Part VIII: Women in the Water

Credit: Duke University Press

Only after weeding through nearly 100 years of surfing history, only after reading first-person accounts and speaking with experienced surfers, only after understanding my own experience in the water a bit better, do I feel prepared to comment on one of the most critical aspects of this project: taking a close look at women’s role in the sport.

Krista Comer lays out her thesis clearly, arguing, “Surfer Girls in the New World Order (Duke University Press 2010) makes use of the claim for girlhood as a constitutive feature of the new global order and links it to third-wave calls for intergenerational conversation to frame a larger thesis about surfing girls’ and women’s politics” (17).

I suggest you read the book, lest I further finagle Comer’s impressive scholarly digestion of the sport, which she weaves through three waves of feminism, calls out for its surprising lack of critical inquiry thus far, and gives credit where credit is due to female trailblazers who have surfed for over half a century. Interestingly, Ed “Club Ed” Guzman’s grandmother, Dorothy Becker, was a pathfinder herself as the first woman to perform a headstand on a surfboard back in 1915.

As with all the books I’ve read, invariably — when speaking of women’s role in the sport — the conversation starts with Gidget. In real life, Gidget was Kathy Kohner, the 15-year-old-avid-Malibu-surfing daughter of screenwriter Frederick Kohner. A crass yet literal combination of “girl” and “midget,” (Warshaw 156) the diminutive icon of the surfer girl took over the culture much like an athletic, adolescent Shirley Temple, with film after film (and novel after novel penned by her father) inspired by her rather unthreatening appeal. Diminutive or not, within four years of the release of the first Gidget film, American surfers multiplied from five thousand to two or three million (Moore 28). As a pioneer, Gidget was a teenage role model for a liberated female, unrestricted by the expectation of who surfed. She inverted the gaze from the passive bystander who watched from shore to the girl who was watched for her physical prowess. Talk about girl power. (See Comer 43). Why do any of us join in except to make the same inversion?

Comer draws a fascinating through-line from the Gidget phenomenon to contemporary markets for girl surfing stories. “A young women’s surf video is local news, women’s international surf camps are travel news, women’s surf shops sponsoring women’s surf films are arts and entertainment news…if surfing wants to be part of the current news cycle (and it does), it has found itself invested like never before in recovering and promoting the history of women’s surfing. Women’s history sells” (39). Comer returns to this idea of the contemporary appeal of women’s surfing lying partially in its own history when she threads in the storytelling aspect of the sport, mentioned elsewhere in this project. Comer points to written biography in particular. “When girls read biographical profiles, they reposition their own practices of storytelling vis-à-vis the emerging public story of ‘women’s surfing today.’ As has so often been the case in women’s history recovery projects, biography in surf culture functions as a ‘first wave’ genre that documents the fact of women’s presence in what otherwise are regarded as masculine cultural geographies” (94).

All the books also invariably mention another pivotal surfer girl film, Blue Crush, which came out in 2002, was loosely based on a Susan Orlean magazine article, and speaks to the long-tail potential of telling these stories. The celluloid version presented a physically strong, financially strapped girl with the potential to turn pro if she can just get her sister (whom she is largely raising on her own) off to school on time, scrap together enough gas money, overcome her fears related to a past near-drowning, and train for the upcoming world-class surf contest. Confession: I loved the movie when it came out, and it’s nice to know it wasn’t from guilty pleasure as much from the energizing novelty of the premise. Its “cinema of girl power” (Comer 99) spoke to an image now in the culture: that of the female professional athlete across sports. “The need for a defiant girl attitude, indeed, why girl power has proven so useful to young women since the early 1990s” (100) is depicted throughout the film; nothing “–idgit” going on here.

Moore adds to this conversation, saying the film has “possibly done more around the world to encourage girls to surf than any single professional women” (187). He spoke to one woman in Japan who credits the film as the reason why her country boasts a higher female surfer head-count proportionally than any other in the world (303). Interesting, Japan also sports “slightly insane-seeming surf magazines,” packed with fashion, gear, tutorials, etc. Comer notes a similar rise, but sharp fall, in girl-themed surf publications in the States. The seemingly positive upsurge created by Blue Crush and its focus on healthy body image and competitive camaraderie, didn’t last. In recent years, “images of girls have gotten younger, more sexualized, and less sporty. And the string of U.S women’s surf magazine that came to the fore to produce alternative surf stories and visual cultures have, one by one, been forced out of business” (190) thanks to bigger business. (Nevermind that the economy was due to crash.)

