Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life

“But, to my sorrow, I was coming into my own as a babysitter. My parents, ignorant of my budding career as a Kaimuki gangbanger, knew me only as Mr. Responsible. That had been my role at home since shortly after the others started arriving […] I could be counted on to keep the little ones undrowned, unelectrocuted, fed, watered, rediapered. But formal babysitting duties, evenings and weekends, were a new thing, and a terrible imposition, I found, when there were waves to ride, city buses begging to be pelted with unripe mangoes, unchaperoned parties to attend in Kaimuki.”

The author’s memories of being “Mr. Responsible” as the oldest child at home help convey his family’s dynamics. By discussing the “terrible imposition” of household responsibilities, Finnegan shows why he treasured his time alone surfing. In addition, in contrasting his family role of responsibility with several decidedly irresponsible activities of youth, the author comments on the difficulties associated with growing up and experiencing the urge for rebellion and freedom.

“This was the fear line that made surfing different, here underscored extra-heavily. I felt like Pip, the cabin boy in Moby Dick who falls overboard and is rescued but loses his mind, undone by visions of the ocean’s infinite malice and indifference. I paddled far, far around the Rice Bowl reef, on the Tongg’s side, light-headed, humiliated, back to shore.”

Finnegan recalls surfing at the “Rice Bowl” for the first time and encountering its powerful waves. Unable to surf on them, Finnegan paddled out of the reef to a calmer area. This quotation shows how Finnegan was free to take significant risks, which helped him understand his skill level and the ever-present danger of the ocean.

“The close, painstaking study of a tiny patch of coast, every eddy and angle, even down to individual rocks, and in every combination of tide and wind and swell—a longitudinal study, through season after season—is the basic occupation of surfers at their local break. Getting a spot wired—truly understanding it—can take years.”

Finnegan reveals the studious side of surfing, describing how surfers need to understand waves, sand bars, currents, rocks, tides, and other elements that can impact their safety on the water. This quotation helps dispel stereotypes of surfers as unintellectual and reveals the natural knowledge they accumulate in pursuit of the best surf.

“But a more conscious, analytic, loosely Marxist disaffection was also taking root in my politics in my midteens […] In the meantime, surfing became an excellent refuge from the conflict—a consuming, physically exhausting, joy-drenched reason to live. It also, in its vaguely outlaw uselessness, its disengagement from productive labor, neatly expressed one’s disaffection.”

Amid the political and social upheaval of the 1960s US, Finnegan experienced surfing as a “refuge” from the conflicts raging around him. Because of surfing’s reputation of “outlaw uselessness” and its association with liberal movements, Finnegan felt that it also helped him showcase his leftist politics.

“Draft-dodging, still well in the future for me but already upending the lives of the older brothers of friends, I vehemently endorsed. The Vietnam War was wrong, rotten to the core. But the military, the government, the police, big business were all congealing in my view as a single oppressive mass—the System, the Man.”

Finnegan explains how he adopted the leftist politics common in his generation; he resisted the authority of “the Man” in its many forms. In this quotation Finnegan hints at his future decision to evade being drafted into the Vietnam War and highlights how having to do so was disruptive to many of his peers.

“What could rightly have worried my dad about me and surfing was the special brand of monomania, anti-social and ill-balanced, that a serious commitment to surfing nearly always brought with it […] The newly emerging ideal was solitude, purity, perfect waves far from civilization.”

Finnegan reflects on how surfing invites obsession, arguing that its reputation as an antisocial pastime is somewhat deserved. He admits that as he became more interested in surfing, he viewed it less as a sport or hobby and more as a way of life, as well as a necessary escape from “civilization.”

“We bent our heads over maps and charts and strained to see distant reefs, channels, headlands, river mouths. We clambered up overgrown trails and beetling crags and coconut trees to vantage points, and were frequently defeated by jungles, bad maps, worse roads, mangrove swamps, ocean currents, and kava. Fishermen helped us. Villagers helped us.”

The author describes the painstaking process of identifying new surfing spots in the South Pacific. With only rudimentary maps and charts to indicate surf conditions, Finnegan and his friend often found themselves at odds with the wilderness of these remote areas. This passage helps generate interest in Finnegan’s adventure and reaffirms his obsession with surfing and risk-taking in general given his willingness to do what it took to overcome the obstacles.

“Surfers have a perfection fetish. The perfect wave, etcetera. There is no such thing. Waves are not stationary objects in nature like roses or diamonds. They’re quick, violent events at the end of a long chain of storm action and ocean reaction.”

