West of Jesus, page 6
I was riding a shortboard, my first, and one I had ridden only a handful of times. The main difference between riding a longboard and a shortboard is speed. Smaller boards make for less planing surface, so catching a wave on a shortboard requires taking off later.
This leaves less time to get to your feet and less time to make it into the wave, but when you do make it into the wave—because less surface area also means less drag—it feels a bit like being shot out of a cannon. Which can take some getting used to.
My neighbor had been a sponsored rider back East, and no sooner did we reach the lineup than I understood why. On a wave that looked certain to be a closeout, he took off late and was swallowed beneath the peak. A second later a deep whoop echoed up out of the water, and a moment after that he reappeared farther down the coast. On a wave that appeared to offer nothing, he got a fifty-foot tube ride.
Waves form tubes when the lip of the wave arcs deep into the trough, creating an open cavity beneath it. In moments of private and pure ecstasy, the lucky surfer can ride in this hollow. Lucky because very few waves tube and waves that do tube do not do it all the time. There are thousands and thousands of variables that can affect a breaking wave, and all of them have to work together to produce a good barrel. Sandbars have to be perfect. Winds have to be amenable. The storms that generate the swell must be powerful enough to generate waves with enough force to tube. The swell direction must line up exactly with the contours of the break's
bottom. The water level has to be right, so the tides have to be right, so the moon has to be right. Even then, great barrel rides last six, seven seconds. A ten-second tube ride rivals a walk on the moon.
Pulling into any tube remains among the hardest things to do in surfing. It's considered the ultimate elusive experience, and in watching my neighbor catch that tube I realized that the reason I had not had this experience before was not, as I had supposed, that I had never ridden barreling waves before; it was that I had not realized the waves that I had seen barreling were actually rideable. It was as if I had been staring at a jigsaw puzzle for years, looking for the right piece to complete the picture, only to finally realize it had been in my hand all along.
Not that any of this easily translated into success. I went over the falls five or six times in rapid succession, and then, after finally managing to catch one, I tried to turn too quickly, whipping my torso around before my feet had gotten set, thus spinning myself completely off the board and catching the wave's lip like a hard
slap on my cheek. The water was shallow. I bounced off the bottom more than once.
"You need to open your shoulder more to the wave" was the
advice I was given.
"I'm trying."
"There is no try; there is only do or don't do" came my neighbor's
Star Wars rejoinder.
In the last Australian census as it turns out, over seventy thousand people had listed their religion as Jedi. While this seems like a joke to most, I've met plenty, myself included, who when asked if they believe in God or, more specifically, what kind of God they believe in, are apt to answer, "Something like the Force in Star Wars." Jack Sorenson, the president of LucasArts, once told the New Yorker: "Star Wars is the mythology of the nonsectarian world.
It describes how people want to live." A quick Internet search of those who want to live this way produces Jedi devotees from almost every country on Earth. Most of these devotees do not believe that George Lucas was a prophet, but merely a man who set down in one place what many people had been thinking for quite a while, which seems to be how things go with most prophets.
Much of Jedi thought is an updated version of Taoism, a religion that dates back to the sixth century BC and is possibly the sole conception of the scholar Lao-tzu, but more likely a consortium of ideas by a variety of thinkers whose work was then summarized by Lao-tzu. Either way, the Tao-te-Ching is full of Yoda-esque sayings: be still like a mountain and flow like a great river.
Alan Watts, the great Western Taoist, whose work became incredibly popular during those Star Wars seventies, inadvertently defined the Force while defining the Tao in his The Watercourse Way as "the first-cause of the universe. It is a force that flows through all life."
But Lucas took things further, adding a good-versus-evil paradigm that Western audiences found fundamentally familiar. The dark side as evil; Darth as Satan. It's an idea most people think of as JudeoChristian, but really one that goes a bit farther back. In The Historical Figure of Jesus, E. P. Sanders, a theologian and professor of religion at Duke University and one of the better scholars on the subject, writes:
It was apparently during the Babylonian exile (around 550 BCE) that Jews began to be complete monotheists.