But it’s not just the girls who feel a void in the media when it comes to alternative options. As Warshaw told me, “Very little of what’s in the magazine seems to have much to do with surfing as I do it these days. But it sure meant a lot to me when I was young. Surf stars, contests, the latest moves, even the ads, I just soaked it all in. I’m 50 years old. Surf magazines, most of them, are for teens and guys in their 20s.”

As I think about audience, not only for this blog but as a beginning surfer myself looking for inspiration, I admit most of what I’ve referenced have been male-centric, sponsored enterprises (ie. Surfline.com, Surfermag.com, etc.) Three of the four books I’ve read have been written by men. Three of them came out just this year, two by male surfer/historians, the third by a female (non-surfing) academic. Is there room for beginning surfers in this recovery project? For the 50-and-over crowd? For all races? Of course, there is. I would be remiss to discuss gender disparities without addressing issues related to racial binaries. “While it is true that surfing today as a world phenomenon is associated with privileged forms of whiteness, it is also true that the subculture’s sympathy for nonwhite spatialities grew from its disaffection from and critique of mid-century U.S. racial formations and from its openness to alternative lifeways. White surfers have usually been in search of much more than perfect waves; they’ve been in pursuit of fundamentally better ways of everyday living, including living more interracial and flexibly gendered lives and with relative compatibility with the nonhuman natural world” (21).

A third film, The Endless Summer, is arguably the most influential surf movie ever made. When it hit the big screen in 1966, it sold out theaters in Kansas just as quickly as it did those on the country’s coasts; the appeal seemed universal. The surfing historians I’ve read have done their due diligence, holding the film accountable for its racist overtones. In part to reset the trends that films like Gidget established in the late ‘50s to mid ‘60s and crowded what had been a semi-rebellious, countercultural, freewheeling lifestyle set by young white men, the narrated film follows two fresh-faced young white men on their global quest for the perfect wave across one, well, endless summer. Credited with paving the way for the incredible expansion of the sport over the 25 years following its release, the film produced “both the initial economy and the foundational structures of feeling that today underwrite surfing as an international public culture of some 6 million participants” (23).

While the film is refreshing in its stress-free humor, lack of violence, and deceptively wholesome depiction of the sport, Daniel Duane calls it like it is when he writes: “the film’s 1960s colonial stupidity is embarrassing: two healthy wealthy Western boys on an unparalleled journey of cultural imperialism—the whole world as their amusing theme park” (Caught Inside 180). Their naïveté is nowhere more pronounced than on their stops in Africa, where their loaded language (“primitive,” “taboo,” “jungle”) invades zones with unabashed dominance. But the novelty of two men approaching a beach in a local fishing village and giving impromptu surf lessons to Senegalese children points a lens to a time before the modern expansion of the sport, when the foreign part of the equation was unequivocally the wooden boards and their white riders.

To echo a question Comer poses, the surfing pool offers diverse potential for storytelling: “Who are these several million travelers? They are most likely to come from places with very developed water cultures: 2 million each from the United States (especially California) and Australia, 1 million from Brazil, 750,000 from Japan, and sizeable groups from New Zealand (100,000), France (80,000), South Africa (50,000), the United Kingdom and Mexico (30,000) each. The surf spots they seek are often elsewhere—Bali, for example, has tens of thousands of annual surf visitors but only about 1,000 native surfers” (24).

My attempt as a beginner, as a female, is to carve out a little of this potential space. After all, it’s 2010. Warshaw says to my inquiry if he has any varying advice for girls vs. boys entering the sport: “I don’t think there’s really any difference between being a boy beginner vs. a girl beginner. Ten or 20 years ago, yes; girls had a harder time because there were so few in the water. No longer.” But when I start talking to the girl surfers I know, the perspective differs.

As Shay Belisle, who grew up on Maui, puts it, “I would say that the number of girls in the water is pretty minimal. Some days when the waves are overhead I’m often the only female in the water. The hard part about being a girl is that there are so many amazing surfers and if you’re not aggressive, it can be really hard to catch waves. The good thing about being a girl is that you can get away with a lot more. I’ve been yelled at for dropping in on someone or not getting out of the way but I’ve seen guys beat each other up and I’m pretty sure they would never do that to a girl.” So, like any discrepancy, I suppose it can work both ways.