Finnegan critiques surf culture’s romanticization of ocean waves and emphasizes that waves are simply events triggered by distant storms. By describing good surf as “violent,” Finnegan creates a realistic image of the ocean as a dangerous force of nature and underscores the risk he and his friend accepted by surfing alone in remote areas.

“After a rapid-fire series of critical sections, surfing blind, things happening too fast for me to react except instinctively, I came skittering out into the channel. I lay down on my board, shaking. Then I struggled in, paddling against the current. On the beach, I only got halfway up to our campsite. On my knees in the sand, in the twilight, absolutely spent, I was surprised to find myself sobbing.”

Finnegan recalls one of his most frightening surfing experiences that occurred while on his trip through the South Pacific. This quotation humanizes the author and highlights the dangerous aspect of his surfing habit as well as his dedication to it. In this passage, he describes being so caught up in the physicality of the moment that his emotional reaction surprised him.

“Bryan and I had our own domesticity, of course, and it was often strained. Being friends as in writing letters was so much easier than being friends as in living together. We bickered and, every few months, fought bitterly. I resented the fact that it felt dangerous to do anything out of the ordinary, anything outside the rut of habit.”

Finnegan recalls how his travels with his friend Bryan changed their relationship. Bryan had a more risk-averse personality than the author and resented Finnegan’s spontaneity. This quotation helps convey Finnegan’s complex dynamic with his friend and also reveals Finnegan as a more impulsive risk-taker in comparison to his friend.

“Their stories, they felt, would make no sense if their listeners didn’t understand exactly how a reef back in Perth caught a west swell. They lost themselves in diagrams more detailed than anyone wanted. Some of this strange ardor could be put down to homesickness, or simply to the countless hours surfing and studying that particular reef, but a good part of it was also, it must be said, dope-fueled.”

Finnegan reminisces about the surf culture in 1970s Bali, where most of the surfers were young men from Australia. This quotation reveals how although Finnegan felt a certain kinship with many surfers he encountered, he was an outsider to some aspects of the surf culture, such as drug use; he stopped partaking in in his early twenties.

“The whole thing had taken days, and had turned into the haggle to end all haggles. It was all totally unlike Bryan, from beginning to end, and yet he had prevailed. For the two of us, it was a full role reversal. He took a huge risk, freed me from the hospital, and in the process, freed himself from me.”

The author describes Bryan’s out-of-character actions of selling bad traveler’s checks to gangsters in order to raise the funds for Finnegan’s hospital bills. The “role reversal” Finnegan refers to means that he was the passive friend while the normally more risk-averse Bryan took risks and made bold decisions. This passage emphasizes Finnegan and Bryan’s close bond while also suggesting that Finnegan believed Bryan was eager to move on from the trip and not feel responsible for Finnegan anymore.

“In Cape Town we heard that the local black schools suffered from a perennial shortage of teachers, and that the academic school year was just beginning. Someone gave me a list of township schools. At the second school I visited, Grassy Park Senior Secondary, the principal, a blustery fellow named George Van Den Heever, hired me on the spot. I would teach English, geography, and something called religious instruction, starting immediately.”

The author explains how he came to be a teacher in a South African township school during the apartheid era. This passage shows how the author easily found interesting opportunities as a white man in 1970s South Africa, and emphasizes his curiosity about other cultures.

“I had no right to judge how South Africans, black or white, dealt individually with their extraordinary situation, but working on the Cape Flats, seeing the workings of institutionalized injustice and state terror up relatively close was deeply affecting me […] There was simply no escaping politics, and I found no common political ground with any of the surfers I met. So I chased waves alone.”

The author explains that he was disappointed by the racism prevalent in the white South African surf community and in the Australian expats who also surfed there; Finnegan distanced himself from these acquaintances and chose to surf by himself. This passage shows how Finnegan’s anti-apartheid stance became an important part of his life, as he learned more about South Africa and became more invested in the political outcomes there. It also shows how these values sometimes caused him to feel like an outsider and prevented him from bonding with the locals over surfing the same way he had in other places.

“In the end, I came to see my careers program as an enormous American folly, even in some cases quite destructive, where it encouraged false hopes or encouraged kids to defy boycotts that I knew nothing about.”

