Review | Barbarian Days | The Surfer’s Journal

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When I was junior staff member at Surfer I was part of a meeting in which a newly hired editor-in-chief handed the entire edit team a packet. The sheaf of black-and-white printouts, held together dubiously by binder clips, was a mix of features and departments clipped from other publications, compiled to suggest his vision for the magazine. Most of the content was fairly easy to grasp in passing, concise examples of where he wanted to go visually and editorially. At the heart of the packet, however, sat William Finnegan’s “Playing Doc’s Games,” which had appeared in two parts in The New Yorker more than fifteen years earlier. I estimated the page-count and columns, did some quick math, and figured the feature ran north of 30,000 words, or about half the length of some novels.

Surf magazines rarely come close to including that much writing in an entire issue, much less a single article. Nevertheless I went home after work and turned to the first page, marked, by our new boss, as required reading. I figured there might be a test on Monday—or something.

I’m not sure exactly what time it was when I finally set aside Finnegan. I know it was sometime after midnight and I still wasn’t finished. I also know I continued to read, after regrouping with a beer and a check of the forecast. I went on not because I had been asked to finish, ordered to, actually, but because I was enthralled.

It’s almost become a statement of the obvious to assert that “Playing Doc’s Games” is perhaps the most comprehensive, intelligent, and complex examination of surfers, and surf sociology, that has ever been produced. But that’s exactly what I discovered that night—fifteen years behind all the other writers and wave riders and non-wave-riders who already knew this. I probably shouldn’t have been surprised that a staff writer for The New Yorker, as well as an award-winning journalist and author (who has covered topics as wide-ranging as apartheid in South Africa, civil war in Mozambique, and downward mobility in the U.S.) could so accurately, and at times so coldly, deconstruct and examine surf culture. But by then I had also read enough “surf writing” to know that the work of even highly-decorated journalists often came off as inauthentic, since, no matter how talented they were behind the keyboard, they simply were not surfers.

Finnegan was both, however, as I discovered—not only a writer operating well beyond my talents, but also a more committed wave rider. He also managed, despite this, to discuss the topic without ever falling into the clichés and tropes that most “core” surf writers fall back on. There was a sense of self, but not ego. There was passion, but it was balanced by intellectualism.

A good deal of surf media, not to mention surf advertising, is suspiciously laced with a simpering breed of enthusiasm (or quasi-juvenile appeals to the contrarian in all of us). For Finnegan the topic is decidedly more complex. No experience within the realm of surf society is ever wholly positive, nor it is it dismissed as the purview of children. Sessions are often laced with dread (big Ocean Beach), or overshadowed by the concern that someone else might arrive and ruin the solace (an out-of-the way spot in Santa Cruz), or, even worse, riddled with a sense that the author should be doing something else with his time, perhaps something more constructive.

And the relationships he develops, and describes, with other surfers are equally conflicted. Wave riding, and the people he shares it with, are often written about generously, even lovingly. But they are all also wrought with the three-dimensional aspects of reality. Nothing, no one, not even surfing, maybe especially not surfing, can possibly be perfect. And Finnegan conveys these nuances, unpacking them in ways that are often surprising, yet enlightening, even to the most dedicated seadogs.

In “Playing Doc’s Games,” Finnegan claims to feel a division between his life in the water versus his life on land. The bleed over, he asserts, ends at the waterline. Surfing is simply something Finnegan does —along with writing, eating, drinking, sleeping, and chasing aspects of adulthood. It is an escape, not the axis of his existence. It sets him apart, certainly, in some ways from the masses, but it is not the self-defining underpinning of his psyche.

In his new book, however, Barbarian Days, Finnegan seems much closer, emotionally, to surfing, and more willing to be defined by his role as a lifelong wave rider. It’s also clear, despite this, that he remains torn regarding the significance, and potential pitfalls, of this distinction. At first, wave riding is simply something that brings him joy and a sense of relief as his family ping-pongs back and forth between the land-based tensions of 1960s Hawaii and California. As he grows older, however, and begins to widen his scope of interests to writing, politics, and world travel, surfing comes to represent something that is perhaps darker, revealing many of the flaws in not only the world at large, but also his own personality.

Finnegan brings his full analytical, journalistic, and literary talents to bear in this 400-plus-page memoir, dissecting a lifetime spent in and around the water. All of the parsing and brooding analysis of “Playing Doc’s Games” are also present (the piece is even adapted to form the chapter that details his time in San Francisco). Only now they’ve been expanded to a wider field of subjects and a longer span of his lifetime.

Lineup hierarchy, surf style, board mechanics, the intricacies of reading incoming sets, wave formation, as well as gorgeous descriptive passages of actual wave riding, something rarely done well by any writer, provide a detailed account of his time in the water. We travel with him from Waikiki to Los Angeles, Indonesia, Africa, even New York, searching for waves, obsessively at first, and then with more doubt and hardened worldliness, in some cases arriving in a locale just before its surf scene has been established, exposed, “discovered,” or corrupted.

In all of this globetrotting, however, the passages that seem to go deepest, even beyond his work in “Playing Doc’s Games,” are Finnegan’s candid descriptions of his life on land, and in the quiet moments between sets. By delving into the socioeconomic, racial, religious, sexual, and political relationships that his surf life has highlighted, and occasionally bridged, he gives us an even deeper understanding of what it means to function in Western society at large —and also apart from it, whether that vantage occurs on the fringes of remote Asian jungles, or from within surf subculture. The Darwinist and existential explorations that were the heart of his piece for The New Yorker still filter to the surface, but they are now part of a much deeper, much richer, and more complex puzzle. Long passages are devoted to building descriptions of his friends, his girlfriends, his family, and fellow travelers. The most critical, and difficult, examinations of human character and behavior, however, are leveled toward the author, by the author.

Finnegan is just as coldly analytical while dissecting his own, often misguided principals. In much of the book, he is a young man, full of hubris and idealism, and his older self often makes cutting note of this. But even in his depictions of his belief structures as a nascent globetrotter, you also get a feel for why he went on to be such a successful foreign and domestic journalist. His eye for detail, and his finely tuned sensitivities for local dynamics, be that at home in California or on some far flung island in Indo, are always shaded and layered, aware of the dualities and ironies that can occur when cultures or different socioeconomic classes rub against each other. These are often made even more poignant by Finnegan’s awareness that one party, him specifically, is generally preoccupied with finding something as trivial as good surf. They’re also, always, tempered with the concept that the author, while striving to paint an accurate picture, is also only human, and thus a highly subjective source for unbiased information.

Finnegan, eventually, moves beyond the ambivalence he experienced while surfing in San Francisco, and the fanaticism of his younger years, to land in a relatively balanced emotional relationship with wave riding. In the process, we come to understand how a hardcore surfer and traveler managed, in many ways, to remain hardcore, and to harness those traits for existential meaning and long-term professional and personal benefit. When I was finished reading Barbarian Days, I felt the same way I had with that packet, after I first completed “Playing Doc’s Games” sometime around two in the morning. If you want to describe what it’s like to be a surfer, I saw, in all of its joys, fears, and conflicts, in all of the doubts and elations it can elicit, it might be easier to simply read aloud from a piece of writing by Finnegan. He has already done all of the hard work for you. —Alex Wilson