One woman dedicated to creating and instilling a positive experience for girls coming into the sport is Dustin Ashley Tester, founder of Maui Surfer Girls (MSG), a camp designed specifically to teach adolescent girls how to surf with a go-girl attitude. “To accomplish that, I feel that you have to create a safe container for them to shine,” Tester says of the camp’s mission to empower young girls. “An all female setting can be nurturing and encouraging when they’re facing their fears and insecurities in the ocean.” Growing up on Maui, Tester had to build her confidence as one of the only girls in the water. A competitive skim boarder, a sport she calls “totally dominated by guys,” she was often the only girl in the heats well into the ‘90s, both in Hawaii and in Santa Cruz, where she was sponsored at the time.

But times are changing. “I have seen such an emergence of female surfers in the last decade. MSG hopefully played a part in that as well as Blue Crush).” (There it is again.) “When I teach daily on Maui’s Westside, I see almost a 50/50 men-to-women ratio in the beginner line-ups.” She does quality that when the swells get big, she and a girlfriend are often the only girls out there. “We still have a ways to go in bigger surf.” As one of the few women to surf Maui’s infamous Jaws big-wave surf break, Tester is a true pioneer. She calls the sensation of reaching such a personal and professional level, “exciting, intimidating, humbling, a mixture of so many emotions that I try to keep at bay when I’m out there.” Understandably conscientious of what the guys would think, she felt she had to prove herself even more than the guys in the lineup. “Jaws is a whole other proving ground.”

With any number of surfing stories to share, Tester is drafting her own written biography, a memoir-in-progress that answers Comer’s call for additional commentary by women. “I’d like to distill my life lessons that I’ve learned through surfing. I think writing is similar to riding a wave, just like life…it involves commitment, perseverance, patience, and a connection to self.”

I think Matt Warshaw would agree. I certainly know I would.

Part VII: Panic in Paradise

Outrigger Canoe Club, Waikiki Beach, Oahu

I promised to retrace all of my past attempts at surfing. The third one kept me out of the water for nearly a year. It also happened to be set in paradise, off Oahu’s Waikiki Beach, the motherland of the sport and the same island that spawned the North Shore and Makaha and Waimea Bay, all legendary surf breaks. As is apparent by now, I am no legend and am not setting out to be.

I was in over my head before we even paddled out, clutching a shorter, slicker board that soon proved easy enough to slip off of, even in flat water. The reef was so vast and the break so shallow, we had to paddle wide and around to get into position. Cheering outrigger canoe teams roared over the waves around us. On the downward slope of each wave, I could make out their colorful oars, hoisted into lines perpendicular to the horizon like a laser sight on the move. Experienced surfers rode right alongside. The waves were louder than I’d ever heard, gaining speed and decibels from a seemingly timeless place as I let one after the next pass.

Then, panic. What the hell was I doing taking on the ocean? Who did I think I was to venture a quarter mile offshore in little more than a rash guard while who knew how much reef stretched beneath us? How easy it would be for to drift with the current, miss a wave, and introduce the sharp live limbs of the reef to my bare skin. I realized how much safer I felt in a wetsuit—a rubbery body armor of protection against the surface areas hidden below.

Ryan reassured, telling me that this was the place, that I owed it to myself to get up and go and enjoy it. I looked back to shore, gauged our distance, and wondered what else might be out there with us. In other words, there was little yielding to the present. Ryan held back to bob in the water with me, and just then a sea turtle crested, a symbol of luck to this island, on the day between our respective thirtieth birthdays as we waded out on borrowed boards. Who doesn’t try for a wave after that?

So, I thought about the turtle and tried. I caught the next wave on my belly and went giddy from the rush, the roar. Okay, turtle, I could do this; I paddled back into a good spot to expect another wave. When I went for it again, I paddled hard, focused on getting my legs from behind to under me until they slipped and missed altogether. They went under water with me, twisting in a warm churning tunnel of bubbles and gray blue. I had no sense of direction until my board popped up and, my ankle leashed, I did too. I broke the surface coughing, but I hadn’t felt any reef, I hadn’t had to hold my breath for too long, and Ryan was there when I looked for him. It was the worst that would likely happen, he said. And I had made it.

