Good News: Surfing Is Not A Dangerous Addiction

Some of surfing's oldest myths die the hardest.

Recently, while randomly checking the internet I've seen one of the hoarier old fables being recycled. To wit: that surfing is an addiction that causes the ruination of the participant; that we become lost to society by this impenetrable obsession.

If it was ever true - maybe the Californians in the late-50's living cheek by jowl in Quonset huts on the North Shore stealing chickens and spearing fish to survive, or the classic Aussie feral who'd roll out of a foetid, malarial swamp in Indo to pack a skeletal frame into a perfect tube - those days are long gone now. Technology, socio-economic 'progress' and the total integration of the activity into the mainstream have rendered the myth of a surfer as a transcendent outlaw from society completely obsolete.

Before we proceed, just look around at your own circle of mates. Of those hardcore surfers, who among them are wastrels who've shipwrecked their lives on surfings' shallow shoals? Maybe you can think of one or two who fell by the wayside, yet in the modern game, to continue on with a surfing life you need an act. A job, or a business, some way of funding it. We've always confused the exceptions for the rule and the rule is surfers getting jobs, taking their kids surfing in Indonesia (if they can), holding it down and muddling through just like everyone else. The rule is dabblers and quitters and weekend warriors getting in a turn and a closeout reo before they return to the office on Monday. Paying the mortage and the school fees. Any uniqueness is purely a delusionary self-conceit.

Surf media likes to portray our blessed activity as one that is singular in its relationship to the natural world (guilty as charged) but even the most cursory glance at other activities shows that to be bunkum.

Does the emotive tug of a great surf photo build a unrealistic fantasy? (Andrew Shield)

Skiing, mountain climbing, rock climbing, all have their devotees equally absorbed into the dynamics of the natural world. Fishing has a literature that stretches back centuries detailing an almost unbelievably complex matrix of biology and natural forces. American novelist and fly fisherman Tom McGuane, in a famous piece written for Sports Illustrated entitled 'The Longest Silence', described a decades-long obsession with catching a permit on a fly. He started the essay with an admission that for him it was the unproductive periods of fishing - the long silences - that were most emphatic. And fly fishing for permit was so unbelievably unproductive that there were less than fifty people worldwide who had managed the feat. Deciphering the innumerable waterways and flats of the Florida Keys, each with its own peculiarities was a lifetime's work. And that was just to get to the starting line, before he'd even put a fly in front of the fish. It makes showing up to a wavepool to pay your money for twelve waves look infantile.

Technology has shrunk the world, especially the oceanic parts of it that make up the bulk of our planet's surface. Craig Ando didn't need months to explore and wait out for swells in his recent edit. He didn't need to sacrifice his relationships and employment to surf in remote Indo. Word of mouth, Google Earth, forecasting, and a strike mission got him in and out and back to the workaday world. Anyone with an internet connection can do it, and if they are of a certain ilk, can try and monetise it as an influencer.

I used to cleave to the romantic ideal of the hardcore committed surfer. The obsessed. The addicted for life. On a final night on the North Shore, waiting for a ride to the airport, I was passed out on a couch in Owl Chapman's slummy bedsit behind Sunset Beach. I don't know what we'd been up to except it was no good. Smoking joints or worse, probably. Our ride arrived. Owl woke up with a blankie wrapped around his knees. He looked like every other old man passed out in front of the television, not a big wave rider still surfing Sunset Beach and Waimea every time it broke.

He told me out by the letterbox in the cool night air: “There ain't nothin' like ridin' a cool, blue wave. No skiing, no mountain climbing, nuthin'. It's so sensuous, so close to nature. It's a better me”. I thought that was gospel truth for every man, woman, and child fortunate enough to ride a wave.

I was wrong.

I read somewhere it was almost unfair to introduce people to surfing because it would take over their lives and rule their day to day existence. Yet over the next decade I introduced thousands of people to it, as a (despised) surf instructor/guide.

