Ocean Beach. Photo: Alex Aragon
“The ocean has the conscienceless temper of a savage autocrat spoiled by much adulation.” Those words comprise the epigraph to the chapter on Ocean Beach in William Finnegan’s Barbarian Days.
Anyone who’s even waded into the Pacific Ocean on this particularly wild, brutal, deadly stretch of coast can immediately recall the severity of this place. The cold, fog, skin and eye-abrading sand winds, and improbably unpredictable currents have mostly kept me from really enjoying the break that was once just a few blocks from my house. The smackdown that even a three-foot wave delivers at Ocean Beach is a humbling and even terrifying experience. I can (and also really cannot) imagine the thrill of the huge, clean barrels that unload on the outer sandbars. Finnegan’s book and 1992 New Yorker piece, “Surfing with Doc,” capture surfing’s transcendental beauty, noise, and dry-mouthed fear, at Ocean Beach and waves I have never seen, better than anything I have read.
In his Ocean Beach chapter, Finnegan does more than share the visceral immersion that the ocean provides. His experience has much to teach us as we enter a time of rapidly increasing uncertainty about the nature of our democracy, our status as citizens, and our interest in averting environmental travesty. In 1985, Finnegan had just abandoned his global surf quest, leaving apartheid South Africa to eventually settle in San Francisco during the height of the AIDS crisis. As he began writing of his experiences teaching in a black township near Cape Town, Finnegan struggled to toe the line between activism and journalism “when it came to something as patently unjust as apartheid.” Finnegan doesn’t explicitly make this connection, but his awakening to the politics of apartheid and his return to surfing, the US, and one of the world’s heaviest breaks, all illustrate the way that intense experiences can generate and mutually reinforce one another. Often, Finnegan writes, his search for deeper meaning in his travels turned up hollow and anticlimactic. But in this particular moment in his travels, Finnegan traversed the worlds of athletic, spiritual pursuit and revolutionary politics. He uncomfortably notes the absence of black surfers in the Cape waves and sees local white surfers’ indifference to their segregation. In this painful, torn place, he surfs alone.
Finnegan calls paddling out on a big day at Ocean Beach an “aimless, half-hysterical activity” in which “your brain struggle[s] to detect the underlying patterns in the surf.” From shore, Ocean Beach often looks god awful, and it is usually worse once you try paddling out. I’ve experienced this more often as a spectator on the dunes, watching surfers get repeatedly spat out on shore for all their efforts. Finnegan writes, “from down in the maelstrom, where you sometimes spent more time underwater than out in the visible world, and often got just one foam-edged breath between waves, it merely danced cruelly in the imagination: the theoretical solution to an impossibly complex problem.” For so many of us in the maelstrom of Trump’s election, struggling to catch a ragged breath from one cold plunge into shock to the next, surfing is more necessary now than ever. When I was finishing my dissertation, feeding on that endeavor’s daily diet of panic, self-loathing and despair, my advisor told me, “Keep surfing. It’s just academia.” I am revising this to call us to a commitment, to ourselves, each other, our democracy, and the other creatures we share this struggling planet with: Keep surfing. Everything is at stake. We are facing down an impossibly complex problem, an autocracy many of us have been led to believe could never happen here. In many ways, the problem’s bald ugliness is simple: here is our savage autocrat spoiled by much adulation. We have many historical precedents to learn from. Russia, Germany, Italy, Spain.
Surfing, perhaps more than other sports, could be considered apolitical by nature. It lacks the highly commercialized competition of NCAA sports in which obscene amounts of money are made, sometimes at the expense of its athletes. Despite some large commercialized professional competitions, it isn’t a venue in which kneeling during the national anthem is highly visible or even possible. Of course, like other forms of the apolitical, disengagement with politics is a luxury afforded to those whose path to the lineup is unimpeded, welcomed, and expected. Witness the price Bianca Valenti has paid for lobbying for women’s inclusion at Mavericks before the contest was eventually canceled altogether. A gift with one hand and a slap in the face with the other: the Mavericks organizers generously “allowed” women to compete, while delivering a paternal spank to an incredibly accomplished big wave surfer who spoke up. In a recent paddle out I organized for the 49 victims of the shooting at Orlando’s Pulse gay bar, several local health and women’s organizations eagerly offered their support, generously donated beautiful, handmade Hawaiian leis with each victim’s name attached in small, lovely script, printed programs, spread the word, and generally helped create a healing ritual in the water. But one local surf/lifestyle company declined to sign on for nominal support, citing fear of alienating investors and a desire to keep the personal and political separate. Even the commemoration of the dead in this revered tradition became politically untouchable, suddenly. The dead were mostly people of color, they were queers, and even after tragedy, they were politicized.
If one looks carefully into their own experiences in the water and the beautiful accouterments of this lifestyle, a question becomes obvious: who gets to be apolitical about surfing, or anything else, anymore? In the Bay Area, because tech billionaire Vinod Khosla has unrepentantly blocked access through “his” property to Martin’s Beach, plenty of surfers have woken up and gotten involved with organizations like the Surfrider Foundation. This is an issue that is immediate and glaringly unjust: most of us suffer under capitalism’s socioeconomic segregation, its prioritization of wealth and private property, thankfully tempered by the California Coastal Commission and the hard work of ocean activists. Surfing in what philosopher Donna Haraway more aptly calls the Capitalocene is inescapably political. The oceans are warmer, more acidic, and filled with plastic. As more surfers come to consciousness about this, we need a surfing philosophy and practice that grounds us as we continue the long, hard work of resistance to injustice and degradation. This practice must build upon the ongoing work of ocean protection and conservation. But it also must be a meditation on and methodology for deep, sustained engagement with injustice- what Haraway calls “staying with the trouble.” My surfer friends, mostly queer women, worry about the Trump Effect in the water. Will we be greeted with more male hostility and condescension than usual? On land, hate crimes against women, people of color, Muslims, and LGBTQ communities have proliferated since Trump’s election, even in liberal havens like Northern California. We are exhausted and afraid, and so we have to keep surfing for our own sanity and clarity. But surfing can no longer just be a retreat from worldly harm. It can and must be a tool for demanding life and justice and cutting down the deadly forces of greed, hatred, and delusion.
No one can describe or prescribe exactly what this tool is like. Finnegan talks about being an apprentice at Ocean Beach- and that is really what surfing is, everywhere. We never stop being apprentices. Every spot, every day, every condition is an opportunity to refine a craft, which is something I have tried to convey to beginner surfers to explain why it can be so frustrating to learn.
We are all apprentices in what is happening now and what’s to come. Some of us, of course, have been held to the fire for generations because of our race, gender, religion, and sexuality. But no matter where we are in our education, no one can dictate how to use the tools we choose. We all have to go through our own throttling, failure, and struggle toward self-recognition. Let’s start by unburdening the ocean of Conrad’s metaphor. The ocean is no vain, abusive demagogue. It is many different things, in many places, in different light and seasons. We can watch and listen, and try to absorb everything it has to show us. While it feels like the walls are closing in on what we have known as our democracy, we have to throw ourselves open to what’s coming, and to announce to all others, human and not, our mutual belonging.
