Gnamma #86 - Surfing and Books and...

On Wednesday I woke up at 6 am in San José del Cabo, Mexico; ate a breakfast of shrinkwrapped corn muffins, half a can of tuna, plus a gatorade; and proceeded to have perhaps the best surf session of my life.

I then napped, did groceries (the store was closed by the time I arrived the night before, hence the convenience-store diet), and plowed through Nat Young's book Church of the Open Sky, which is a memoir-of-vignettes about surfing. (Note, the author is the old Australian Nat Young, not the young American Nat Young--popular name for surfers?)

It's a fun, quick read, perfect morsels for light vacation reading between surf sessions. However, other than some touching spiritual notes at the beginning of the book, there is little depth in its pages. Young himself defers to William Finnegan's Barbarian Days as the titular example of exemplary surf writing. I told my girlfriend Elena that I found Young's book akin to an old guy's unprompted rambling stories of his youth, and she said that's somewhat how she found Finnegan's book, too. Maybe it's just how these words land differently to a surfer or not, but to me the main message is that damn, there's really very little good writing about surfing. But maybe I'm just overdue to subscribe to The Surfer's Journal.

The best surf writing I've found, real contemporary writing about the activity and the people and cultures that patchwork comprise what "surfing is," has been in low-volume periodicals. Emocean is taking a high production and social-focused approach, Primitive Skills loves the weirdo outsider shit, Addiction seeks to highlight the "core" California surfer, and the newly-rebooted Acid Surfing is finding its way with a concept-heavy direction. I actually credit Acid, particularly volume 4, with getting me into surfing. Back in summer 2016 on a trip to New York City, I picked it up at a book store because it had cool graphic design and I was about to move to Los Angeles where I thought maybe I would try surfing. The edition immediately intellectualized the activity to me (crucial, for your brain-first author) and interwove its strange history with patterns of colonization and exploitation in the Pacific islands. It made it clear that surfing was a universe one can step into, not just a sport one can pick up and put down.

Tina, years ago, gave me the Critical Surf Studies Reader as a kind gift for lending her a longboard for a month or so. (Thanks Tina!!) Those editors leap into this page one:

[...] surfing engenders a romantic attraction and emotional entanglement with nature, beauty, performance, the body, and uninhibited play, further heightened by the surf's apparent distance from earthly concerns.

Now we're cooking!!! Although this academic stuff is certainly less fun as beach reading, the entanglement here is key. Entanglement (in the Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing flavor?), how surfing, ostensibly the act of wave-riding, is interwoven with a bunch of other things across different realms: personal ritual, cultural patterns in leisure and rebellion, coastal oceanography and geology, the craft of board design, the lifecycles of sea urchins, access to nature, the quality of global storm and climate models, lower-back pain, and much much more.

This entanglement of everything of inevitable, as I see it, a source of vibrant contact and friction in life.

Primitive Skills, perhaps my favorite of the above magazines, has a hilarious descriptive line in the colophon that captures one of the facets of surfing:

Primitive Skills Magazine is an independent study into the rituals, symbols, habits & habitats of surfers. Misuse of funds, distaste for authority, anti-social behaviour, freedom of thought & other undesirable side effects of salt water to the brain.

This articulation of the surfer punk, trying to find freedom of thought, is totally a romantic appeal to me. I mean, that's exactly what I'm pursuing right now on a surf getaway, an attempt to step outside my usual worlds and rinse the brain as much as possible, and it's certainly a misuse of funds. Like I mentioned, I'm in San José del Cabo, Mexico (the more relaxed of the two "Los Cabos"--a globalized megaresort hub), and I'm dangling on the budget end of the global surf tourism industry, albeit in a very expensive place. I've had two guides here, G and M, both in their 30s who have spent the past decade flying around to even more exotic surf retreat destinations to push people into waves. They sell their skills in being friendly (building trust with locals), intimately knowing the breaks (so that under most conditions they can find their clients good surf sessions), and a combination of patience and a keen eye (which supports good coaching).

I surfed with G and one of his repeat clients today, C. C has bleached white teeth and works in corporate law and was on a second-marriage bachelor party of all guys in their 50s, and was excited to drink us under the table after a successful morning of wave-riding. (Thanks for the margarita, bro!) The class politics are interesting but nothing new... G is squeezing out a middle-class kind of living as a guide, though it's tough on his body, and C is his main kind of client, flying in for a weekend and happy to slam the credit card down to get him on as many waves as possible before returning home. And then there's me, semi-unemployed but trying to think too hard about all this stuff and surf my brains out before I get too sunburnt or spend too much money.

Being here, on this retreat-esque trip, has made me really thankful that I see a career ahead of me where I can still surf regularly, but that it's not my job. I like Primitive Skills because to me surfing is just a habit, like a guacamole distributed all throughout in the rolled-up burrito that is my life. (Because I do it in central California, it also makes me a prime demographic for Addiction Mag, I guess.)

Years ago, my friend Ariana suggested I read Finite and Infinite Games (pdf) by James Carse. It's a classic from 1986 that attempts to descriptively split lots of human behavior into "finite" or "infinite" games. Not surprisingly, finite games end. A basketball match, or paying into a 401k, are finite games. They tend to have clear rules and clear end conditions. Infinite games are different: the goal in them is just to keep playing (though they can end by choice or death). You usually just keep adjusting the rules so that it remains fun or interesting or worthwhile to continue playing. Being a poet and marriage are infinite games.

Surfing is a cyclical activity, always defined by time spent in the water because at some point you have to get back on land. So each surf session is perhaps a finite game, but the practice of surfing is a lifelong pursuit, an infinite game. I love hearing stories of older surfers realizing how much fun it is to boogieboard or bodysurf or any other flavor of surfing once their hips can't handle a quick take-off to a hard board any longer. Despite my mediocre review of his book, I truly mean no disrespect to Nat Young, who still rips in his 70s (see 23:40)--that's playing the infinite game of surfing effectively.

Surfing is different for every surfer. For Nat it's rooted in the churning surf world history of the 60s and his family; for G it's a livelihood and source of elbow strain; for C it's an escape and way to stay young; for me it's a starting point of many intellectual interests and a surefire anti-anxiety technique. I think every surfer would say it's also fun, and that's part of the entanglement too. Thank goodness there's still so much to write and read about.

Shredding,

Lukas

p.s. Gnamma has left MailerLite and is now on Buttondown, a much more elegant product and a team that seems to have some good values. I now need to fork up some money each month, but I guess that's as it should be for a good product. Thanks for bearing with me, I'm sorry if I accidentally re-subscribed you; feel free to bail.