Maybe it’s just me, a 40-year, post-prime, stay-at-home surfer who used to be an okay rider. Maybe, but I don’t really think so. Once surfing lost its outlaw, dirtbag image and became respectable, it lost something more. I mean, riding waves was still as fun as ever, but the sport’s subcultural aspect (was it a sport then?) was watered down.
We, who had once been the only vermin attending prom in pre-punk combat boots and army jackets, had turned acceptable to everyone, including teachers, cops and the parents of girlfriends.
The corruption began at the top, after our heroes were paid to dress and act in a way contrary to the filthy mold we had been poured into. Something cannot be mainstream and countercultural at the same time. It must have felt the same to hardcore rappers after McDonald’s intruded on their act.
We were banned from the Olympics and left as far from the catwalk as possible. Before Nick Cage pearled up to his neck, and some fresh-out-of-surf-school Nebraska transplant put surfing Pipe on his bucket list, half a dozen of us packed our salt-encrusted bodies into a roach motel and saved every penny for a 7-foot-6 Hynson Semi and a one-way standby ticket to Hawaii.
The best among us might get a free board and first dibs on a friend’s couch. Skip Engblom was talking about Dogtown, but it could have been most any U.S. beach town when he said, “It was dirty, it was filthy. It was paradise.” Paradise was sold for 30 pieces of silver, along with those who once lived freely in its shadow.
I woke to the news that surfers were cool, and that nice parents were willing to pay surf coaches to be like us. Only little Johnny was not like us and never would be. That would require him getting off the hamster wheel, becoming self-educated, swinging low, and living on whatever scraps fell from the king’s table.
Very few were tough enough to fight for their spot in the lineup, save every cent and buy a real hand-shaped surfboard from a real surfboard maker. Either that, or you made your own. You shopped at Goodwill and were willing to get bloody in the lifelong battle against the rising tide of conformity.
Sorry to offend anyone, but I find modern surf culture boring. The surfing is not boring, but what comes next looks like a Kmart ad. Nothing organic about it. Surf good, wear the uniform, get paid, blow up on Instagram, get an acceptable haircut, talk surfing like a man in the lot.
Maybe that’s why I have a hard time writing about anything that didn’t happen before the invention of the cellphone. Why waste brain cells trying to describe the indescribable — six-foot airs and heroic drops at Nazaré. Your reel will put you under the lip of a falling liquid skyscraper before it even implodes.
To read the stories of those who invented the boards, the language and a life lived before Madison Avenue repackaged it, check out the time machine known as “Good Things Love Water.”
Those going my way can order signed, limited-edition copies through Perelandra Publishing. Books arrive Aug. 18.