In hindsight, Finnegan is critical of his well-intentioned attempt to counsel his students in postsecondary education and career options. This quotation shows that during Finnegan’s time in South Africa, he was constantly learning about his students’ lives and experiences as Black South Africans, and that some of the assumptions he made were ill-founded. This ties in with his views about the tensions and power imbalance of experiencing foreign cultures as an American tourist. In addition, this passage presents the author as a humble narrator of his own life, willing to admit when his ideas weren’t successful.

“I was becoming domesticated […] by my own wary choice, with concessions small and extra-small to stability and convenience […] I realized that in the thirteen years since high school, the longest period I had ever kept the same address was fifteen months. That was in Cape Town. Basta. Enough with itinerancy.”

The author reflects on how he slowly gave up his nomadic ways in his early thirties while living in San Francisco. This transition resulted from his own desire to leave “itinerancy” behind and embrace a more stable life. In this passage, Finnegan demonstrates how he steadily matured out of his exploratory and escapist youth and into a more settled middle age.

“The fear in these long trough moments was nothing like the concentrated panic I once felt at big Rice Bowl as a kid. It was more diffuse, queasy, contingent. Drowning was just a vague, unlikely possibility, the ultimate unwanted outcome, floating around the edge of things—a cold green specter, nothing more.”

Finnegan explains how his experience of fear changed as he became an experienced surfer, transforming “panic” to a more dulled queasiness. This quotation shows how Finnegan’s varied experiences, which included more than a few near drownings, helped him develop a calmer mental state on the water.

“I had surfed alongside a few big wave specialists on the North Shore, but I thought of them as mutants, mystics, pilgrims traveling another road from the rest of us, possibly made from different raw material. They seemed bionic, suspiciously immune to normal reactions (panic, fight or flight) in the face of life-threatening peril.”

Finnegan characterizes big-wave surfers as somewhat supernatural for their ability to embrace danger and resist normal primal responses to risky situations. By describing them as such, the author shows his own reverence and admiration for these surfers and conveys his perspective on his own limitations and comfort with risk.

“I recognized those waves as lethal, but also as nearly flawless, and, with the right equipment and sufficient technique, ridable. I kept expecting to start shaking, to get hit by some racking adrenaline drain, now that I was safe on land […] My luck had been extravagant. I felt like finding a church, lighting a candle, and humbling myself.”

The author reminisces about surfing a set of massive waves on Madeira and reflects on how strangely calm and content he felt afterward. Finnegan humbly emphasizes his feelings of awe and gratitude, acknowledging that luck plays a role in each surfer’s success.

“Peter had not come back. Gnarly as he was, he had taken a hint from our close calls. When I asked him about it sometime later, he said, ‘Things were finally set up like I wanted, and this one slipup was going to ruin it, and make a lot of people sad.’ I could have said the same thing. In fact, I should have said it. But I lacked his clarity. I wasn’t through with Madeira.”

After their terrifying near-death ordeal at sea, Peter gave up surfing on Madeira. This quotation highlights Finnegan’s obsessive interest in surfing as well as Madeira specifically, and his sober self-reflection suggests that he wishes he’d become more risk-averse too. It also ties in with his views on surfing and friendship, suggesting that friends can bond over surfing until their attitudes to risk begin to differ.

“Unfortunately, my surfing was in decline. I was getting old […] I appalled myself. I missed waves I should have caught, lumbered to my feet when I should have sprung. Getting older as a surfer, I’d heard it said, was a long, slow, humiliating process of becoming a kook again.”

This passage shows Finnegan’s penchant for being critical of himself and his abilities as a surfer. Additionally, it highlights the competitive nature of even amateur surfing, in which surfers often compete informally to make waves and not appear to be a rookie, or “kook.”

“Having an audience made it worse—the humiliation of surfing so timidly. But the worst part was the feeling in my chest as I paddled over large, exquisite waves, over and over, unwilling to risk the takeoffs. It was such a waste. Such cowardice. My self-loathing spiked insufferably.”

Finnegan recalls a surf session at Madeira when he failed to ride many waves. This passage emphasizes his high standards for himself and highlights the macho approach to surfing he’d been steeped in since childhood.

“The kelp, the eelgrass, the gentle blue waves. Seals barked, gulls cried, dolphins breached. I felt spiritually poisoned—some acrid cocktail of anger, sadness, hopelessness—by the story I was working on. Surfing had never made more sense.”

Finnegan recalls how surfing helped him cope with disturbing aspects of his work, such as writing a piece on his old neighborhood in California, which was plagued by gang violence and an underfunded public school system. In this passage, the author develops his theme about the therapeutic aspect of surfing, which he continually turned to throughout different personal and professional challenges in his life.