It was late afternoon in western Sonoma County, and with winter slowly waning, the sky was starting to get dark. Still, I’m tagging along with two of my close friends and classmates, August and Elijah. They’re heading out to the surf for their daily wave-riding ritual.

They go out on rainy days like today just as the parishioner goes to church every Sunday. But to them, surfing is very different from the devout parishioners strict religious traditions.

“It’s more of an addiction,” August says, hurriedly loading their surf equipment into his car. “But a good one, you know? Because of all the time I have to surf, senior year has been so much easier.”

I think it would be fair to call surfing a meditative activity: a combination of the subjectively good parts of a religion and the good parts of addiction. Unlike most churchgoers, many surfers claim to experience a state of divinity every time they crest a wave. It’s mostly the overzealous religious followers that say the same thing about churchgoing.

There’s something there...

Do all surfers know what impact surfing has on their life? Why has it been such a cultural phenomenon in coastal regions? Even the best surfers in the world can’t make up their mind.

“It just means so much to all of us,” August says. We’re driving out of Sebastopol now, heading out to Jenner, about 30 miles northwest of here, as the crow flies. He continues, “it’s definitely a lifestyle for most of us.”

They aren’t expecting big waves today. It’s raining, and “stuff isn’t great on days like this.” Apparently, I won’t see them catch much. Little did we know…

* * *

I’ve never surfed a day in my life. The closest I’ve gotten to surfing lessons was a few years of body surfing in the Pacific Ocean, an activity my amphibious parents decided I should learn as a small child. I decided that I wasn’t a huge fan of hypothermia and salt water, so as soon as they relented, I stopped going into the ocean. It’s been six years since I’ve actually swum in the sea, and I feel as though that’s been a snag in my search for self-discovery. I decided to look more into the sport that’s been around for a millennium, surfing. I felt as though I’ve been missing out on religion, another aspect of western culture, especially in my small coastal hometown. Actually, the spread of surfing was eerily close to the spread of many world religions. It begins with a remote group of native people.

The first Hawaiian was most likely from the Polynesian Marquesas, arriving on the mid-pacific islands in double-hulled canoes propelled by woven sails. Early Marquesan- Hawaiian artifacts date from around the 5th century AD. Following the Polynesians, some Tahitians stumbled upon the new Polynesian islands seven centuries later.

A culture without a deep knowledge and respect of the ocean couldn’t have done this 3760-kilometer journey, so surfing (already a Polynesian way of life) became not only a hierarchical activity on the islands, but a philosophy, a way of life, a mating strategy, and a spiritual exercise. The Hawaiian verb for surf is Nalu, also meant “to investigate” and “to search after truth and the origin of things.”

An hour later, as I waited for my friends on the beach a few miles south of Jenner, I repeated a native Hawaiian surfing chant wishing them skill and glory:

Give me the waves that I may ride upon them

Lest I be ashamed

When I reach the shore

On native Hawaii, surfing was a social function not reserved for any gender or class. The best surfers would most often become chiefs sure, but everyone was equal on the water. The best surfers benefited from their skill only once they had arrived back on land.

Hawaiian culture evolved around surfing. The Hawaiians would find productive ways of living that would maximize the amount of leisure/surfing time. Their culture would’ve disintegrated without this surfing ritual that they had built their lives around.  Luckily, the moon kept revolving and the waves kept crashing, fueling the culture for years to come.

Little did they know…

Captain James Cook landed his ship Discovery upon the Hawaiian islands in 1778, bringing a massive wave that even the greatest of all surfing chiefs, King Kalaniopuu, couldn’t wrangle.