Previously, they had thought their god was the best god, but they had not denied the existence of other gods. A religion that believes there is only one god has a difficult time explaining evil. Did the one good God create it? Why does he permit it? Faced with the actual existence of both good and evil, some religious traditions have posited the existence of two opposing gods. This is the most distinctive theological belief in Zoroastrianism, which began in Persia in the sixth or fifth century BCE and which influenced Mediterranean thought in several ways. Judaism probably owes to Zoroastrianism the idea that an evil power opposed God. (Christianity, in turn, inherited the idea from Judaism.) Judaism remained true to monotheism and did not grant that there was an opposing god, but it accepted some aspects of the Persian dualism, such as the conflict between God and the forces of evil.
So in understanding "there is no try; there is only do or don't
do," I'm understanding an amalgamation of spiritual ideas dating back some three thousand years, which goes a long way toward explaining why seventy thousand people in Australia listed Jedi as their religion. It also shed some light on what Jim White meant by "beliefs are like stew" and gave me a way to backtrack the Conductor's story. And, perhaps stranger still, not thirty seconds after I had been told to do or don't do, I did.
I don't remember much about the wave. I remember seeing the bulge begin to rise and thinking that I was lined up about twenty feet off the peak. I took seven or eight sideways strokes and then straightened out. My board caught hold, and three more deep paddles pulled me into it. Already the offshore winds were whipping spray off the face. I couldn't see. Sometime, during this invisible second of watery blindness, I got to my feet and made my first turn. The wave jacked in an instant. Pumping a surfboard means keeping the weight on the back foot steady while picking up the front foot and slamming it back down again, an action that drives more water across the board's fins and increases acceleration. I only had time to pump my board once when I found myself looking down the wave's swirling, kaleidoscope eye. Somehow my feet were in the right place. I bent my back leg in and dropped toward one knee, reaching out to grab the outside rail. The light vanished, and the world turned turquoise. This was the green room. The barrel. I shot out the other side. In and out and done. My first Jedi tube ride.
15
I moved on to calling folklorists, mythologists, urban mythologists, psychologists, parapsychologists, the Jungians, the Joseph Campbell Society, but nobody had heard of the Conductor. I had heard about him twice in seven years, on two different continents, from two different people. Finding no one who had heard anything close was more than a little disconcerting. I had assumed that for the story to circumnavigate the globe required a network of intermediaries, people who shared enough of a fascination with the tale that they'd at least want to repeat it once or twice, and that some of those who heard this repetition would themselves further the process. Not finding anyone who had done such a thing just didn't make all that much sense. The standard dictionary definition of coincidence is "a sequence of events that although accidental seems to have been planned or arranged." Perhaps I had moved beyond the realm of standard definitions. Perhaps I needed a different approach.
If I couldn't track down the story itself, there was a chance that I could backtrack its individual parts in such a way that they would begin to shed light on the collective whole. I decided to take the core components of the Conductor's story—the surf quest, that hint of Eastern mysticism, weather and wave control, that flavor of tropical mythology—and see if I could find a moment in time when outside factors would force all of these parts to intersect and overlap. If I couldn't find the story's moment of physical origin, possibly I could trace the preexisting conditions that conspired to create that moment of physical origin. Maybe, I thought, that would be enough.
So if the Conductor's story began with a surf trip, when did this surf trip take place? It's impossible to know for sure, but it's a good bet that it followed the 1964 release of Bruce Brown's classic The Endless Summer. Surfers, coming out of the fifties and on into the sixties, had earned a reputation as beatnik beach bums who were going nowhere fast, and certainly not around the world in search of waves. Before Endless Summer, outside of the occasional trip to Hawaii, the surf travel industry was nonexistent. Brown changed all of that, turning the wave safari into a rite of passage as essential to the sport as a good bottom turn.
