We entered surfing through the back door. In the mid-seventies, skateboarding was still a wave-riding surrogate. The carves, kick turns, and Berts; the attraction to banks and bowls; the way we’d duck and drag our hands under overhanging foliage—these were surf moves adapted to pavement, though we didn’t know it at the time. I’m reminded of Ralph Macchio, whose famous “wax on, wax off” strokes would later become his defensive blocks in “The Karate Kid.” Which is to say that it was all in our muscle memory, we just had to translate it to water.
We were on a family trip to Hawaii in the summer of ’78, staying at a hotel with sweeping views of Waikiki Beach. We had no idea that this was the very spot where the great Duke Kahanamoku got a mile-long ride in 1917; where Jimmy Stewart, Gary Cooper, Montgomery Clift, and Babe Ruth caught their first waves in the fifties; where, legend has it, a strapping Waikiki Beach Boy and a smitten haole (foreign) girl made love while riding tandem during a moonlight surf in the sixties. Nor did we know about Jack London’s visit in 1907, during which he became so enraptured by surfing that he called it a “royal sport for the natural kings of earth” in a now-legendary magazine article that historians cite as the seed that would later sprout Gidget, the Beach Boys, Frankie and Annette, Malibu Barbie, and all the rest. We only knew that Cousin Jeff had recently wallpapered his bedroom in surf posters, and that he raved fanatically about “hang fives” and “tube rides.”
And so it was on a bright August morning that my brothers and I rented mustard yellow soft boards from a paunchy, silver-haired beach boy who warned us to “Neva turn your back on da ocean.” We paddled out clumsily, got whacked around by even the feeblest of white wash, found it astonishingly difficult to straddle our ten-foot boards without tipping over, found it nearly impossible to align ourselves with the wave at the proper time—too soon and the swell would continue on without us, too late and we’d “pearl” (go head over heels)—and exited the water two hours later humiliated, not to mention sunburned and nipple-rashed. But we were persistent. For the next three days we surfed from dawn till dusk, and by the end of it we were up on nearly every wave.
It wasn’t the actual surfing that hooked me, but rather the way it played back in my head as I tried to fall asleep at night. The thrill of stroking, stroking, stroking then suddenly being raised up as if by some divine hand; the precarious pop from prone to feet; that giddy buzz of standing tall in a Bruce Lee fighter stance as the whitewash tickles my heels and the shimmering blue whooshes past—all of it returned in visceral detail. It was if I were under a spell; as if salt water had entered my veins.
