Screen of the Lotus Eaters

There’s something in surfing that feels awful utopian. It’s a real late- stage human activity. Many have tried to define it. But some things are just beyond category and reason and the whole modern Euclidean mind.

It’s important, every so often, to remember where surfing comes from. Waves have peeled and dumped all over Earth’s oceans for millennia, but it was very late in Homo sapiens global migration when Hawaiians—canoe voyagers, sea people—pushed to their feet and mastered the sacred slide of he‘e nalu. And it was sacred. In pre-contact Hawaii everything was sacred because everything was part of a vast interdependence. Life begat life. Familial was the cosmos. Hawaiians lived this interdependence through ritualized reverence of nature. Fairies in the forests, gods in the waters. Secrets and forbidden knowledge structured reality. Their world teemed with myth and meaning. And from this world came wave sliding.

In today’s supposedly secular world, surfing’s sacred origins seem rather significant. We have ourselves a bona fide time capsule, a true cosmic vessel to the past and perhaps, if only for the length of a session, another way of being. Does it not feel that way? By dipping in and paddling out, we partake in a thing in our world but not of it. This might explain the weirdness in trying to classify surfing. To classify is to flatten and shed nuance—to think with a modern mind—which doesn’t really gel with the real thing.

Maybe this reads like sun-sick gibberish. But I’m pretty well convinced the Hawaiians who slid on paipos and alaias inhabited a lost surfing paradise. And what we do today, beneath so many layers, is still connected to that old utopia.

Of course, there is no utopia without dystopia. The two exist in tandem like the yin and yang on a Town & Country surfboard. Utopia is a joyous lineup of giving and sharing but utopia is also fickle and prone to fright and disappearance. The slide into dystopia always feels easier. It only takes one greedy fuck to turn a whole lineup into possessed me-firsters.

Dystopia abounds in popular culture. Viruses, zombies, and the environmental apocalypse—such thoughts come easy (and it’s worth asking why). Alternatively, surf stories have given us wondrous visions of the good life. Or they usually try to. Through these stories, expressed in art or film or shared in the parking lot, we hash out the myths and meanings that structure surfing’s reality. Ultimately, we learn what to desire in surfing as much as we learn how to desire at all.

The quest for the perfect wave is an early story of surf desire. Bruce Brown’s 1964 The Endless Summer imagines waves themselves as a reason for being. It offers a simple, utopian blueprint: Log your way around the world. Meet people and share what you’ve learned of happiness. In this narrative, the perfect wave is not a static achievement to be found and conquered but a rhythmic process—a way of being.

The quest, however, pretty quickly evolved into the escape. Alby Falzon and David Elfick’s 1972 Morning of the Earth imagines a new dawn for humanity with surfing at its core. The Australians build their own boards, live in shacks, and eat from homegrown gardens. Lopez breathes his yogic koans. A perfectly hollow Pipe drains away. These are little slices of heaven and yet, it’s only half the story. 

So much peace-loving yin implies the presence of a rather strong yang, just as escape implies an escape from something. “Something has happened,” Miki Dora says early in John Severson’s 1970 film Pacific Vibrations. “[Americans] have become barbaristic… I think we’re having a nervous breakdown.” 

For a young George Greenough, the escape took on a certain specificity. In Crystal Voyager, a 1973 collaboration with Elfick and Falzon, he navigates the dystopia of his fellow man’s…presence. “Surfing is my main satisfaction in life,” he says. “And I get little pleasure from it when the surf is crowded.” His desire for solitude—born of his inability to abide surfing’s growth, its crowds, its other surfers—is a worm long-burrowed in the surf imagination. Surfing, he attests, is an artistic expression of the individual. Crowds inhibit this expression. We are each other’s problems.

The films of the 1980s and 90s depicted a world Greenough helped, but did not mean, to create. The Shortboard Revolution—informed in part by his kneeboard and fin designs—would propel surfing into the era of competition and commercial growth we know today. If surfing had felt spiritual or sacred to its early American adopters, well, the grinding mechanics of capitalism would change that. In sussing-out profits, we mythologized a new and charmed creature, the professional surfer: the surfer who makes it, the surfer who pays a mortgage with checks from sponsors.

Films like Chris Bystrom’s Blazing Boards, released in 1985, trotted the globe to promote contests. North Shore in 1987 dramatized the dream of moving to Hawaii and becoming a contest surfer. By the time Taylor Steele released Momentum in 1992, surfing as entertainment didn’t need explaining to its core audience. Instead, Momentum provided the raw intel on what and who mattered in surfing. Segments, stripped of context, abandon the idealized myth to instead highlight progression. For a new youth, learning what and how to desire, Momentum’s surfers appear like products out of a catalog, their maneuvers and style made to study and emulate.

