Pacific Passages: An Anthology of Surf Writing

Part V: Surfing Today

Part V Surfing Today [This page intentionally left blank.] th e s i g n i f i c a n t i m p a c t o f t e c h n o l o g y on surfing over the past fifteen years—represented here by Bruce Jenkins’s profile of Laird Hamilton and tow-in surfing—has fundamentally changed the practice and perception of surfing. Continued innovations in surfboard building materials, wave forecasting, portable wave machines, and the building of artificial reefs promise not only to redefine the sport but to make surfing accessible to more people than ever before. The twentieth-century revival of surfing opened with Jack London championing an individualist , man-versus-nature ethos. The century closed with an equally hypermasculinized Laird Hamilton, a lightning-rod figure who, along with a small group of dedicated big-wave riders, helped expand surfing into a team sport complete with personal watercraft, foot straps, and tow-in ropes. The passing of Mickey Dora in 2002 closed a chapter on perhaps the most captivating figure in surf culture of the latter half of the twentieth century. Beyond conveying the importance Dora holds for surfers who came of age in the 1950s and 1960s, Steve Pezman’s “The Cat’s Ninth Life” demonstrates the sustained role surfing plays in the lives of surfers now in their sixties. When not actually riding waves, Pezman and his surf companions—Mickey Muñoz and Yvon Chouinard (both of whom make an appearance in Bob Shacochis’s “Return of the Prodigal Surfer” in Part VI)—are picking up surfboards, scouting the surf, or involved in any number of ancillary projects that revolve around riding waves, from building boards and selling apparel to publishing magazines and books. A whole generation—now expanding to several generations—may not spend as much time in the waves as formerly, yet surfing remains a compelling force in their lives. Susan Orlean’s profile of teenage surfer girls on Maui captures one of the most important shifts in contemporary surfing: the enormous movement of women into the sport that began in the 1990s. Aided by surfing today | 227 user-friendly modern longboards and fueled by apparel-giant Quiksilver’s financial resources (the women’s fashion line Roxy was launched in 1990), the women’s movement produced its own bona fide star in Lisa Anderson (world champion from 1994 to 1997) and its own surf magazine (Wahine, founded in 1994). More women surf now than ever before (comprising an estimated 15 to 20 percent of the surf population worldwide), creating a critical shift in both the practice and image of surfing as daughters, mothers , and grandmothers rejoin men in the line-up. Surf journalist Steve Barilotti offers a powerful counterpoint to the exuberant narratives penned by Kevin Naughton and Craig Peterson during the early years of surf travel in the 1970s. A popular conception during that era was the non-depletive nature of riding waves: “The surfer leaves at the end of the day, and there’s no trace.”1 Barilotti’s visit to Bali shows the traces that three decades of surfers have in fact left behind in their pursuit of riding the perfect wave. Marketed worldwide for its health aspects and sex appeal, surfing does not slip unscathed through the unsavory sex-trade industry that afflicts many ports of call on the exotic-wave circuit. Barilotti also implicitly ruminates over his own responsibility as a traveling reporter for Surfer magazine, one whose job it is to spotlight surf outposts around the globe only to watch the local cultures steadily degrade under the onslaught of eager, barrel-eyed surfers, the twenty-first-century messengers of globalism. This part of the book concludes with a poignant article by Matt Warshaw on aging big-wave surfer Fred Van Dyke. Set in the context of how surfing priorities have shifted in the author’s own life, Warshaw chronicles Van Dyke as an extreme example of a phenomenon that nevertheless touches upon all aging surfers: the moment when their hard-core dedication—so crucial to the image surfers have of themselves—begins to wane. 228 | part v ...