Cook’s sailors feared the massive waves that crested Waikiki beach. They noted, to their fear and surprise, that “young boys and girls played amid such tempestuous waves, the ones of which the hardiest of our seamen would have trembled to face.” Contrary to this, the Hawaiian women believed that these sailors were gods, and that their sudden appearance had a divine purpose. Normal hawaiian nobility, those who had conquered the waves for centuries, were now mere mortals compared to these strange white creatures from the waves. Tensions between the native hawaiians and the sailors grew as the women began to ignore the natives’ sexual surfing enterprises and focus more on these new sea men. This early extraction of the Hawaiian way of life produced disease and mixed-race children, signaling the beginning of the now inevitable downfall of the natives’ culture.

The natives originally welcomed Cook and his crew, but a division in social customs eventually led to the demise of both groups. The Hawaiians lacked the concept of private property and began to take little things from Discovery, a habit the sailors saw as hostile. After the Hawaiians made off with a lifeboat, the situation turned violent. They beat Cook to death on the beach. It’s somewhat symbolic, of course, but who really cares about symbolism as long as the waves just keep on crashing.

The sailors also noted that the small island of Oahu was abundant with the very fragrant sandalwood trees. Reports of the lucrative resources on the island made their way back to England and trade soon overtook the islands. The Chinese, while trying to find an appropriate way-station for Pacific trade, rediscovered properties of the sandalwood trees that Cook’s crew had found 30 years earlier. The Chinese used the trees as materials for incense, building, and medicine. King Kamehameha, a mighty surfer, ruled by the idea of uniting the islands under a singular monarchy, hell-bent on international exchange.

Kamehameha regulated the destruction of sandalwood forests until his death in 1819. The “developed” world then took that as an incentive to pillage the forests and transition the islands to a cash economy, the income of which would almost always go to the chiefs who, according to Peter Westwick’s The World in the Curl, “had developed a taste for fine western clothing and furniture, ships, and guns.” The chiefs began to shift “workers from fields and fish ponds to sandalwood harvests.” This new economy meant less leisure time, less time for surfing. The native Hawaiian culture began to disintegrate. But the waves themselves remained.

* * *

August, Elijah, and I had turned the corner onto Salmon Creek, a beach well known for its local activity and unpredictable waves. August is talking to me, but we both turn when we hear Elijah yelp. They begin to “froth,” a word in the surfing lexicon used to describe the feeling one gets when seeing a great set for the first time. Right now, they’re freaking out.

“Dude dude dude look at that A-frame!”

“I wonder if Boardwalks is firing too.”

“Let me call my dad.”

From what I understood, the waves exceeded their expectations, and they decided to just stay at Salmon to surf. The wind keeps whipping around us, and the rain keeps pelting our skin. I’m shivering my ass off, but they seem unbothered. They’re still gushing over the surf. I said they should make a surf lingo Rosetta Stone. I don’t think they heard me.  Their minds were set on the waves. As August told me before: “Sometimes my mind won’t focus on anything else before I get my fix.”

That sounds awfully close to addictive behavior, but really, what do I know.

* * *

Disease had wiped out nearly all Native Hawaiians by the time the country lost its political independence in the late 19th century. This loss paved the way for appropriation, and as the native Hawaiians succumbed to the pressures of the machine world, surfing moved to a new demographic with leisure time: the “haoles,” white people (sometimes with half Hawaiian heritage) who surfed the sets once the old native Hawaiian lineup had died off. These haoles birthed the idea of modern surfing in the early 20th century, triggering the start of the Romantic era in Hawaii. Surfing, with its rebellious image and romantic following, made a comeback during the Romantic era, but it had lost its religious and philosophical roots. The Romantic writers who traveled to Hawaii (thus the era’s name) hailed it’s healing properties, as well as its self-realizing and heroic connotations. Through these writings, the world began to perceive Hawaiian surfing as a decadent, heathen lifestyle. The haoles and romantics condoned the lifestyle, the rest of the western world admonished it until the Romantic ideals began to catch on.

One haole was a pioneer in the emergence of modern surfing and its eventual overwhelming popularity. His name was George Freeth, a quarter-Hawaiian man who pursued the sport as a teenager, having seen paintings of his ancestors riding the waves at Waikiki Beach. He soon became one of the great surfers on the island and was notorious to any visitor.

