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chapter 57 “The Maui Surfer Girls” (2002) Susan Orlean Susan Orlean, an author and staff writer for the New Yorker, provides an updated version of “The Life” that Tom Wolfe first described in his articles on The Pump House Gang (1966). Bunking with teenage surfer girls on Maui, Orlean draws out “the moment,” a state of pure surfing adolescence, as she writes, that is as utopian as it is ephemeral: a life revolving around the beach and dreams of surf-stardom that, like the life of Wolfe’s La Jolla teenagers, ends all too quickly in the realities of adulthood. Part of today’s realities for female surfers that Orlean touches upon include inequalities in everything from sponsorship to competitive respect. Another sign of the times for surfing that Orlean records is the appearance of surf moms and surf dads. Increased mainstreaming of the sport has drawn surfing into the realm of suburban soccer carpools, with parents moving groups of kids from one contest to the next in pursuit of trophies and future stardom. t h e m a u i s u r f e r g i r l s l o v e o n e another’s hair. It is awesome hair, long and bleached by the sun, and it falls over their shoulders straight, like water, or in squiggles, like seaweed, or in waves. They are forever playing with it—yanking it up into ponytails, or twisting handfuls and securing them with chopsticks or pencils, or dividing it as carefully as you would divide a pile of coins and then weaving it into tight, yellow plaits. Not long ago I was on the beach in Maui watching the surfer girls surf, and when they came out of the water they sat in a row facing the ocean, and each girl took the hair of the girl in front of her and combed it with her fingers and crisscrossed it into braids. The Maui surfer girls even love the kind of hair that I dreaded when I was their age, fourteen or so—they love wild, knotty, bright hair, as big and stiff as carpet, the most un-straight, un-sleek, un-ordinary hair you could imagine, and they can love it, I suppose, because when you are young and on top of the world you can love anything you want, and just the fact that you love it makes 247 it cool and fabulous. A Maui surfer girl named Gloria Madden has that kind of hair—thick red corkscrews striped orange and silver from the sun, hair that if you weren’t beautiful and fearless you’d consider an affliction that you would try to iron flat or stuff under a hat. One afternoon I was driving two of the girls to Blockbuster Video in Kahului. It was the day before a surfing competition, and the girls were going to spend the night at their coach’s house up the coast so they’d be ready for the contest at dawn. On contest nights, they fill their time by eating a lot of food and watching hours of surf videos, but on this particular occasion they decided they needed to rent a movie, too, in case they found themselves with ten or twenty seconds of unoccupied time. On our way to the video store, the girls told me they admired my rental car and said that they thought rental cars totally ripped and that they each wanted to get one. My car, which until then I had sort of hated, suddenly took on a glow. I asked what else they would have if they could have anything in the world. They thought for a moment, and then the girl in the backseat said, “A moped and thousands of new clothes. You know, stuff like thousands of bathing suits and thousands of new board shorts.” “I’d want a Baby-G watch and new flip-flops, and one of those cool sports bras like the one Iris just got,” the other said. She was in the front passenger seat, barefoot, sand caked, twirling her hair into a French knot. It was a half-cloudy day with weird light that made the green Hawaiian hills look black and the ocean look like zinc. It was also, in fact, a school day, but these were the luckiest of all the surfer girls because they are home-schooled so that they can surf any time at all. The girl...

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