The Great Floodgates of the Wonderworld (7 page)

“Broseph,” he says. “You finally caught one.”

“Yeah, it felt awesome.”

“Huh,” he says, smirking.

“What?”

“Your stance was so wide, I thought you were about to take a shit or something.”

“Oh,” I say, deflated by the realization that my stance had been about equal to a snowboarder’s circa 1993—a wide-legged, butt-out style commonly known in surfing and skateboarding as
stinkbug
.

“But other than that,” Kyle says, “you looked pretty good.”

“Yeah?”

“Sure. But if I were you, I’d stick to skateboarding.”

That afternoon we barbecue with Kyle’s future in-laws, an amiable older couple who’d grown up on neighboring farms in rural Poland. They cook us traditional Polish food, grilled kielbasa and mashed potatoes and sautéed spinach, and we all eat together on the back porch in the late-day light, watching Kyle’s little dog chase rosy-headed finches around in the big backyard, the smell of citronella candles mingling with the salt tang of the ocean. Ravenous after hours of physical exertion in the sea, I put down two or three kielbasas, a giant helping of mashed potatoes, and a couple imported Polish beers. For dessert Kyle and I polish off an entire apple strudel. It’s the most relaxed I’ve felt since moving to the city a year earlier, and I’m discovering it’s not just the surfing I love—regardless of what a hopeless kook I am—but also the blissed-out feeling it gives me, this slow, quiet-minded serenity that eludes me in Brooklyn. I don’t know what to name it at the time, but I’m in the early stages of what my roommates will soon come to refer to, ironically, as “stoke stroke,” a nearly insatiable obsession with surfing and the ocean.

A
s with any noble pursuit, debate exists over the true historical origins of surfing. Most claim that the earliest form of surf riding—most likely bodysurfing, or riding in primitive canoes—originated in Polynesia, thousands of years ago. Some Peruvians claim that ancient South American fishermen recreated on “surf planks” as far back as 2000 BCE. The theory is that these planks originally served as transport between the shore and fishing boats and vice versa, and one day some sure-footed fisherman stood up on his plank, thus transforming his commute into sport. My personal theory is that surfing, like the erection of pyramids in places as disparate as ancient Egypt and pre-Columbian South America, may have originated simultaneously and synchronistically in different parts of the world. But there’s something disingenuous about even this idea, very similar to the notion—still popular in pockets of Brooklyn—that Italian-born Christopher Columbus discovered America. The true originators of surfing are creatures like the dolphin, known by surfers around the world to actually catch waves and ride them with what can only be described as bliss, and that have been doing so for millions of years, since well before the dawn of humankind.

Still, the topic at hand is human surfing, meaning surfing on boards, and the most common theory claims that the pursuit developed in the South Seas. Surfing migrated from Polynesia to Indonesia, the Marquesas, Tahiti, and eventually Hawaii. Hawaii is the undisputed wellspring of modern surfing, the place where it became known as the Sport of Kings. Hawaiians learned to ride standing up well over a thousand years ago. Hawaiian kings surfed to display their physical prowess; they rode special boards called
olo
. Since
olo
boards were fashioned from solid balsa or a tree called the
williwilli
, and often reached eighteen to twenty-five feet in length, it took three or more underlings to launch from shore. While the kings postured on their giant logs, the commoners rode much shorter boards, known as
alaia
. As Nat Young says in his
History of Surfing
, the commoners often know best, as anything above ten feet is unwieldy, while the
alaia
boards were much more maneuverable.

In Hawaii, the sea was and is believed to have its own persona, its own distinct emotions. The ancient Hawaiians used kahunas to pray for good surf. The kahunas performed ritual dances and chants, hoping to please the sea and conjure up good waves. Surfing was an integral part of Hawaiian spiritual life; the act of surfing was imbued with an ecstatic, even supernatural quality. When the waves were up, female surfers stripped off their clothes and ran into the ocean; for them surfing was a form of baptism—a way to wash away ills, to be renewed and connected to life through the infinite sea. With so many naked bodies in the undulating ocean, surfing was also integral to the act of courtship, which often took place right out in the lineup.

But like any human activity, surfing wasn’t free from politics. Only royalty had access to certain beaches and better-crafted surfboards. Members of the elite class also used surfing as a form of gambling, in which reputations, money, and even marriages were at stake.

The arrival of the British explorer Captain Cook in Hawaii in 1778 bore ill portents for the culture of surfing. Cook himself was impressed with surfing and wrote eloquently about it in his journals. But his written descriptions of naked “heathens” frolicking in the surf caught the attention of European missionaries, who subsequently flocked to Hawaii to “redeem” the natives. These missionaries were deeply offended by Hawaiians’ placement of spiritual significance on an activity involving nudity. Countless hours of unfettered enjoyment in the ocean was also an affront to the Protestant work ethic. As a result, surfing was actually banned in Hawaii for nearly a century. On the heels of maltreatment and heavy taxation by their native rulers, the dismantling of native culture was a devastating blow for the Hawaiians, and these life-sustaining activities went almost completely dormant. Fortunately, even as the native population dwindled, a few dissidents kept surfing alive, a fact proven by documentarians like Mark Twain, who wrote about the act in the late 1860s.