Two unlikely characters then entered the story. One was Alexander Hume Ford, the son of a wealthy South Carolina plantation owner. He took an interest in Freeth having visited the island as a young adult. He described Freeth as “a paragon of modern youth. Pre-Christian of course, yet when he rides the waves he’s almost Christ-like.”

It really was the Romantic Era.

The second unlikely character was the author and explorer Jack London, who made a trip to Waikiki in 1907. Ford knew London’s reputation as an outdoorsman and cornered London in the dining room of the Royal Hawaiian, seeking to use London as surfing’s passage into a positive realm of American culture. Ford Gushed over the revival of the Old Hawaiian Sport through Freeth’s skill and convinced London to try it.

After a day on the water, London touted surfing as “a royal sport of the natural kings of the earth.”

London’s press boosted tourism on the islands and the surf lifestyle flourished, overtaking the resources available on the island for such an influx of people. Running out of space in the line-ups, surfers were forced to spread over the globe.

* * *

My father grew up in a house with five other siblings on a Malibu Beach. Their lives revolved around the waves in the same way my friends’ lives do today. But people from the “valley” (Pasadena) looked down upon my father and his siblings. “They saw us as hippies, and in a sense surfing was countercultural,” my father recalls “long hair, lazy, pot smoking. We didn’t do any of that though…

“Ok, just the long hair.”

My friends still have to deal with that stigma today. They believe the root of those beliefs to be confusion.

“While other people are just waking up and getting their caffeine fix, we’re out on another world. They just don’t understand that feeling.”

But even my friends have to admit that more people are surfing now than when my father surfed. It’s not looked down upon at all by a majority of the population. But when did this shift occur? And why?

The surfing lexicon is another aspect of surfing that verifies its status as a distinct subculture and an output of the modern surf phenomenon. I hear my surfer friends use it all of the time, not just in the water. Whenever I interviewed a surfer (excluding my father, but I don’t think he used this lingo back in his day) their speech would eventually slip into this collection of words and phrases supposedly brought on by the thought of the ocean.

The relationship between surf culture in the water and surf culture on land revolves around that transcendental state of cresting a wave that all surfers know, but have trouble describing, even among themselves. So, they express themselves through art and other media, a new surf culture. This new surf culture is wholly hedonistic and renaissance: it’s very different from the Native Hawaiian surf culture. This new culture began to appear in the 1960s, working parallel with the San Francisco counterculture movement.

There are two parts of surf culture: the internal activities that surfers partake in on land, and the external public images of surfing. Having a father who surfed as a child, I have had exposure on both fronts. My father hates The Beach Boys (“only one of whom actually surfed,” my father says) and the pop-culture image they created. This image has bothered surfing traditionalists for years. The Beach Boy model modern surf culture trash heap brings wealthy middle-Americans and land-lubber white people with no knowledge of internal surf affairs to the ocean. They are to modern surfers what the Romantics were to the native Hawaiians. But they’re only another wave of surfers that contributed to the modern issue of localism. Surfing’s increasing popularity is making localism a more prevalent problem today, but it has existed for at least a century.

Localism emerged alongside modern surfing on the shores of Waikiki, where the native Hawaiians would beat visiting haoles just because they were white. The Da Hui, sort of the Hell’s Angels of the water, would break up lineups of haole surfers encroaching on local beaches with slashed tires and fist-fights. Localism spread to California and Australia too as a combatant to the increasing popularity of surfing amongst the populus. Good surf spots lost their sanctity as the sport established itself as a hedonistic activity for the masses.

Surfing and conflict tend to go together well: the Da Hui formed in the 1970s, a time of social unrest and civil rights activism amongst native hawaiians. These tyrannical localists defended Hawaiian culture against appropriation despite the fact that many Da Hui weren’t even Hawaiian themselves. They were from the mainland United States, sometimes not even near the coast: Eddie Rothman, the co-founder and ringleader of the Da Hui, hailed from Philadelphia. Many localists are not locals to a surf spot, but just surfers who managed to master a set before they were apprehended. It’s a game of skill, but it’s also a testament to the power surfing has over an individual.

