Obsession leads to understanding in surf memoir

“Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life”
William Finnegan
Penguin Press. $27.95

Review by Catherine Toth Fox
Special to the Star-Advertiser

Ever since William Finne-gan’s article about the San Francisco surf scene, “Playing Doc’s Games,” appeared in The New Yorker in 1992, fans of his writing have been waiting eagerly for his surfing memoir. It’s not unlike sitting at a lineup anticipating a forecasted swell that seems to be taking its time to get here.

Well, “Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life” is here. And it’s even better than one could have imagined.

Raised in California with a couple of school-year stints in Hawaii, Finnegan got the stoke early on. He came here first as a 13-year-old, living in a little cottage with his parents and three siblings on Kulamanu Street in the lap of Diamond Head, so close to the ocean he could walk down and paddle out. Which is what he did. Whenever he could.

Cliffs in the mid-1960s was a local break, and if Finnegan was the only haole, it didn’t matter.

“Nobody bothered me. Nobody vibed me. It was the opposite of my life at school.”

At Kaimuki Intermediate, the new arrival was routinely bullied. In shop class, a fellow student named Freitas hit him on the head with a two-by-four whenever the teacher wasn’t looking. “Bonk…bonk…bonk, a nice steady rhythm, always with enough of a pause between blows to allow me brief hope that there might not be another.” Forced to prove himself in fights, he was eventually rescued by a “racist gang” of tough haoles. “Our main enemies were the ‘mokes’ — which seemed to mean anyone dark and tough.”

With such a land life, his offshore life felt even more like paradise. Out at Cliffs, Finnegan made lasting friendships with Hawaiian and Japanese-American surfers who, he belatedly discovered, had been attending Kaimuki Intermediate with him, all along.

Explaining a surf break to a reader who’s never surfed is a challenge in itself, by the way. How do you describe the way a wave breaks — or why that even matters?

Even more arduous is describing a wave to someone who knows it well.

And this is Finnegan’s gift. He’s observant and expressive but shows careful restraint in his zeal. He says only what needs to be said, enough to create a vivid picture for the reader while masterfully giving that picture a kind of movement.

The waves as he describes them each have their unique characters, like the “thick, dark blue peaks (that) seemed to jump out of the deep ocean” (Kaikoos on O‘ahu) or “waves so beautiful, as they hurled themselves into the offshores, they made me a little queasy” (Honolua Bay on Maui). It really doesn’t matter if you’ve surfed these spots yourself, because, as Finnegan shows throughout his memoir, breaks are finicky, defiant, temperamental and hopelessly complicated. His experience is just that — his. And even if you jumped on a plane to Maui right now, you’ll never catch Honolua Bay exactly the way he did, and on acid, no less, in his 20’s. And it doesn’t matter. You’re riding that wave with Finnegan, shooting down the wall or getting thrashed on the reef.

In language that combines the practical and poetic: “Offshore winds — Blowing from land to sea, ideal for surfing … (They) wreathe waves in glory”— Finnegan helps the reader understand his ardor and appreciate just how onerous chasing the surf can be.

An adventurous idealist, Finnegan travels the world in search of pristine, unspoiled breaks. He gets bored in California, skunked in Guam and humbled in South Africa as a first-time teacher during the political turmoil of the late ‘70s. Along the way, he turns into an accidental anthropologist, learning about local culture, etiquette and topography. In the process, thanks to his interest in other people, his keen listening and observing, he gains a greater appreciation and understanding for the world around him. Which is transformative: “I wanted to learn new ways to be. I wanted to change, to feel less existentially alienated, to feel more at home in my skin, as they say, and in the world.”

Not surprisingly, he becomes a writer.

As he ages and continues to challenge himself with big waves, to sometimes terrifying effect, Finnegan also deftly weaves in the demands and rewards of family life, of being there for his dying parents and a young daughter who asks him to be more careful.

Finnegan’s struggle to resolve the search for that elusive perfect wave with the selfishness in which that drive is rooted is one of the strengths of this book. ”Barbarian Days” is an exploration of the world that just might inspire the reader to venture out, surfboard optional.