Barbarian Days: A Sufing Life

as will the themes of obsession, risk, and ambivalent dedication to questionable pursuits.

Since these guys were not, I knew, San Francisco surfers, of whom there were only a few dozen...

The first wave snapped my ankle leash—a ten-foot length of polyurethane, strong enough to pull a car uphill—as if it were a piece of string. I swam underneath that wave and then kept swimming, toward the open ocean. The second wave looked like a three-story building. It, like the first wave, was preparing to break a few yards in front of me. I dived deep and swam hard. The lip of the wave hitting the surface above me sounded like a bolt of lightning exploding at very close range, and it filled the water with shock waves. I managed to stay underneath the turbulence, but when I surfaced I saw that the third wave of the set belonged to another order of being. It was bigger, thicker, and drawing much more heavily off the bottom than the others. My arms felt rubbery, and I started hyperventilating. I dived very early and very deep. The deeper I swam, the colder and darker the water got. The noise as the wave broke was preternaturally low, a basso profundo of utter violence, and the force pulling me backward and upward felt like some nightmare inversion of gravity. Again, I managed to escape, and when I finally surfaced I was far outside. There were no more waves, which was fortunate, since I was sure that one more would have finished me. Mark was there, though, perhaps ten yards to my right. He had been duck-diving and escaping the unimaginable just as narrowly as I had. His leash had not broken, however; he was reeling in his board. As he did so, he turned to me, with a manic look in his eyes, and yelled, “This is great!” It could have been worse. He could have yelled, “This is interesting!”

There are great days in the fall, when the first north and west swells of the season meet the first offshore winds. Offshores—winds that blow from land to sea—are the wonder drug of surfing. Because they cross so little water before they reach the waves, they create no troublesome chop, and because they strike the waves from the front they don’t force the waves to topple prematurely and haphazardly, the way onshores do, but instead delay their breaking, letting the power of a wave rise, gather, and concentrate in the crest before it can overcome the wind’s resistance. Offshores thus make waves hollower (more concave) and cleaner (more regular) and faster. And yet the sum effect of offshore winds is greater than any of its parts. On a good day, their sculptor’s blade, meticulous and invisible, seems to drench whole coastlines in grace. In San Francisco, the winter offshores start to blow after the first snowfall in the High Sierras. Fall surf benefits in the local estimation from the inevitable comparison with the months of fogbound, onshore slop that an Ocean Beach summer entails. And the first large swells of the season actually do arrive in November, often before the sandbars are ready to turn them into ridable surf. In December and January, though, the combination of huge winter storm swells and local beach and weather conditions frequently produces waves that beggar description.