Surfing is incredibly difficult to capture. Be it in word, photo, video or conversation it is a slippery subject when trying to pin down the essence of the lifestyle and experience.
As Billabong has said in its tag line “Only a surfer knows the feeling.”
Explaining that feeling is no easy feat. The best magazine that I have come across that comes closest to describing surfing in picture and word is The Surfers Journal.
When it comes to video and film, Fishpeople is extraordinary and 180 Degrees South is a close second.
Down to words THE DROP”, which I have just finished reading from Thad Ziolkowski, is one of the finest surfing reads I have enjoyed for a long time.
HarperCollins has an affinity for sports publications and Harper Wave is excellent at its craft.
Ziolkowski writes about the addictive nature of surfing, tying up with real-life stories and medical research about drug addiction and recovery, commenting from his own personal experiences as well.
As a studied, well-travelled, well-experienced surfer with a PHD in literature and a Guggenheim Fellowship, and drug rehabilitated himself, Ziolkowski is able to express himself in a way that few of the rest of us can.
He writes about one of my favourite surfers from the ’70s: (forgive me while I extract some hefty quotes to demonstrate).
“In surfing, the premium placed on spontaneity and quick twitch reflexivity conditions surfers to quiet or mute the cautious prefrontal cortex and heed the limbic and instinctive.
“Such values arise from the nature of the sport itself, which is to say the protean nature of waves.
“The face of a wave as a field of attention and improvisation in which time slows to the point of becoming spatial and the right decisions are so ineluctably made that the act of choosing vanishes.
“This is the realm of the zone, of flow — the multivalent, synchronic present (In the neurological studies of flow states, one thing emerges as consistent: deactivation of the prefrontal cortex),” Ziolkowski expands on drug high and flow state, but working back to the favourite surfer I speak of ...
“Surfers who exploit and in effect celebrate the permutational nature of waves are the ones most beloved and revered, whereas those who impose a kind of template or preordained choreography on the wave may and often do win contests and world championships.
“The history of surfing teems with contest-winning machines but a relatively small number of inspiring performers — artists, shamans, the surfers with mana.
“The most electrifyingly spontaneous surfer in living memory, combining radical free, creative improvisation with the athletic ability to execute manoeuvres as they occurred to him, was Montgomery Ernest Thomas Kaluhiokalani, known by the nickname his grandmother gave him because of his curly hair, Buttons.
“One is born with a body of a certain kind, certain gifts and potentialities, certain limits.
“Buttons had the symmetrical musculature of a natural athlete who would have excelled at most any sport.
“In his surfing, the symmetry finds expression not only in his uncanny balance but in his cat-like ability to switch stance mid-manoeuvre, beginning a re-entry regular-foot then hopping around into goofy-foot along the coping just before riding back down.
“It astonished and delighted, as did the move for which he is best known, the carving 360, the ultimate form of curvilinear symmetry, the circle: a button — liquid graffiti.”
Thank you Ziolkowski for a magical mystery tour into the world of surfing, addiction and recovery. RIP Buttons who recovered from drug addiction to tragically be taken out by cancer.
To young readers, may I encourage — let salt water be the only drug you dabble in and even then, with that, manage with wisdom, diligence, discipline, enthusiasm and a mindful balance of expression and caution, but most of all, enjoy the ride.
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