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Beauty's Edge: The Way of the Surfer

by Drew Kampion

Howdy,

Just to let you know I have a new book, Beauty's Edge: The Way of the

Surfer, to be published soon by Harry N. Abrams of New York. A

photo-heavy volume, the book includes profiles of 11 notable surfers:

Woody Brown, John Severson, Dick Brewer, Nat Young, Rolf Aurness,

Bill Hamilton, Gerry Lopez, Tom Curren, Lisa Andersen, Kelly Slater,

and Titus Kinimaka. I'll let you know when it will be available.

Meanwhile, here's the intro for your snacking pleasure.

Stay stoked & keep walkin' on water!

Drew

* * * * *

Introduction

Surfing is the simple act of walking on water. There are lots of

other ways to ride ocean waves (bodysurfing, for example), but when

we say "surfing" we really mean walking on water, or at least

standing on it. This is what makes surfing unique - when we surf, we

walk on water.

But this "simple" act is so complex, it's hard to believe it's

possible at all. Consider the progression of forces that birth ocean

waves - the action of solar radiation on the upper atmosphere, the

migration of that energy toward the surface, how it joins with the

planet's rotational and counter-rotational currents to create

jet-stream flows and finally surface winds. Consider the movement of

wind over water, the steady friction of air on the liquid surface,

ruffling it into ripples, nudging up chop, pushing up seas, and

finally organizing turbulent fields of wind-tossed seas into

well-formed bands of open-ocean swell.

Propelled by gravity, trains of swell race away from the winds that

spawned them, moving across the ocean deeps until they feel the drag

of the shallows near land. As the swells shoal, they rise up out of

themselves, peaking and curling into the liquid dreams that surfers

ride. And if the generation of waves is complex, consider the

intricate physics of the controlled fall of riding the surf. It

would take more than a few chalkboards to plot the calculations.

Reducing all this to simple phrases, one could say that surfing is

nearly incomprehensible, almost miraculous, exquisitely sensual,

perhaps unique to this one blue planet.

Surfing is often described as an ancient Hawaiian sport; it was, and

it still is. The "experts" reckon it all started somewhere in

Polynesia about the year 1000, but no one really knows. The cultures

of Pacific islands were expressed in stone and bone, not iron and

parchment, and little has been preserved from that era. Nonetheless,

somewhere around the time of the Vikings does make sense, since there

is often a resonance in human affairs expressed in a synchronicity of

events. It was during the 8th, 9th, and 10th centuries that these

Scandinavian warriors were raiding Europe with fierce abandon. They

are still regarded as the best sailors of their age by historians who

fail to take into account the contemporaneous exploits of the

Polynesians.

Those natives of the South Pacific built large voyaging canoes out of

forest hardwood and stabilized the big hulls with outriggers. These

vessels could sail closer to weather than any European monohull, and

(like the Vikings' longships) when the winds were light or straight

on the nose, they could be paddled. Powered by sails of woven

pandanus leaves and the athletes who manned her, the voyaging canoe

was a notable achievement in maritime architecture. Guided by

peerless navigators, ancient Polynesians were accustomed to long

journeys at sea, either as part of their traditional, precisely-timed

trading routes or as adventurous explorations. Out on the immense

blue desert of the Pacific they discovered Rapa Nui (Easter Island),

the Hawaiian chain, and hundreds of other remote islands

The Polynesians were true voyagers. They knew the sea like the

native Sioux knew the North American prairies. They could "see"

islands hundreds of miles away in the refractory patterns on the

liquid plain they rode. They were masters of celestial navigation.

They routinely made crossings of over a thousand miles and hit their

target islands dead-on. They were very tuned into the environment,

and their far-flung trade circles operated on a seasonal calendar

with a punctuality that presaged the celebrated German rail system.

