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Outside magazine, June 2001
Return of the Prodigal Surfer
By Bob Shacochis
KIRITIMATI, CHRISTMAS ISLAND, erstwhile thermonuclear playground in the mid-Pacific. Neither the beginning nor the end of a journey toward the lightness of being but, for me, more of the same, surfwise, selfwise, further evidence of the cosmic truth inherent in the mocking axiom, You should have been here yesterday. Yesterday, in fact, is the stale cake of many an aging surfer. Yesterday is what I walked away from, determined to someday again lick the frosting from the sea-blue bowl.

Out there on the Kiritimati atoll, we were a small, neoprene-booted family of silverbacks—Mickey Muñoz, Yvon Chouinard, Chip Post—and brazen cubs—Yvon's son and daughter, her boyfriend, Chip's son. Mickey, 61, was the first maniac to surf Waimea Bay, back in 1957. Yvon, 60, founder of Patagonia Inc. and legendary climber, had surfed just about every break on earth, starting with Malibu in 1954. Chip, 60, a lawyer in L.A., had seniority in almost every lineup from Baja to San Francisco. Our Generation Xers, in their late twenties, were already dismantling breaks all over the planet. In years (middle), condition (not splendid), experience (moderate), and ability (rusted), I was the odd watermonkey in the clan, neither out nor in, and the only one dragging an existential crisis to the beach. The only one who had opted out of The Life, the juice. Maybe I wanted back in, but maybe not. I felt like an amputee contemplating the return of his legs, but long accustomed to the stumps.

In the coral rubble of the point we stood brooding, muttering, trying to conjure what was not there. The glorious, mythical break had been crosswired by La Niña, and the deformed shoulder-high waves now advanced across the reef erratically, convulsed with spasms, closing prematurely, like grand ideas that never quite take shape or cohere to meaning. In years past at this same spot, Yvon had been graced with an endless supply of standard Christmas Island beauties—precise double-overhead rights, shining high-pocketed barrel tubes that spit you out into the postcoital calm of the harbor. We'd come all this way for Oceania's interpretation of euclidean geometry and we got this: bad poetry, illiterate verse.

Yeah, well. . . this was a hungry crew, and you never know what's inedible until you put it in your mouth.

The Xers flung themselves into the channel; the rip ferried them out to the reef. Chip goes. Then Yvon, but less enthusiastically. "I'm not going," said Mickey, squatting on his heels. I sat too, thunderstruck with relief. Forget that it had been more than seven or eight years since I surfed, almost 15 since I surfed steady, daily, with the seriousness and joy of a suntanned dervish. With or without its perfect waves one thing about this break horrified me: As each swell approached the reef, the trough began to boil in two sections, and when the wall steepened to its full height, thinning to emerald translucence, the two boils morphed into thick fence posts of coral.

We watched Yvon muscle onto an unreliable peak, gnarled and hurried by the onshore wind. The drop was clean, exhilarating, but without potential. He trimmed and surged past the first spike of coral, the fins of his board visible only a few scant inches above the crown before the wave sectioned and crumbled over the second spike. He exited and paddled in.

"Those coral heads really spook me," I confessed.

The stay-alive technique, Yvon assured me, was glide shallow when you left your board, protect your head, avoid disembowelment or the tearing off of your balls.

"Yeah, I guess," I said.

For a half-hour we watched the rodeo out on the reef, Chip and the Xers rocketing out of the chute, tossed and bucked into the slop. Mickey kept looking up the coast, across the scoop of bay to a reef I had named, ingloriously, Caca's, because the locals in the nearby village mined the beach with their morning turds. The tide had begun to ebb.

"Caca's going off!" Mickey cheered. Yvon and I squinted at the froth zippering in the distance.

"Yeah?" we said, unconvinced. But off we trudged to check it out.

SO. THERE IS A PATHOLOGY to my romance with surfing that contains a malarial rhythm; its recurrence can catch me unaware, bring fevers. For a day or two I'll wonder what's wrong with me, and then, of course, I'll know.