"Bruce Brown, Robert August, and Mike Hyson found perfect surf at Cape St. Francis, South Africa, in late November 1963,"
wrote one of surfing's premier anthropologists, Matt Warshaw, in his book Surf Riders: In Search of the Perfect Wave, "and the discovery, as presented in Bruce Brown's film The Endless Summer, is as much a part of surfing history and lore as a story from the Old Testament." Described in the film, the trio hiked a small desert of sand dunes to come upon what is essentially surf pornography: Seventy-degree water, prevailing offshore winds and perfect waves that Brown tells us exist three hundred days a year, and on some of those days, when the waves are big, a seven-mile ride is possible.
Oddly, while the waves in the film were actually found at Cape St. Francis, very little else in the sequence was real. Brown, though only twenty-six at the time he shot The Endless Summer, was already a veteran, and he knew that a little fiction never hurt a good surf story. He staked a precious fifty thousand dollars—the sum total of the profits of his previous four films and every last cent he could borrow—on this film. He knew his career hung in the balance. So, as Warshaw points out, he faked it.
Setting the factual record straight, the prevailing wind at Cape St. Francis is not offshore, and a surfer would be more likely to see a troupe of hula dancers gyrate across the Cape than a set of 15-foot waves peeling off for 7 miles.
Brown's 300-good-surf-days-a-year claim was overstated by about 285 days. He relied on an even higher degree of poetic license to create the dune-filled "discovery"
sequence . . . It might be said that the entire Endless Summer project was born in deception starting with the title. Brown knew that the best waves are found in winter, not summer.
But he also knew that Midwesterners would never drive through sleet and snow to see a movie called The Endless Winter.
In other words, the myth that begat a myth was itself a myth.
But that did little to change the film's ripple effect. Within a few years of its release, taking advantage of the burgeoning international transportation industry, wave riders began pushing into all sorts of forgotten corners. In 1996, when I went to Bali for the first time, I made a point of visiting the Uluwatu Temple, where I fed peanuts to monkeys and found a monk who pointed out the spot where the surf photographer Alby Falzon glanced out a window in 1972. On the other side of that window was a jungle that fed into a ravine that poured into a cave that opened onto a reef that formed what Surfer magazine recently called "the daddy of all dream waves." The monk summed it up best when he said, "Here they stood, here they saw."
Uluwatu, as the wave has come to be known, was a clarion call to all those wanting to get out and go far. It was among the first in a series of dream discoveries that helped define the modern era of surfing. A few months later, Bob Lafferty, glanced out an airplane window on a short hop out of Jakarta and noticed the long shadow
of gargantuan reef angling off the southeastern tip of Java. After a battle of bad roads and worse boating, he and some friends found their way to what was soon to become G-Land, short for Grajagan, the world's first jungle surf camp. In 1974 Tony Hilde and Mark Scanlon hitched a ride out of Goa, India, and ended up shipwrecked and surfing in the Maldives. In 1975 it was Lagundri Bay, Nias, and five years later the Mentawai Islands, off the coast of Sumatra, a discovery that had by this point become so routine that the Outside magazine writer Rob Story called its uncovering "good old surf imperialism."
Certainly these things would have happened without The Endless Summer, but not nearly as quickly and not with the same sense of purpose. Because of the movie's influence, because folks heeded its call, surfing went from being a backyard pastime to a worldwide quest. While no quantitative data explains the mind-shift that accompanied this transition, it's a safe assumption that the surf quest, the most fundamental element found in the Conductor's story, did not exist in any serious form before 1964. It wasn't much, but it was a place to start.
16
My journey to Bruce Brown's house took a little more than five hours or a little less than eleven years depending on when you start the clock. If you start the clock around seven in the morning on the sunny, summer day when I drove north from Los Angeles to a spot twenty-five miles north of Santa Barbara, it annoyingly took more than five hours. It should have taken less than three, but we got lost. We got lost because the directions Bruce's son, Dana Brown, left on my voice mail were an address off Highway One and a cryptic addendum: "If you pass the Blade Runner—looking refinery you've gone too far." I was thirty-six years old and certain that I'd passed the Blade Runner-looking refinery a long time ago.