How exactly they discovered surfing will never be known for sure, but

you can conjecture. Any sailor, paddler, or rower knows the dynamics

of the ocean surface - the cycles of energy, the patterns of the sea,

how everything comes in waves - the seasons, the storms, the tides,

the surf. Out on the ocean, paddling with the swells, you can feel

the presence of the next wave coming up behind you, how it draws you

back on its approach, and then it lifts you - quite a bit if the

swell is large - lifts you, and then you surge ahead as the face of

it passes under you. And sometimes ... if you're moving fast enough

and the wave is steep enough, sometimes you start chasing down its

forward slope, the hull slapping rudely on the chop as you lift your

paddle over your head and let the wave take you for a ride.

Perhaps surfing started something like that, catching a free ride on

the way back in from fishing, resting the paddle and enjoying the

glide. The logical next step was to play the sport - to stand up and

show off. However it all began, when the great 18th-century European

explorers (notably Captain James Cook and his fleet) came upon

Polynesia and first saw people riding waves, they were confused.

Early renderings reveal their misapprehensions - naked maidens

balancing gracefully on small planks atop aquatic billows - positions

that defy now-understood hydrodynamic principles.

The arrival of British sailors and Christian missionaries, to a large

degree unintended, unleashed a double-edged Hawaiian genocide, a

little Pacific holocaust of disease and cultural disruption. The

survivors worked in the new plantation economy, and surfing fell by

the wayside. Mostly.

In 1874, savvy traveler Isabella L. Bird, spent a day at a remote

beach and observed more accurately that, "The great art seems to be

to mount the roller precisely at the right time, and to keep exactly

on its curl just before it breaks. ... always apparently coming down

hill with a slanting motion ... always just ahead of the breaker,

carried shorewards by its mighty impulse at the rate of forty miles

an hour ... the more daring riders knelt and even stood on their

surf-boards, waving their arms and uttering exultant cries ... always

apparently on the verge of engulfment by the fierce breaker whose

towering white crest was ever above and just behind them." [Isabella

L. Bird, The Hawaiian Archipelago: Six Months Amongst the Palm

Groves, Coral Reefs, and Volcanos of the Sandwich Islands, John

Murray: London, 1876.]

That was the afterglow of Polynesian surfing, a moment discovered in

a rare, persisting enclave of the past. Nobody really knows exactly

what surfing was like in its full glory. It is clear that at the

time of European contact in 1778 (forgetting for a moment any

shipwrecked Spaniards who may or may not have washed ashore on Niihau

200 years earlier), surfing was a highly-regarded and integral part

of Hawaiian culture. Kings and queens did it. Princes and

princesses did it. Kahunas and warriors did it. And so did most

everyone else.

They surfed the waves on a variety of vehicles. They rode short,

wide, thin paipo boards on their bellies; they rode the longer and

thicker alai'a boards prone, kneeling, or erect, but the royal

18-foot-long, cigar-shaped olo was only ridden by very important

people at exclusive surf spots.

One of these special areas was far off the beach at Waikiki, out by

Diamond Head, a spot the old Hawaiians called Kalahuewehe. Many a

great surfing contest was held there during the annual convergence of

the Hawaiian peoples on this island they called "the gathering

place." And what the Polynesians liked about the place, the haoles

(white foreigners) did too.

Following the hostile overthrow of Queen Liliuokalani by resident

American annexationists, the Territory of Hawaii was created in 1898

with missionary son Sanford B. Dole installed as governor. The

Spanish-American War immediately swept the obscure Pacific island

chain into national consciousness. When someone grasped the

strategic significance of Pearl Harbor to the nation's security, the

game was over. Honolulu was the state capital, Waikiki was the

beach, and the good old days began.

