane dreams.
In the mid ’60s, they called it the Shortboard Revolution. As it turns out, this was nothing but a silly marketing term meant to cut the cost of surfboard materials in half. Ironically, what it did, however, was jackhammer the surfing establishment as we whittled down our 10-foot masterpiece and replaced them with lopsided garage-built pocket rockets.
We thought we were rebelling, but the new boss was the same as the old boss, a dictator we would not recognize for nearly a decade when longer boards once again returned to win us.
I have no problem with surfing competition except when it ropes off the best breaks from us common folk to offer them to those who are able to stand on wax better than everyone else. But make no mistake. This is not rebellion but conformity to rules and jerseys and bullhorns and the whims of surfers generally inferior to those they sit in judgment of.
Paddling out alone in the dark to a surf spot is about the most rebellious thing one can legally do in these times of quiet desperation. It is then we face the world on its own brutal terms. There, with nobody to impress, we ride a wave without worrying what anyone else will think. Turn if you want to turn. Cut back if you like. Simply stand there if that is what moves you.
The land disappears as there are no taxes to be paid, no rendering to Caesar, that fat cow drooling over a nation of nervous sheep waiting, longing to be sheered for his pleasure. There is more to lose than the clanging of Marxist chains that bind you to the suffocating comforts of a Posturepedic.
There is another you, a better you, beckoning you to wake up to the real world. Born in a violent storm, a wave is moving down the coast offering itself in the form of a free ride before it dies in the sand. Rebel.