But it was enough for me to know the answer to my earlier question. I didn’t have the right to take on the ocean like this, not until I did know what the hell I was doing. I paddled in, felt the energy deficit, looked out to see where I had just been, and realized that had been a lucky turtle after all. I was back on the hot sand, Ryan was somewhere out there in the lineup, both of us happy for the moment and the medium at hand.

This project is a continued attempt to figure out what the hell I am doing when I wade into the ocean, such a vast body that only becomes daunting because of my relationship to it and my attempt to enter its own lineup of life and power. It exists in its natural state—always. It doesn’t panic or hem or haw or consciously commit. So when I don’t panic or hem or haw, no wonder things feel more natural. It seems to be a lesson I can use out of the water as much as in.

Part VI: How Chile Fits Into All This

This is Santiago.

As I’ll be moving to Chile next year, I’m fascinated to learn that some believe surfing got its official start just north, in Peru, despite the sport’s long-held Polynesian origins. As Michael Scott Moore writes in Sweetness and Blood, “Evidence of Peruvian surf boats now called caballitos goes back some three thousand years” (237). These reed canoes were shaped with an upward sloping front end, just like the nose of a surfboard, in order to clear the onslaught of a coming wave. Peruvian fisherman could even stand up on these and use an oar to steer, much like SUPing today. The defining difference seems to lie between whether or not the caballitos were used recreationally or just commercially for fishing or transporting goods in the anchovy and sardine-rich waters off an otherwise sparse, hostile coastline (Warshaw 19). Hawaii, it seems, has the monopoly on the sport’s recreational roots. The revision does not necessarily diminish the significance of the sport’s influence by and evolution alongside Hawaiian culture, for it was in Hawaii that it become “a universal recreation practiced by men as well as women, peasants as well as kings” (Moore 5).

In The History of Surfing, Matt Warshaw shares an anecdote from his days at Surfer in the late ’80s and early ’90s, over two decades before Moore wrote on the subject. A contributing writer from Lima, Felipe Pomar, came into the office to tell the editors all about the caballito and propose to revise the history of the sport with an exposé on wave-riders in ancient Peru. In April 1988, “Surfing in 1,000 B.C.” hit the stands and receded without, well, making many waves of its own. Warshaw credits the subdued reception to a protective reflex on the part of the surfing community. He asserts: “Good luck trying to sell the idea that reed-boat-straddling Peruvians trolling for anchovy off the grim brown coast of Peru were the real first wave-riders. ‘Ours has always been a culture of storytellers, not historians,’ a surf journalist wrote in 2005. In other words, surfers themselves prefer to shape, design, and choose their collective past. And when it comes down to Hawaii or Peru, the tropics or the desert, the Sport of Kings or the Sport of Fisherman—well, that’s hardly a choice at all” (22).

The last century alone is arguably the most influential of the sport’s history, with its spread across nations and genders. For instance, Moore makes off-beat observations of surfing in Indonesia, Germany, Morocco, the United Kingdom, Israel and the Gaza Strip, Cuba, and Japan. For Latin America alone, Moore notes that the gospel, as it were, took over Argentina in 1963, Brazil in 1939, and in the ’60s in Chile. (Interesting, this is one of few references to Chile I’ve come across in my reading.) Warshaw surfed there 15 years ago, but told me “the better experience is to be had farther south—incredible left-hand sand-bottom breaks, no crowds, no flat spells. Possibly the most consistent wave-region in the world. I’ve also surfed Peru and Brazil; Peru is much better, but nothing I’d go back for.” And Peru was recently in the news, taking top honors on its hometown waves by winning the Billabong ISA World Surfing Games.

Certainly, Surfline covers the region, and Woodshed Films’ 180° South focuses on Chilean and Argentinean Patagonia. In the film, surfer (and Danville, CA native) Jeff Johnson retraces the journey of his idols: Yvon Choinard, the founder of Patagonia Clothing, and Doug Tompkins, the founder of The North Face, respectively two of the most successful sport outfitting operations in the world. Long before, they were blacksmiths from Ventura, California who fashioned their own climbing gear and stopped to surf whenever the conditions called. They documented their drive across a dirt highway through Mexico to Chile, where they scaled Mount Fitz Roy in Patagonia, Argentina. For his own journey toward the same goal, Johnson sets out on a 54-foot cutter, captained by a friend from Patagonia, who will be sailing the ship from Seattle back to its native harbor.

