Kelly Slater drives his way through a real barrel. Nothing artificial about this one. Photo: ASP/Kirstin
Between this and my last piece on why we should flip off the kickflip, I’m probably setting myself up as some sort of anti-progress dinosaur – a retrosaurus, if you like. But that is simply not the case. I am significantly younger than my opinions might suggest. Or maybe I am just older than I think and can’t deal with it. Anyway, my point is that the threatened emergence of the “Wavegarden” fills me with inner-city watery horror – something like pissing yourself in a shopping centre (that’s a “mall” to the Americans in the room), on a crowded escalator, with hundreds of untrained shopping freaks waiting their turn to get on, before going back and forth, back and forth, as they unskillfully negotiate the shops.
Waves just don’t belong in gardens. And no amount of Taj [Burrow] grinning and frothing is going to persuade me otherwise. Let’s be honest, Taj is so positive he probably froths over the milky waves in his muesli. Surfing does not need a custom-built enclosure for waves to pace relentlessly and uniformly back and forth. Waves are free. Waves are unique. And waves belong in the wild. Waves should not be caged so that imbeciles can stick their fingers out and touch something they would not normally have access to. This will only lead to disaster when they encounter one out in the real world that doesn’t behave as predictably as it did in captivity.
Horrific.
Picture the scene at your already crowded line-up: a bunch of clowns with zero ocean awareness pitch up, feeling like they are semi-pros because they’ve had a season ticket for the Wavegarden for 6 months. Next thing you know, there’s a fin in your eye as one of them gets pitched on a wave slightly less friendly than the ones in his Garden. Let’s see who’s laughing then. I am all for bringing surfing to the masses. I know it can enrich lives and bring unbridled joy, but at least let people serve an apprenticeship. Why try to make it too easy? Surely the types of people we would rather share the water with are those who are as committed and dedicated to the art as many of us have been? I am definitely not the type of person to look down my nose at beginners or brand people as “kooks,” but I am acutely aware of reality – surfing is just not for everyone.
Once upon a time, I worked in a surf, snowboard and skate shop. At the time, I was a keen snowboarder with several years of experience and two dedicated seasons in New Zealand under my belt. By the time I left that particular job I loathed snowboarding to such a degree that I barely touched snow for three years. It was no coincidence that my employment in that store coincided with a “Snowdome” opening up in the local area – one of these horrendous giant fridges that you find in shopping centres with “real” snow and thousands of wannabes skidding around wearing the latest fashions, and all the while paying about £20 an hour for the privilege. Every day I would have wide-eyed and overly enthusiastic customers gushing over the Snowdome and asking if I’d tried it (shortly before asking some dumb question about color so they could match up their boards, boots, bindings, pants, jackets, fucking bandanas…whatever). My answer to their question was always the same – a flat “no.” My answer to this day remains the same – though I do enjoy the actual mountains again. The rest of my tenure at that particular establishment was spent lurking in the depths of the basement, avoiding the shop floor, fixing and servicing boards for preferable cash-in-hand rates, and plotting my swiftest escape route.
I resented the fact that someone could take a lifestyle I loved and dilute it so that idiots could easily digest it, throw their cash around, and be fooled into thinking they were having the same experience as me. This may seem to be purely selfish, but I do believe that making these sports too easy taints them for everyone. I don’t want to surf in a shopping centre. I want to work for it. I like forecasting. I like unpredictability. I love to travel and I love to explore. These elements are a huge part of what make surfing beautiful. So why do people feel the need to bastardize it into something completely different? Are these the same people who breed “designer dogs” to suit their own myopic purposes?
“That’s a strange looking…eh…dog? What breed is it?”
“Hey, wow, thanks! It’s a Fendi-Doodle!”
“A what?!”
“A Fendi-Doodle! He was bred from a poodle and a handbag. Don’t you think his handles are just ssssooooooooo cute!”
“Em…not really. And what’s wrong with his side?”
“Oh, he was born without a label so I had to iron that one on myself. I thought about checking with the vet first, but he’ll probably be dead in a couple of months and I’ll just throw him in the bin anyway…”
Keep Surfing Outside. That’s going to be my slogan. So much of what makes surfing special to me is the travel, the exploration, and the discovery. And of course those perfect moments of unity with the world when you feel connected in a way that definitely can’t be manufactured. Why would someone want to taint this by artificially manufacturing something that contradicts nearly everything that we love about surfing? You can ram a dog into a handbag as if it were a bottle of perfume all you like, but at the end of the day, it’s still going to stink.
Surfing is the one true sport which can’t be contained. We don’t need a wire or a speed boat to tow us round. We don’t need waves of concrete or wood to give us speed or project us into the air. We don’t need complicated lift systems, tickets or artificial snow. We don’t need trails or obstacles to be built or sculpted especially for us. In surfing, all of these things are either accomplished by nature or by our own power and technique, and that is how I firmly believe it should stay. Sure, it’s rarely perfect, but isn’t that just why we love it? Isn’t it just that which makes those perfect days something a little beyond perfect? I love and loathe the variables and the unpredictability in equal measure some days. But I would never change them. I can rant and rave with the best of them when I’ve driven for 5 hours and the forecast hasn’t delivered. I can swear I’m going to take up windsurfing, again, when it’s blown out and onshore, again. And some days I grudge every single penny of diesel I smoke away as my van trudges back and forth in its familiar rut to check every spot, just in case. But I still wouldn’t change it.
No man can tether time nor tide. And that’s just how it is.