This established a dichotomy that manifested in surf culture throughout the late 90s and early 2000s. The myth of surfing’s competitive beasts versus its subsidized drifters would be relentlessly packaged and reproduced. Rob Machado and Kelly Slater—the presence of one suggesting the other—monopolized the archetype for well over a decade. Then came Irons versus Rastovich. Who knew? What the youth imagine as utopia, once achieved, devolves into dystopia. Jack Johnson, the Malloys, and Taylor Steele worked this angle often: the anxieties of commodified surfing. In September Sessions (2000), A Brokedown Melody (2004), and The Drifter (2009), the world’s best surfers escape a soulless tour to reflect, with boundless capacity, upon the unease of their commodified lives.

These escapes usually happen in the Global South where many a tattered, First World soul has sought perspective. Here the locals, often children, ride broken boards. They bodysurf. They enjoy small waves. The poverty that frames their lives is not a problem with a context but a virtue. Their “simple” life is our lesson. In the end, the message is clear: progression is only a myth. Free yourself of the myth.

The problem, of course, is that myths are very real and very sticky. We believe and live them. Without them, the reality we know falls apart. In these films, if the professional surfer gains perspective so do we. Or that’s the plan. But often enough, their particular story feels detached from reality. After all, we’re talking about the charmed few who are paid to surf. Their escape is not our escape. Theirs is from one utopia to another.

In Dane Reynolds’ Chapter 11, released in 2016, we get a hybrid tale. By 15, sponsored and sent on his first Indonesian boat trip, young Dane has, to his own bewilderment, fulfilled the back row daydream. He’s a professional surfer with a feature movie in production. The film asks and answers: at what cost?

Dane’s dystopia, we learn, is the psychic cage of heavy expectation. Money, cult adoration—all this is no salve to a mind trapped by the need to justify one’s paycheck, to supply the surf world with never- ending progression. It is, one imagines, a rather shitty place to be. He is not, by class and upbringing, unaware of his service to the corporate beast. He sees that every creative act—from cutback to doodle to Sperm Whale—is taken and commodified. He seems to understand, or at least viscerally process, the vacant horror in this.

Dystopia, of course, is relative. (And again, like his predecessors, Dane is ultimately paid to surf, not to mine precious metals.) Similarly, the utopia he provides, and has always given away so generously, is also only utopian through the prism of a modern perspective. 

It’s the fantasy of iconoclastic rage fulfilled—of a smart employee who holds a special disgust for greedy bosses, of a savage, slack-jawed gouge that says, quite clearly, there’s something pent up under the surface. Among many things, Dane’s surfing is an answer to modernity’s restless striving. For us, through the slick powers of fantasy and projection, his aggression in both the water (and toward his former sponsors) becomes our vicarious aggression. The ennui we cannot afford to reveal in our own lives becomes the ennui he does not have to hide.

There is, however, a sort of Sisyphean quality to this version of projected utopia. Hack after hack after hack—then the wave dissipates. Exhausted, you slink to your board. Did something happen? What was it? And what now?

Nearly half a century before The Endless Summer, Jack London wrote of the “bronzed gods” of Waikiki: George Freeth, the young Kahanamokus, and the beach boys of Hui Nalu. To London, these men occupied a higher plane. They surfed and knew the ocean in ways he couldn’t and wouldn’t. To the Hawaiians—survivors of foreign disease, dispossession, and the violent fracturing of their world—surfing meant something else entirely: not an achievement or quest in pursuit but a perseverance of ancient practices.

Those early Waikiki photographs, of kanaka and haole sharing happiness in the ocean, obscure the dark triage of the time. With their lives and society upended, with their myths and meanings under long and systematic assault, surfing granted sanity through the trauma. For the Hawaiian the ocean became something new, a space of utopia within the dystopia.

Sometimes, surfing serves an escapist purpose. I wish it wasn’t so. I wish people didn’t need escaping. For surfing, for anything really, it’s too much to ask. I think that’s where a lot of our trouble starts. We imbue this thing with hopes of salvation, that it might cleanse our day and fulfill our needs. When it fails to deliver, when conditions suck or some asshole ruins a session, the mirage shatters. Reality returns. Dystopia creeps in.

It helps to remember what surfing has been, what it teaches us, and to imagine what surfing could be. Without a doubt, this thing—this playing we do in the ocean—is a real late-stage thing. It need not be a restless quest, escape, or a solution to any of the issues we’ve foisted upon it. It could be, very simply, just surfing. Just happiness. Of course whether it is or isn’t has nothing to do with surfing, and everything to do with us.