As any good journey can, Johnson gets waylaid in Rapa Nui (Easter Island) after the mast of the boat snaps. As it happens, he meets the island’s first female surfer out in the waves 2,300 miles from Chile, making Rapa Nui the most remote body of land in the world. By the time Johnson arrives in Patagonia to meet up with Yvon and Doug (who has spent nearly two decades buying up some two million acres of land to preserve as the future Patagonia National Park and give back to Chile), the snow has melted, making the climbing conditions more treacherous. But this becomes another lesson of the journey, as do conversations with Ramon Navarro, a Chilean world-class surfer whose father has made his living off of and by respecting the sea. Over the years, commercialized fishing has drastically depleted the quantity of fish, while pulp mills along the Chilean coast have contaminated the country’s waterways and the dams of Spanish energy companies have depleted those waterways altogether.

The direct message of the film is certainly about the importance of conservation, but the implicit takeaway has to do with the significance of the quest and the resulting potential for self-transformation. “Every time I travel, I learn something new and get to be a better person,” Choinard says at one point. “The best journeys answer questions that in the beginning you didn’t even think to ask.”

This surf project is a concentrated part of a journey I aim for this blog to continue to document. By learning more about my coastline here in California, I hope to transfer that knowledge to any stretch of ocean I have the chance to observe in the future. Reading the ocean becomes a way to know better where I may stand in relation to it, a way to ground myself on the wet margins of a foreign land. In linking surfing with travel, Warshaw puts things in terms of places he’d be willing to go back for; mostly, he is content for his adventures “to be small—just a couple of hours, at my local break.”

All the while, I’m conscious of the act of writing as my third point of connection. After all, I’m choosing to put down words in a medium that by nature can shift and change, that can be inherently “surfed.” Krista Comer uses this metaphor not only for a user’s relationship to the Internet, but also for larger statements about global design. She writes, “to ‘surf’ the Web or the new world order is to be in the midst of an argument, an ideological project, about the ethics, gender, and regional Hawaiian and Californian borderlands style of globalization” (Surfer Girls 12-13). For Warshaw, the majority of his career has seen his writing and surfing routines “joined at the hip. That is, I’d surf whenever it was worth surfing, and write the rest of the time. With breaks for meals and sleeping. Very simple.”

Perhaps this project stems from an overall effort to simplify, to breakdown yet link the experiences I translate into language. So, I will continue to draw connections between traveling, writing, and a pursuit like surfing that requires a fluency, currency, and camaraderie of its own…more on that next time.

Part V: Getting (Back) Up

Thanks to Club Ed

It was all meant to be. After three rescheduled lessons in as many weeks, after storm-induced 10-12 foot swells earlier in the week, Ed was right: Things settled down. Not only that. The temperature reached well into the 80s, and a dear friend turned out to be free to join me on a Thursday adventure in search of surf.

The first item on the agenda called for checking out Paradise Surf Shop, which receives the better part of a chapter in Krista Comer’s Surfer Girls. Four female friends keen to give a boost to the women’s surfing community opened the shop in 1997, making it “the only girl-focused Northern California venture in existence” (167). Santa Cruz, which Comer points out as having “more women in the water than any other place in the world (15-20 percent)” (169), welcomed the enterprise, which also sponsored surf contests and supported environmental activism. Comer observed in her book, published just this year, that the recession had hit the shop hard, forcing the owners to look for a buyer. Indeed, by the time I got down there yesterday, Paradise Surf Shop was gone for good. Asking around, I found out it closed its doors two months ago, another small business that couldn’t make it until things settled down.

But the missed opportunity didn’t stand a chance against the perfection of the day. We wended our way over to the Santa Cruz Surfing Museum, a brick lighthouse no larger than a San Francisco bedroom, but had to pause with nearly every step to take in the 5-7 foot waves, the cresting surfers (easily 100) and the warmth of the sun, unhampered by much more than a light breeze. Summer in November? We took it. After a short lap through the Museum’s century of Santa Cruz surfing, we joined the Club Ed group lesson down at Cowell’s Beach.

After balancing the bright yellow, 10-foot foam boards on our heads for a walk across the sand, we lined them up, noses toward the surf, and practiced two techniques for standing up: the typical pop-up that relies on upper body strength and the quick positioning of your left foot forward (if you’re regular footed) and right foot back, into a low stance that stabilizes your center of gravity (goofy-footed surfers have their right foot forward). You can also sit up on a bended right knee, slide your left foot forward, and push off the board with your right foot. The second option is especially helpful if you’re running low on energy and need to give your arms a break.

