On Surfing
Looking back on the last twenty years of my life, I can trace my happiness or sense of well-being or worth around how healthy or involved my relationship was with surfing. It’s a remarkable thing, honestly, how much pleasure surfing can bring a surfer, and how much emptiness it can leave, too. For me, as I slide (gracefully) into my thirties, evaluating and reevaluating my relationship with surfing has been one of the true existential challenges, and one of the most rewarding.
There’s a true comfort in knowing that, tragedies or freak accidents notwithstanding, I’ll have this thing in my life which brings me a great deal of happiness and joy and community and pleasure, not to mention travel and adventure and just a much broader existential horizon.
It sounds cliche, and you hear a lot of professional surfers or industry guys (both clubs I’ve never really been a part of) say this, but surfing has given me everything. Through some tangential way, surfing has opened every door and provided some foundation for every good thing in my life. My most valued friendships, my most important professional connections, basically every good woman who ever loved me, even—somehow you can trace everything back to surfing.
And I don’t necessarily think just being a surfer is what people find value in, but that in my deep, obsessive, and gregarious love for surfing and the happiness it brings me, there is potential for that deep, obsessive, gregarious love and happiness elsewhere in my life. Surfing has given me a happiness high water mark, and for that I’m eternally grateful.
Well, that’s a complicated question. If there’s no waves, I stay pretty busy, get lots of work done, and I really enjoy those stretches. But if there’s waves, I’ll go nuts if I can’t get in the water, or if I’m missing good windows and my phone is blowing up with text messages. I’ll last a day or two. Actually, that’s not true. I broke my toe and foot the fourth day I was in Hawaii this year, and spent three weeks in a foam bot, hobbling around the North Shore. Basically, not being able to surf when there are waves—those are the times that try men’s souls.
My Pops got my brother and I in the water when we were tiny, so it was always around. But I can more or less remember when I knew I wanted to be a capital-S Surfer. Like, when it got its hooks in me. There was a good hurricane swell on the Gulf, and Pops took my brother and me down to the beach with him. I can remember driving over the bridge and seeing the water, and these waves breaking way out on the outer sandbars that you could see above the sand dunes and the sea grass, and the red flag on the lifeguard tower’s flag pole just pinned. I remember pulling into the parking lot, and there was that electricity that fills a surf spot’s parking lot. Guys waxing their boards, sprinting across the lot, shouting to each other. I remember guys giving Pops that sort of knowing look, that head nod, throwing shakas. These sort of obvious little gestures that marked your membership in the club. And then just sitting on the beach, guys coming up to Pops to chat, talking about waves they’d gotten. It was all so alive and exciting, and just felt like this amazing little secret world that I wanted to be a part of. This would have been in the early-’90s, so surfing was a lot smaller, and certainly on the Gulf Coast it was an even smaller subculture than elsewhere. So it felt like a very cool little world to have access to at a really young age, and I don’t think that feeling has changed.
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Michael is a writer and photographer born in Florida as a first-generation American to Austrian and South African parents. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Bitter Southerner, and The Surfer’s Journal among other magazines.
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