“Most epic sessions for me end with breaking the icicles off my hood and rushing home to a hot shower,” says Scott Laderman. Duluth looking nice and toasty in December 2008. Photo: T.C. Worley
Surf scholars pray for jobs at schools on the top 10 surf universities lists, a favorite feature of mine. We dream of waking up and surfing “the Lane” and then marching off to lecture in sandals on UCSC’s nature preserve of a campus. Or to have the key to Blacks to make the quick dash back to UCSD from an awesome A-frame Szechuan. It is a dream, however, because so few of us get to dial in an academic position that offers constant access to good surf and a stable teaching career with opportunities for advancement. In light of this, I find myself constantly asking,“Where have all the surf profs gone?”
The answer is: everywhere. Sure, some capitulate and take inland gigs. The job becomes more important than the wave count, which is quite practical and understandable, albeit, kinda boring. While others, however, still score in some of the most unlikely places and continue to work surfing into their research and teaching.
Scott Laderman, a professor of history at the University of Minnesota, Duluth of all places, still gets his share of waves (on Lake Superior and beyond), and is also a productive scholar. He and I met up in Central America to plan a Surfing, War and Tourism short term study abroad program to Nicaragua. I just had to ask him a few questions related to studying abroad and surfing the great lakes. I also wanted to find out more about Empire in Waves, which should be required reading for all surfers and had to have been inspired by some of his own globetrotting.
Scott, how did you get introduced to surfing and how important was it to your early years?
I grew up near the coast in L.A., and surfing was just one of those things that people learned to do there. It’s like hockey in Minnesota.
Surfing has always been very important to me. I got in the water as often as I could when I was young, and most of my friendships were with other surfers. The beach was in many ways the center of my social existence.
How did surfing (if at all) play into your decision to pursue a doctoral degree in Minnesota?
I wasn’t thinking about surfing when pursuing my doctoral degree. Well, at least not as a research topic. I was a bit worried when I left California for Minnesota to begin graduate school. I knew almost nothing about Minnesota. I had heard that there was surfing on the Great Lakes, but all the photos I had seen were of small, windblown crap. Not only that, but I was in the Twin Cities, which was nearly three hours from Lake Superior. I assumed when I started grad school that I would finish my coursework and then rush back to California, where I would write my dissertation. But that’s not how it worked out. I came to love Minnesota and decided to stay. When the job in Duluth opened up as I was finishing my dissertation, I excitedly applied. Duluth is on the shores of Lake Superior. It’s a great town in a beautiful area, and it gets better waves than you might think.
How often do you get to surf in Duluth and can you describe the epic Duluthian surf day for you?
The frequency of surf depends on how good of a season we’re having. The Great Lakes region relies entirely on wind swell (though, with a few hundreds miles of fetch, it can sometimes look like ground swell), with the best surf – usually the only surf – from the early fall through the late spring. In an exceptional year, I might be able to surf a couple of times a week. In an average year, it’s more like a session every two or three weeks. In a bad year, which is what we’re having now, I might get out once a month or so. For me an epic day is just like an epic day for many people: glassy, light offshores, and head-high to overhead. The only difference here is that those epic days tend to come when it’s bitingly cold. Minnesota isn’t exactly known for its balmy winters. So most epic sessions for me end with breaking the icicles off my hood and rushing home to a hot shower.
How would you quickly summarize Empire in the Waves for to someone who hasn’t read it? How did you come by the desire to write the book, or when did you decide surfing was important enough to write an academic book about? Why should a surfer read it?
Empire in Waves is not a blind celebration of surfing, as many popular surfing books and especially documentary films seem to be. Rather, it provides an international history of the ways that modern wave-riding has intersected with colonialism and empire-building, cultural diplomacy, major protest movements, and neoliberal capitalism. Basically, what I did is combine my professional interest in the history of U.S. foreign relations with my personal interest in surfing and surf culture.
I first started thinking about the book when I was interning at SURFER magazine in the early 1990s. In particular, I was struck by the ways that surfers envisioned Indonesia. It seemed impossible to open up a surfing magazine at that time that didn’t feature enticing photos of the country. Yet as a surfer active in human rights issues, including the Indonesian occupation of East Timor, I knew that there was a side to Indonesia – a brutal, U.S.-backed authoritarian state with an appalling human rights record – that most surfers didn’t seem to think about. Why was this? I wondered. Most books begin with a question, and that one was mine.
Why have you now decided to take a group of undergraduates to study Surfing War and Tourism in Nicaragua next summer? What would you personally like to gain from teaching a course like this in the field? What do you hope your students take away from participating?
Teaching a class called Surfing, War, and Tourism seemed like a great opportunity to tell this more complicated story of surfing while introducing students to the waves of Nicaragua, a country with a long history of U.S. involvement, including the terror of the Contra war in the 1980s. Students will have an opportunity to learn some history for college credit, visit some beautiful colonial cities, and surf some great waves. It seems cruel to study surfing without actually doing some surfing, so this class makes that possible.
Every dog has its day. Duluth, February 2012. Photo: Supplied by Author