Then it was time to finally paddle out and give this all a shot. The instructors, John and Emily, couldn’t have been more encouraging, in possession of a calm that quelled my own rising nerves merely by proximity. We glided over toward the small, pristine sets ideal for beginning surfers. We learned how to tip our board to ride over a breaking wave; how to sit back and turn by egg-beating our feet until we faced the waves. (You don’t want to get caught off guard by an incoming set.) Their teaching philosophy for catching a wave was as straightforward as it gets: “Paddle over here to me. Turn around. Now go. Paddle, paddle, paddle!” They held the tail of the board, lined us up, and gave a firm push. The extra velocity added to that generated by my own paddling just enough to feel the rush of the wave and to sense when it was time to pop upright.

The first time, I stood straight up, my feet parallel, as if I had been told to stand and wave hello to everyone on shore. No harm, no foul. I tried again. That second wave turned out to be one of my best rides all day, a long one right back within yards of shore. A hop off, a holler, unadulterated fun. I had to shout to my friend on the beach: “Did you see that?!” unaware of who might hear or who might care. It didn’t matter. All my preparation and patience was paying off in that exact moment and I couldn’t help but acknowledge so out loud. We cheered each other, too, with each ride, no matter how long. We clapped and bellowed with such genuine support for the efforts of virtual strangers. Each wave is a commitment, after all. Even with that extra nudge, you have to focus, decide you’re ready to go, and contribute to the direction of the board toward shore.

I paddled back out to our little group, all outfitted in bright blue shirts that announced our surf school much like those triangular placards crowned on driving school vehicles that warn: Stand back! Beginner on the road! The driving analogy is apt as the rules of the waves are similar to those of the road. The incoming surfer has the right of way; you don’t cut in front of multiple lanes of traffic; etc. Much is common sense, but you’re also learning to get up before you can advance to steering techniques. Cowell’s can be packed with surfers of all levels. If you do see a surfer coming unavoidably across your path, the etiquette calls for you to slide off your board and flip it over on top of you like a temporary, underwater shelter until the wave and its surfer pass.

After a few more rides, my smile was permanent, as was a healthy dose of adrenaline—we were still all those yards out and above an unseen ocean floor, its depth unmeasured. But these waves were soft, not the heavy, unforgiving terrain of Ocean Beach. The exertion was humbling to say the least; my arms started to wither, my triceps loudly announcing themselves (as they still are today). I caught my breath staring out at the lineups another quarter mile offshore and around the point that jets out into the Pacific, produces these consistent breaks, and helps make Cowell’s “one of the best places to surf in the world,” according to John (Surfer’s July 2009 issue also ranked Santa Cruz the top surf town in the U.S.).

You can learn a thing or two wading out, waiting for that next set, hypnotized by the motion of the water relative to the horizon. As it turned out, for instance, John used to live in the Outer Sunset, too, as in at Ocean Beach, as in on the very same block where I live now, as in the apartment building right next door. So I also found a one-time neighbor out in that water. He pushed me into the next wave and I caught my second long ride of the day.

After an hour and a few more short rides, I was ready to take the next wave all the way in, and my lesson partners were another wave or two behind me. We panted on the shore, the exertion of our bodies all the more of a reward for the journey. One woman was celebrating her 40th birthday and had ridden her very first wave all the way in; talk about a way to celebrate. When I rested out that earlier set, I chatted with a local woman in her late 40s to early 50s with long graying blonde hair loose and damp down her wetsuitted back. When I asked, she said she has been surfing for the last five years. I loved that we were three women who started a little later in life. And while I may not get out there again all that soon or with enough regularity to noticeably improve, I was content with the day, the fatigue its own current in my body, the promise of crispy chicken tacos and a cold beer with a good friend.

