Scientists believe Bali’s Mt. Agung is due to erupt any day now. Photo: Jesse Wagstaff/Flickr
For surfers especially, as of exactly 4:40 p.m., Monday, all is well on the Island of the Gods. The Holy Mt. Agung volcano, standing at about 10,000 ft, has yet to blow her stack. With the hysteria of highland evacuations subsiding and all of Bali’s breaks well beyond the exclusion zone, the attitude here is far from feeling imperiled. It’s more like waiting for a solar eclipse. Spectacular, sure, but so far away as to be almost unimaginable.
There is good reason for this. The experience of surfing here on the “Ring of Fire” has always been closely paired with its tectonic shifts and upheavals. Little known and reported about Indonesian surfing is that most locals, from Simeulue to Nias to Lance’s Rights to Padang Padang and beyond, are finely tuned and connected to these subtle changes of our reef’s bottom contours on a daily basis due to the regular tectonic activity in this region.
Nowhere more than Nias, of course, resting directly atop one of the world’s largest and most active subduction zones and whose reef is more like a waterbed, changing the break back and forth with every tide.
But here in Bali the changes that the eruption of Mt. Agung will bring to the island’s surfers will be far different then when she erupted last in 1963. Back then, no internet, no cellphones, no computers or even telephones made for a much more mysterious and disastrous event with over 1100 dead. Today, with live feeds, better science, and actual emergency services in place, for surfers the reaction to the eruption will range mostly from inconvenient to gleeful to deeply religious.
For surfers, the rhythm of daily life continues normally on the island of Bali, despite fears of Mt. Agungs eruption scientists say is imminent. Photo: Trevor Murphy
Inconvenient to our Canggu brothers, with the seasonal trade winds they could suffer from the glassine ash fall. Gleeful to the surfers of the Bukit Peninsula, with the airport closed the surf will be far less crowded. But most importantly, deeply religious to the local surfers who count themselves among the faithful.
Mt. Agung, like Everest in Tibet, is the Mother Goddess of this island on whose hillsides nestles Pura Besakih, the Balinese Hindu faith’s most sacred temple. It also rests directly in the path of destruction. However, over the centuries, this temple has never been destroyed by the ferocious lava and pyroclastic flows that have scoured Agung’s slopes. Somehow, this type of destruction has always managed to flow around the Temple, leaving it as untouched as the ancient faith of her devotees.
So it is for surfers, in a way. Let us bear in mind that we are all connected to this summit in a relatively religious manner. One of our most influential surf films ever made, which is received with religious fervor even to this day, was named after the very summit of Mt. Agung. The Balinese people call the summit “The Morning of the World”, believing that each day on earth begins when the first rays of the sun find its summit. Filmmaker Alby Falzon discovered this fact and named his famous film after the summit. Except, back in 1971, he changed it to “Morning of the Earth”.
It had a better ring to it.
