With some of Europe’s best beach breaks, France is a special place for surfers worldwide. And in light of the recent attacks, the surf community, along with proponents of peace everywhere, are deeply saddened by the atrocities.
For us in France getting the news about the November 13 Paris terror attacks was a little like finding out about 9/11: surprise, then disbelief, then shock. On a Friday evening in Marseille we were eating dinner with friends. As a little reminder of how interconnected our world is today, an American guest visiting Southern France with his wife received a text message from his daughter in New York. Then it was off for an evening of smart phones and worried calls and helpless speculation. Size-wise, France is like a big U.S. state and almost everyone has friends and family in Paris.
My son lives there with his wife and one year old. He reassured us everyone was fine but pointed out that one of the attacks happened literally around the corner. Then I remembered the bar they often go to for a drink, just next door to the sushi joint where we all had lunch a month ago. We would find out that 19 people died there.
To understand the district where most of the attacks occurred, think Brooklyn or Venice, then add an even more lively sidewalk cafe scene. The area’s ethnically mixed, and most people are twenty and thirty-ish, cool, tolerant, educated. Like my filmmaker son and his actress wife, many are artists. It was a warm Friday evening, the best moment of the week. Always full, the bars and cafés were even more packed because people like to go out to watch soccer on TV, and France, which will host the European Championships in June, was playing World Champion Germany at the Stade de France.
I don’t need to go into the unspeakable horror that followed; we’ve all seen the endless TV reports. The open, accepting vibe of the area — also where the January Charlie Hebdo attacks happened — just adds to the irony. Most ironic, though, is the contract between the sunny pleasure-loving, life-embracing joy of French culture and the dark utter negativity of the bitter, frustrated vampires who somehow thought they were finding meaning in their Kalashnikovs and suicide vests.
What does this have to do with surfing? Maybe more than you’d think. If the culture of France and the surfing life are marked by one quality, it is savoring the joy of life lived in the present moment. Next weekend those café tables will be full again. Political and military responses matter, of course, but if there’s one thing most of us can do to resist the moral black hole of terrorism it’s fight the fear and embrace fully the lives we have in that present instant. There’s less of a difference than you’d think between paddling out and strolling out on a warm evening to sit down at a table on the boulevard with friends.