On the drive home, I also learned that I was taking her home on Highway One for the first time since a devastating car accident two years and a few months ago. On that day she was also leaving a perfect afternoon in Santa Cruz, which I hadn’t realized until yesterday. She hadn’t been able to bring herself to return, much less to take the One, until my last-minute offer of a day to follow the sun out to the beach. I held her hand as we passed the landmark that let us know it had happened there, right on the asphalt disappearing beneath us. We spent the next 30 minutes watching the most magical sunset I believe I’ve ever seen on a day that would have been, of all days, her twelfth anniversary with the partner lost that day. To our left, a long swash of bluish purple cut like a promise through a canvas of pink and orange. After three attempts to make this trip, after five real rides on a surfboard, after an entire day of hypnotic views, she made the bravest journey of all.

Part IV: No Lesson To Learn

Andy Irons died today. The three-time world champion was only 32, had a baby on the way, and it’s being reported that he passed away from Dengue Fever, although that’s not yet definitive and a toxicology report awaits. He was exposed in Puerto Rico and was too sick to compete at the Rip Curl Pro Search Puerto Rico currently underway. He passed in a Texas hotel room on his way home to Kauai. The Association of Surfing Professionals (ASP) CEO Brodie Carr said: “The surfers today lost a brother. We all lost one of our fellow tribesmen and one of our family we’ve been traveling with for many years, we lost a world champion; we lost a friend.” There is no consolation in a situation like this; no lesson one wants to learn.

During this project, I have been thinking about the connection between surfing and travel. Today, a professional surfer has sponsored access to some of the most beautiful coastlines in the world: Hawaii, South Africa, Australia, California, Mexico. The list goes on and on. But the connection between surf and exploration goes back hundreds of years. When Daniel Duane ran a search for “surfing” at UC Santa Cruz’s library, he didn’t come up with much. But once he meandered into the “travel/exploration” section, he was “delighted to discover that Captain James Cook…sensed in the eighteenth century something of surfing’s mystery. At anchor in Tahiti, his crew resting ashore, Cook made an entry in his diary one day and gave wave riding its first inscription in a European tongue. Noticing, as he put it, that Tahitians weren’t ‘strangers to the soothing effects produced by particular sorts of motion’—meaning surfing—‘which in some cases seem to allay any perturbation of mind with as much success as music’ (Duane, Caught Inside 17). Surfers are explorers too, traveling the world in pursuit of the perfect wave they inherently can never surf twice.

Travel terminology is often incorporated into discussions of the sport’s spread around the world. Riding Giants documents Californian “migrations” to Hawaii, first in 1953 to Micaha, Oahu, which became known as the first access point to big-wave surfing, and five years later with the discovery of the heavy swell of the island’s Waimea Bay. Matt Warshaw, in his introduction to The History of Surfing, acts at once as surfer/historian/explorer when “tracing and understanding the jagged fault line between surf culture and culture at large… The nonsurfing world has shaped and formed the sport more deeply than surfers care to admit. Surf culture, in turn, has traveled and settled over mountains, plans, and cities, from coast to coast, nation to nation. Watching these two forces react to each other, for me, never gets dull: the circling and grinding and ignoring and ridiculing—and, these days, more often than not, collaborating” (11).

In Surfer Girls, Krista Comer discusses “surfaris,” as well as the “diasporic public culture” (12) of surfing both geographically and for its contribution to globalization, as the sport has “set people, money, goods, and ideas into motion in ways that created new forms of identity, sociality, commerce, and politics” (13). She also discusses how surf culture has given way to the idea of the “translocal,” who moves through, links, and popularizes surf breaks the world over. Comer synthesizes these ideas when she hypothetically asks: “Are surfers expatriates, nomads, tourist, venture capitalists or global citizens?” (24). Where my women’s travel writing class has been discussing the tourist vs. traveler dichotomy, I can’t help but appreciate how truly varied the surfer’s global/local identity can be. Comer distills her observation and further articulates the language of discovery when she writes: “But most often surfers travel the world today as subcultural workers according to a logic resembling global citizenship. Surfing gives citizenship geographical dimension (“homelands” are surf breaks), political coherence (global green politics as a shared philosophy), and a ready-made group of generally like-minded citizen-friends” (25).

As with any global transit, surfing as travel brings its own vulnerabilities to bear, from exposure to infectious disease to the risk of being held under too long by a relentless set of waves to literally inserting oneself into the marine food chain with every paddle out. (There was a fatal shark attack in Santa Barbara just last week.) Perhaps surfing stills the mind because the risks are inherent to being able to access the freedom, the play, the present. It’s balanced in that way.

But balance is little comfort. My heart goes out to Andy Irons’ family and his fellow surfers.