I was driving with a friend to meet Brown because, a few weeks prior, Dana had released his first film, Step into Liquid, the hypothetical third installment in what would become The Endless Summer trilogy. Both my friend and myself had seen the film and conspired to write as much as possible about both men because both men had become beacons in our respective personal mythologies. Writing stories about such beacons is what journalists do to give meaning to their lives. Which is to say, I was driving north from Los Angeles not just because a couple of guys had made a couple of movies, but because, in the middle of a freezing Baltimore winter, when I wanted nothing as much as I wanted California sunshine, I read Kem Nunn's Tapping the Source.
I read Tapping the Source in graduate school, studying creative writing under the unusual tutelage of Robert Stone. By that point, Stone was already a literary legend, both a National Book Award winner and one of the last living Merry Pranksters, but one not built for the rigors of academia. He was often given to wild flights. On the first day of class, Stone walked in, sat down, said little, read James Joyce's "Araby" aloud, in its entirety, closed the book, closed his eyes for about thirty seconds, opened his eyes, stood up, said good-bye and left. What went on in his mind during those thirty seconds was anyone's guess.
During that same period, I was making ends meet tending bar.
I met a local surfer, Derek I think his name was, who told me there were waves breaking on Maryland's Eastern Shore. I hadn't yet been on a board. He had an extra wetsuit, offered to teach me, and did so the hard way. He gave me a shortboard and no instructions.
I paddled headlong into nasty shorebreak, and the first wave I met snapped the pointed nose of the surfboard into the soft flesh of my cheek. I got out of the water as fast as I got in. A few days later Stone saw the cut, asked after it. I told him the story, and he told me to read Tapping the Source.
Nunn's book, part hard-boiled fiction, part tale of watery redemption, was set at a mythical place called the Ranch, somewhere north of Santa Barbara and south of Shangri-La. The Ranch, in Nunn's book, was a cattle ranch that abutted the finest waves in California, the break kept safe and secret by a group of heavily armed cowboys. At the time I first read the book, I had no idea if the Ranch even existed. In the years after, even when surfing in nearby San Francisco, no one had ever mentioned it. Then, years later, I was on the phone with Dana Brown, discussing the possibility of an interview, when he said, "Why don't you drive up the coast, you can interview me, meet my father, and we'll all go surf the Ranch."
I didn't need to be asked twice. A few days later my friend and I were lost, doing fruitless laps on the Pacific Coast Highway, passing the Blade Runner—looking refinery again and again when we finally spotted a police cruiser parked in a turnout, just off the road.
We pulled alongside the car and glanced through the open window at the cop, who was sleeping with his jaw open and a bulbous nose so veiny that it looked like a booze-broken road map to every sad-sack tavern in California. We woke him up and asked him if he knew the address we needed.
"No" giving us his best hard-cop onceover—"wouldn't know where that is."
"Umm, we're looking for Bruce Brown's place."
Then he noticed the surfboards strapped to our roof. "Oh, that figures."
He gave us directions to an expansive ranchero nestled far back from the road, at the base of a deep canyon. Just past the backyard, a rocky outcropping stood like a sentinel atop a steep cliff. The Pacific was visible from the front porch. Brown had bought the land back before anyone realized that coastal property near Santa Barbara was going to become what coastal property near Santa Barbara became. He lived there with his wife and dog and endured frequent visitors. We walked in as both Dana and Bruce Brown and Robert "Wingnut" Weaver, the iconoclastic Santa Cruz longboarder made famous by The Endless Summer II, were recording commentary to accompany the release of that movie's DVD. Bruce told us to grab a beer from the fridge and make ourselves at home. It was about noon, perhaps as good a time as any to start drinking.