Melville also has a place in the written history of surfing and the culture of the South Seas and Hawaii. In his book
Typee
, he narrates his desertion of a whaling ship and the months he spent in hiding with the Polynesian Typee tribe. Melville was always an anticolonialist at heart; he despised Christian missionaries and their desire to “snivilize” native peoples. He revered the Typees’ laid-back lifestyle, their constant napping, their lack of taboos, the way they lived in balance with nature, free from modern life’s preoccupations and traps. But he never completely shed certain Western biases: he eventually fled the Typees for fear of being cannibalized. On his way back to the States in 1843, he stopped off in Hawaii. If Melville witnessed any surfing in Hawaii he fails to mention it in
Typee
, as he does in his 1849 book
Mardi
, where he gives an impassioned account of surf-riding in Tahiti: “An expert swimmer shifts his position on his plank; now half striding it; and anon, like a rider in the ring, poising himself upright in the scud, coming on like a man in the air. At last, all is lost in scud and vapor, as the overgrown billow bursts like a bomb.”

It makes sense that Melville witnessed no surfing in Hawaii, as he arrived just three years after the first missionaries’ arrival, on the heels of Captain Cook. The influence of the Western traders and their booze and firearms had already weakened traditional religion and customs; the missionaries capitalized on this. They were apparently enabled by Kamehameha III, who ruled from 1825 to 1854, and whom Melville criticized for handing over his kingdom to his American adviser and minister G. P. Judd, in what many consider America’s first conquest in a long line of imperial actions.

Melville was very much on the side of the natives—making him pro-surfing by default; his open defiance of the missionaries apparently raised Judd’s hackles. Fearing he might be discovered as a deserter from whaling ships like the
Acushnet
and the
Lucy-Ann
, Melville left his job as a bookkeeper and fled the islands.

I
n August, my roommates and I throw a small party at Rockaway Beach, in Queens, to celebrate my birthday. Asa brings a couple surfboards; some other partygoers invite their friend Dawn, whom I meet for the first time. Three solid weekends of paddling out on Long Island pay off, as I catch ride after ride on Asa’s nine-six longboard. Totally hooked, I join Dawn on a walk to the local surf shop to buy some wax and end up leaving with a brand-new board and a $600 hole in my wallet. Later that evening, Asa, Dawn, and I all catch a wave together, ride it in toward shore, where the sun’s setting over the city instead of the sea—a fact of East Coast life that always leaves me disoriented. But the skies are beautiful nonetheless, all tagged up with looping swirls of chemical pastels. From that moment on, Rockaway becomes my new stomping ground, Asa and Dawn my constant surfing companions.

Whereas Wiborgs and other Long Island beaches are semipristine retreats from the world, Rockaway is arguably the most urbanized beach in the country. Originally a playground for Manhattan’s elite, it had a private train line, lavish amusement parks, and opulent mansions. But the cruel economic tides of the late 1960s and the 1970s swept the poor into the city’s increasingly brackish outer boroughs. Several dozen blocky, utilitarian housing projects sprung up on Rockaway’s shores, like a bulky, crumbling seawall spanning sixty city blocks. To this day, parts of Rockaway are considered among New York’s worst neighbor hoods. Among those willing to surf Rockaway, rumors persist of burglarized cars, muggings, surfers who tape knives to the bottom of their boards.

Yet, like so many areas of Brooklyn and Queens, Rockaway is a neighborhood in flux. Like the classic Ramones song and the Rockaway reference in
Moby-Dick
, the Rockaway I discover is a destination worthy of hitchhiking or the squandering of a day’s wages. Fronted by a big plaster and tile sculpture of a cartoonish gray whale, a wide, wood-planked boardwalk skirts the coastline. The beach itself is fairly narrow even at low tide, but covered in warm, inviting sand, of a grain similar to that found in Florida or California, though more likely littered with chunks of concrete and brick, used syringes, spent .22 shell casings.

Off on the glimmering, gun-metal horizon sit ubiquitous cargo ships and oil tankers; closer to shore the sea is partitioned by a series of rocky human-made jetties—the space in between bulwarks on Ninetieth Street having just two years before been designated by the city of New York as an official surfing beach. On any given summer day, this narrow break teems with surfers of all stripes: Puerto Rican guys on shortboards, crusty and toothless old-school rippers in crash helmets, Wall Street players on $3,000 custom Takayama longboards, other tattooed skateboarders like me seeking shelter from the heat, NYU coeds on rented soft-tops, talented local kids with Afros, Japanese scenesters with expensive haircuts, and local thirty somethings who look like edgier, scarredup versions of Patagonia surf catalog models. There are too many people battling for limited resources, as there are everywhere else in the city, but even so the Rockaway vibe is generally mellow and accommodating to beginners. Everyone’s just happy to be out of the city, floating in cool salt water that’s balm after a week of sultry, concrete heat. The only reminders that we live in New York City are the housing projects and the clanking of the elevated A train in the distance.

I
increasingly gravitate to the beach, spending long afternoons out at Rockaway, or weekends camping in Kyle’s backyard, rising at dawn to check the waves. In the city I’m plagued by worry and regrets, credit card bills, loneliness, but these all fall away out in the water at Rockaway, where, at dusk, schools of tiny fish flash beneath the surface, then make what seem to me miraculous leaps above the water, tens of hundreds of them, arcing over the rippled gray glaze of the Atlantic before splashing back in like silver rain. Out here in the ocean, on my surfboard, I’m totally in the moment, out of my head and in my body—
meditation and water are wedded for ever
.

My new aquaphiliac addiction spreads around my household. Not long after I buy my surfboard, Natalie and Paul pick up their own. They even buy a used Volvo wagon, purchased from an ex-Californian and dubbed the Surfmobile, with room for boards in the back and a little plastic hula girl on a surfboard mounted to the dash.