"Half a mile out, where is the reef, the whiteheaded combers thrust

suddenly skyward out of the placid turquoise-blue and come rolling

into shore. One after another they come, a mile long, with smoking

crests, the white battalions of the infinite army of the sea. ... And

suddenly, out there where a big smoker lifts skyward, rising like a

sea-god from out of the welter of spume and churning white, on the

giddy, toppling, overhanging and downfalling, precarious crest

appears the dark head of a man. Swiftly he rises through the rushing

white. His black shoulders, his chest, his loins, his limbs - all is

abruptly projected on one's vision. Where but the moment before was

only the wide desolation and invincible roar, is now a man, erect,

full-statured, not struggling frantically in that wild movement, not

buried and crushed and buffeted by those mighty monsters, but

standing above them all, calm and superb, poised on the giddy summit,

his feet buried in the churning foam, the salt smoke rising to his

knees, and all the rest of him in the free air and flashing sunlight,

and he is flying through the air, flying forward, flying fast as the

surge on which he stands. He is a Mercury - a brown Mercury. ... He

is a Kanaka - and more, he is a man, a member of the kingly species

that has mastered matter and the brutes and lorded it over creation."

[Jack London, "A Royal Sport: Surfing at Waikiki" from The Cruise of

the Stark]

When "walking on water" caught the eye of adventure author Jack

London in 1907, most of the native population was dead and gone, and

the island paradise had been reshaped by missionaries and plantation

economics. There were only a handful of Hawaiian surfers left, and

most congregated on the beach at Waikiki, where the kanuks could make

a living introducing the arcane practice to haole tourists, whose

interest in the sport had been sparked by the writings of London,

Mark Twain, and others. A select group of experts worked as "beach

boys," taking visitors on tandem rides and giving surfing lessons.

Between customers they hung out on the sand, played the ukulele,

sang, talked story, made love to haole women, surfed, paddled canoe,

and generally had a pretty good lifestyle. They were the

grandfathers of modern surfing.

This core group of Waikiki surfers seeded the 20th-century

renaissance of "the sport of Hawaiian kings." With their knowledge

of the ocean, their fearless play in the powerful waves, and most of

all their confident, self-sufficient style, they inspired those who

came to Waikiki. And a few notable beach boys traveled to other

parts of the world, taking surfing with them, and seeding its growth

elsewhere. Through this small band of beach boys, surfing passed

forward into our modern era, where it has assumed an increasingly

important place in our global culture.

Vilified as a beatnik tribe of beach bums in the late 1950s and early

'60s, the postmodern view of surfers has shifted, informed by the

complexification of the sport itself in recent decades. Bold new

gymnastic approaches to wave-riding have combined with the

proliferation of lifestyle-related "board sports" to capture

increasing media attention (surfing has gone mainstream). At the

same time, technology, in the guise of personal watercraft (Jet Skis

or PWCs), have opened access to the "unridden realm" - giant waves

that generally break farther out to sea and cannot be approached

without "jet-assisted take-off" methodologies, by which the surfer is

towed into a wave that he couldn't physically paddle into. The sight

of diminutive surfers dwarfed by 60-foot walls of raging water has

been compelling enough to put surfing, at last, on par with the other

so-called "extreme" sports that occupy so much of our precious

attention in this current neo-Roman epoch.

But beneath this highly visible world of danger, disaster, and

fleeting glory, there lives and breathes the "rank and file" surf

culture - a million or more so-called hardcore devotees, each with a

personal relationship with the ocean and its waves. To represent

surfing as the achievements of only its greatest practitioners on the

most epic of waves is a kind of misleading shorthand - a symbolic

gesture in the direction of the infinite truths residing deep in the

oceanic reservoirs of our combined surfing experiences. It sounds

pretentious, but it's not meant to be. It's just simple math.

The history of surfing is the sum total of all the waves ever ridden,

of all the journeys and adventures and lessons learned by all those

who have ever paddled out to ride a wave. An impossible story to

tell, of course, even as reflected in the lives of a few tribal

archetypes, individuals who embody the essence of the endeavor, whose

lives along the surfer's path are tantamount to walking on water.

[click to Drew's HomePage]

* * *

Life is a wave. Your attitude is your surfboard.

http://www.drewkampion.com

B+

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