I would like to tell you that I remain a surfer but that would mostly be a lie, even though I grew up surfing, changed my life for surfing, lived and breathed and exhaled surfing for many years. Now I can barely address the subject without feeling that I've swallowed bitter medicine. I avoid surf shops with the same furtiveness with which I steer clear of underage girls, and I wouldn't dare flip through a surf magazine's exquisite pornography of waves, unless I had it in mind to make myself miserable with desire.

My life only started when I became infected with surfing, moonsick with surfing, a 14-year-old East Coast gremmie with his first board, a Greg Noll slab of lumber, begging my older brothers for a ride to Ocean City. Before that, I was just some kid-form of animated protoplasm, my amphibian brain stem unconnected to any encompassing reality, skateboarding around suburbia like an orphan.

I remember the spraying rapture of the first time I got wrapped—seriously, profoundly, amniotically wrapped—by an overhead tube, an extended moment when all the pistons of the universe seemed to fire for the sole purpose of my pleasure. It was at Frisco Beach, south of the cape on Hatteras. I remember the hard vertical slash of the drop, the gravitational punch of the bottom turn and that divine sense of inevitability that comes from trimming up to find yourself in the pocket hammered into a long beautiful cliffside of feathering water. It only got better. There, pinned on the wall in front of me, entirely unexpected and smack in my face, was a magnificent wahine ass-valentine, tucked into a papery yellow bikini. For a moment I thought I was experiencing a puberty-triggered hallucination, but there she was in the flesh, whoever she was, wet as my dreams, locked on a line about two feet above me. Surgasm—can that be a word? The wave vaulted above us and came down as neat and transparent as glass and we were bottled in brilliant motion, in the racing sea. And friends, that ride never ended, unto this day. Boy, girl, wave—whew. On earth, I could ask no greater reward from heaven, nor define any other cosmology as complete as this.

The first time I declared my irreversible independence and defied my father, it was to go surfing. I joined the Peace Corps to go surfing in the Windward Islands. Later I moved my household from the ocean-lonely prairies of Iowa, where I was teaching, to the Outer Banks to go surfing. I chased spectacular waves off Long Island, New Jersey, Virginia Beach, North Carolina, Florida, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, waves that when I kicked out, through the sizzle of the whitewater I could hear hoots of astonishment on the beach, which felt like your ecstasy was shouting back at you, and beyond you, to a future where one day you might recollect that once, for a time, you had been a great lover in your affair with the world. You weren't just sniffing around.

NOW, YEARS LATER, on Christmas Island, I didn't know if I wanted to surf again, to become reinfected, because I knew there was a chance I would stop living one life and start living another, that I would uproot everything, and I didn't particularly think that was possible. Still, Mickey designed me a new board, which Fletcher, Yvon's son, shaped and glassed for me. Still, I flew 6,000 miles to Christmas Island, artificially mellowed by some kind of depresso's drug to make me stop smoking. Still, I gulped back the dread that the point break had induced and walked down to Caca's with Mickey and Yvon.

What we found was surfing's equivalent of a petting zoo—little giddyup waves, pony waves, knee-high and forgiving. The silverbacks made every wave they wanted; I made maybe one out of five. I felt clownish, hesitant, my judgment blurred by bad eyesight. But finally none of that mattered, finally I started hopping into the saddle, having fun. That I considered to be a mercy.

I had collided head-on with my youth and with what needed resurrection, though not in the boomer sense of never letting go. I had already let go. But the dialectic of my transformation had reached a standstill: Surf = No Surf = ??? I wanted more waves. I wanted more waves the way a priest wants miracles, the desert wants rain. Throughout my celibacy, living a counterpoint life, I had prayed hard to be welcomed home again to waves, and these tame ponies would, I hoped, serve as that invitation. I have since surfed San Onofre with limited success. Florida too, but only once. I have yet to find the equation that will spring open my life, rearrange my freedoms. My resources are modest, my obligations many; my dreams are still the right dreams but veined with a fatty ambivalence. Maybe the season has passed, but I don't think so.

The thing about surfing, Chip told me, is that "you leave no trail." Yessir, Mickey agreed: "It's like music—you play it and it's done."

The strategy you're looking for is the one that teaches you to hold the note.

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Photo Credit: Chris Van Lennep