And at the end of the week I'd watch incredulous as these people ticked the box and moved on with life. I was slapped in the face by Nassim Nicholas Taleb's “hidden evidence”. In this context, the cohort that don't find surfing addictive or obsession forming, and who also form the vast majority. We don't hear from them because they don't write books, become surf writers, or become surf commenters. Out of the thousands I introduced to surfing, how many of them cashed in their chips, brought acreage behind Streaky Bay or Rio Nexpa to raise alpacas and live the surfing lifestyle? Who became an expert tuberider in Indo? None. A handful moved to cities near the coast and continued to dabble.

Still they were kooks, the legions of the unjazzed. Squares. No-one salty and hardcore with a skill-set would ever quit, surely? Yet they did. They still do. Circling the drain is a common reason: They get older and fatter and have less time to do it, shortboards don't feel so good, satisfaction declines. Declining satisfaction reduces motivation. Weeks turn into months. Before long it's 'fuck it, where's my golf clubs?'

It may not be a dangerous obsession yet surfing can be downright dangerous, especially when Pipeline is feathering on Second Reef and unloading on the inside. (Josh Bystrom)

At the other end of the myth - the myth of the hardcore - we overreach massively about the level of sacrifice required to maintain a surfing habit. Derek Hynd when asked by Andrew Kidman in 'Beyond Litmus' if there were sacrifices to be made in choosing surfing as the main thing in your life, said “I don't think so...freedom's no sacrifice. The end of a good day [surfing] is hard to beat anywhere doing anything”.

It's ridiculously easy to live as a surfer and hold down a job in a city. A good, proper white collar job. Pound nails, tile bathrooms, build pools, hang gyprock, render brick, unblock dunnies and the world is your oyster: raise a family and get go-outs. Modern forecasting outsources most of the semi-mystical knowledge that had to be so laboriously grafted.

We maintain the myths because they are beautiful and sustaining. They make money for people. Because when whitey found surfing, lions like Jack London and later Tom Blake weaved so much magic into it we'd rather get drunk on a spoonful of their glorious syrup than grimace through a slug of cold hard reality.

Look around. There are shapers who don't surf. Surf Photographers! Hardly any of them surf. What's up with that?!

Don't get me wrong. I'm not running down surfing here. Quite the contrary. It's a force for good in my life, a force for good in almost everyone I know who does it. People perhaps underestimate how rare it is to have a passion in life. The masses live what Thoreau termed, “lives of quiet desperation”. This isn't a modern phenomenon. Polish writer Joseph Conrad described in his novel Lord Jim how it was, “extraordinary how we go through life with eyes half shut, with dull ears, with dormant thoughts. Perhaps it's just as well; and it may be that it is this very dullness that makes life to the incalculable majority so supportable and so welcome."

I don't believe it is possible to paddle out into the vast Pacific, or the stormy Atlantic, or the mysterious Indian, let alone the indefatigable circumpolar Southern Ocean and remain in that dull state of mind. It transports you into a different reality - no matter how many waves you catch, or how pumping, or shit the surf is.

Some have described surfing with its dependence on natural forces (wavepools excepted of course) as oppressive and that quitting was liberating as they no longer had to factor those natural forces into everyday decisions. I can't relate to that. After spending some time in the UK away from the ocean I found not being able to connect to the circumpolar or Pacific-wide drama of wind and tide and wave, and all the action and variety and change within those parameters made life seem impossibly small. 'Wow', I thought, 'so this is how normal people live? Fuck that.'

A final observation about the utility of surfing in the modern world. A recent YouTube video of Tom and Nick Carroll talking about boardriders club Newport Plus was hosted by the CEO of a hardware brands company. Towards the end of the video Tom points to the club trailer, posted up with corporate sponsors: Real Estate, hardware, building companies, etc. and notes how the club has transformed from a bunch of teenage reprobates into a pillar of society. Much like a rowing or rugby club, where networks and patronage offer opportunities to participants.

In short, surfing now offers a way to connect with middle class society, not become an outlaw to it. And that's probably no bad thing.

It's not an obsession, it's not some dangerous addiction waiting to ruin your life, but it is still magic.

Can all three of those things be true?

Tell me if I've got this completely wrong.

//STEVE SHEARER