The first known surf story was told by ancient Hawaiians nearly 500 years ago. Preserved through chants and hulas, they communicated how Maui Chiefess Kelea was kidnapped and taken to Oahu, where she proved herself the best surfer in The Islands.
While Kelea’s saga predates Gidget’s by over 400 years, I believe that surfing and surf stories are older still—as old as time itself.
Imagine Adam, or, more likely, his rebellious wife, Eve, wandering from Eden to the Persian Gulf. Once there, she immerses herself in the clean, warm waters. Using a large piece of driftwood for floatation, a whitewater wave sends her speeding toward shore.
Once she feels stable, she rises to her feet on the organic surf craft. Upon returning to the Garden, she enthusiastically shares her stoke with the slack-jawed Adam, and the surf story is born. I find the idea of Adam or Eve being surfing’s first parents plausible because of a story told me by legendary surfer, Woody Brown, in 1991. Woody convinced me that day of what he believed, that surfing is as intuitive as walking.
In 1937, Brown didn’t know surfing existed. Considering the lack of media at that time, that’s understandable. According to him, “I had never before seen even a picture of a surfer or a surfboard.”
Brown was a glider pilot transplanted from New York to San Diego. His wife would slingshot his sailplane from the family car into the wild blue yonder, soaring beyond the 300-foot cliffs overlooking Black’s Beach in La Jolla.
After crashing on the beach one day, Woody located a piece of driftwood, swam it out a ways, and rode shoreward. After discovering the secret thrill of prone surfing, the adventurous, athletic, and inventive Brown returned home and built a surfboard shaped like an airplane wing. Within a year, he became the leader of the then-tiny San Diego surf pack.
Standing tall, he rode anything the ocean threw at him. As legendary surfing pioneer, Don Okey says, “Without ever seeing surfing or a surfboard, Woody Brown became the best surfer in the area and made the best surfboard we had ever seen. We followed him, and he made brave men out of us all.”
Not until C.R. Stecyk’s 1976 Surfer Magazine piece “Curse of the Chumash,” did it become obvious that surfing in California predated all written records. Stecyk made it clear that members of the Chumash tribe were surfing hundreds, maybe thousands, of years before Europeans arrived in the Golden State.
While wave riding may have been initially done by the tribe for practical reasons, like getting their canoes to shore more quickly, they must have noticed that the process felt darned good. After some brave soul paddled out, caught a wave, and stood triumphant on his plank canoe, racing an endless Malibu wall, other tribal members, no doubt, tried going him one better.
To determine who was best, they each caught a wave and rode it as far as they could. The one who went the furthest was deemed the winner. Coveted golden cowrie shells were put on the line, and the first professional surfing contest debuted in California.
While I am in no way comparing myself to Eve, Kelea, the Chumash, or Woody Brown, I discovered surfing in 1958 when I was ten years old. I had never seen surfing before, but when my neighbor Robert, who had accompanied our family on vacation to Lake Arrowhead, found two large strips of pine bark on shore, I had never seen surfing before.
After paddling the frail slabs out a short way, we intuitively turned them around and rode tiny ripples to the sand. By day’s end, we were standing up on our crude surf craft. We had no idea what to call this fun new thing, and mainstream surfing remained unknown to Robert and me until we saw “Gidget” together in 1959.
We had discovered real surfing and would soon fail at imitating it by attempting to ride the plywood planks we had carved from the base of my HO Railroad set. It would be three more years until I traded 45 of my paper route dollars for a used 9’6” Wardy Surfboard.
The preceding paragraphs serve as the opening passages of Ahrens’ forthcoming book, “Good Things Love Water.” He is also the author of “Windansea: Life. Death. Resurrection.”
