Waves Pull at Him

A great friend recommended the book so I threw it in my Amazon list.  Somehow it made it past the winnowing on the last time I prepared an order and hit “send.”  “Barbarian Days” by William Finnegan was remarkable.  I never thought I’d care about waves.  I’ve waded out into the surf and hopped over waves and been occasionally knocked over by curls, spun around so I didn’t know which way was up.  If they’re big they impressive.  If they’re tidal I’ll watch replays of their devastation on Youtube.  But to paraphrase Lenny Bruce: ‘a wave’s a wave.’

William Finnegan oriented his life around waves and by end of his tale you can begin to understand why.  I had just passed through Newport Beach a few weeks back, the place Finnegan was born, and had ate breakfast three days in a row during that trip with surfers down below me at Laguna Niguel.  And though that’s not why I read the book just now, I was glad to have some fresh memories in my mind beyond the earliest Beach Boy lyric points of reference.  Hawaii, where I’ve never been is where he moved to when he was a boy in middle school, or so that is where is starts his tale.  His style is so unassuming, smart and approachable that even after considering the story for the first few pages I knew it would be the next thing I’d read from my pile. 

Waves pull at him and influences choices, to drop out of college, return to Hawaii when he did.  We don’t really learn much about the years he didn’t surf, working on the railroad in the West Coast, but the remarkable journey continues shortly thereafter that involves Guam, and Fiji, and Australia and Indonesia, ultimately to South Africa before returning to his homeland. 

I kept considering the man on the cover of the book jacket, the author and his friend, certainly in the middle of that trip, searching for the perfect waves.   I started out intrigued, because I reckoned, he looked a bit like me, at one time in my life. Irish mugs are like that.  And his realizations after years and years on the road, had resonance with my own.  Later he settles down in places I know well like San Francisco and Manhattan.  Certainly, though I never associated such places with surfing.  And only a dedicated wave-lover would bother with the freezing winter waves of either place when the surf swells sufficiently to make things interesting.

One might assume that repeated descriptions of curls and tubes and spray might become a bit tiresome after a while but that is not the case.  In his hand, they seem to take on the distinction of different lands, or different music, or different cuisine, consistently captivating.  Fourteen years beyond me in age, I could consider what’s up ahead, as he battles-on with waves thought eventually, as his kids grow and his parents retire, he admits the limits of age, himself.   It all mattered a lot, and as they say, I couldn’t put the book down.  In the end I stayed up far later than I should have till three in the morning finishing out his tale, as an act of fraternal camaraderie, disobedience and respect. 

Wednesday, 02/21/18