In the late 20th century, as more and more people moved to Hawaii with each passing decade, Hawaiian locals began to protest the loss of their breaks. Pro surfing competitions were often contested by the Da Hui and other locals. They would “shamelessly steal waves from visiting pros at crucial times.” To try and deter further protests, the pro leagues adopted the Da Hui as surf patrol. This only further monopolized breaks and made the lives of Hawaiian locals even worse.

So for the Da Hui, surfing is a spiritual activity. Saying it’s just an addiction isn’t a good enough defense for localization. They must be trying to see it as the native Hawaiians did: a philosophy, a lifestyle.

I asked August about this problem, and he told me he knows people that get mad at anyone, regardless of skill level if you “screw up their ride just a little bit.”

Elijah added: “They pop your bubble.”

I asked my father, once a die-hard localist, what his motives were.

“The valley kids just annoyed us.”

I guess many of the things in surf culture don't have any ulterior motives. Surfers just do what they can to hit the best waves consistently. It is an addictive behavior.

What do the actions of localists say about western culture? Their actions just verify the hedonism of both surfing and western values.

I also think localism centers around the meditative aspects of surfing, referring to the way the waves can sometimes be sanctuaries for the surfers. For example, technology is a boon in some aspects, but it draws them away from the sanctity of the activity.

An addiction deals with two sides of the same coin: the side that makes the addict feel good, and the side that slowly debilitates them. In exploring whether or not surfing was an addiction, I tried to tackle both sides.

But the debilitating side of the surfing addiction isn’t clear; it’s an intrinsic problem. There are health problems that come with a lifestyle of surfing, and there’s the issue of localization and the underlying colonial roots, but those are all extrinsic.  I wondered if there was something else, some intrinsic threat to the hedonic surfer.

But maybe surfing isn’t a religious tradition or an addiction or anything aforementioned. I can’t say for sure, but I don’t think my surfing friends can either, so maybe the discussion of these hypotheses doesn’t really matter. Surfing isn’t anything but a ritual; surfers today respect it in the same way the Native Hawaiians did, and they partake in it everyday as a ritualistic and healing exercise. The difference is that surfers today just don’t care about what surfing is or what it isn’t, or what it represents or symbolizes. They just like to do it.

It’s just their life, as August tells me:

“The moment you crest a wave, the energy of those molecules of water that have traveled across an ocean break upon you. You’re riding the life-blood of nature, the smallest things on Earth. I see it as a metaphor for life: you let the waves flow by, and you miss some, give some to others, but then you catch one, and it takes you away, to that other place.”

* * *

I began to walk towards August, who was sprinting towards me, supposedly unburdened after fifty minutes of heavy surf. He began to speak to me in a characteristically excited tone.

“Best day we’ve ever had!”

“Best drop I’ve ever had!”

“You’re so lucky you came out today.”

“I turned so heavy on that crest, dude.”

Elijah followed soon after, equally as elated. The high after the hit, I suppose. As we drove home, I could barely get a word in. They gushed about past exploits and runs. They gave me fudge. We talked about the fear factor. I asked what was going through their head as they crested a wave. They replied in unison as if rehearsed, “nothing.” It’s a truly zen moment.

I asked them about the difference between surfing up in Northern California and surfing in Southern California. They said it added to the experience to surf up here, as you’re more an individual in a natural, craggy, landscape, even if the surf is more predictable down there. They felt as though it’s always too crowded in Southern California. I asked if they thought more of the North Coast. If they thought of it as a sanctuary. “Yes.” August said, “but definitely not a peaceful one.”

We had arrived back at August’s house. The rain was coming down hard now, but we all knew that the waves themselves remained.