The Wild and Crazy Wisdom of Surfers
by Drew Kampion

The history of surf culture is nothing more nor less that the sum of the waves and the lives of all those who have surfed. Everything else is a kind of misleading shorthand - a symbolic gesture in the direction of the infinite truths residing deep in the oceanic reservoirs of our combined surfing experiences. It sounds pretentious, but it's not meant to be. It's just simple math.

So, the theme of this little meditation on surf culture is: "Surfing as a philosophy of Freedom and Aloha born out of real, actual, day-to-day interaction with the Wild Earth."

Encounters with the Wild are becoming ever more rare for the average person in our mechanized cultures, be they in Japan, England, Brazil, the US, South Africa, Mexico, France, or anywhere else. Yet contact with the Wild is vital to our human spirits.

The Wild is where we sprang from, eons past, and the Wild is what we spring from day by day. The Wild brings us fully into our eyes and ears and fingertips. Without the Wild, we are asleep in our lives.

The Wild is the scrape of rock and shell on our cold bare feet. It's the chill sluice of brine down through our wetsuit; it's the early-morning offshore wind numbing our cheeks, even while the rising sun blinds our vision. The Wild is the approaching dark mass of an outside set, and it is the unseen possibility of a moving mass beneath the surface of the water close around us. The Wild is the ledging square section of surf sucking powerfully up and over a draining reef.

To surf is to engage with the Wild, and there is nothing wilder than the lacerating hide and snaggle-toothed mouth of the shark, or the bottomless pitch of a grinding wall of swell for that matter.

It is the Wild that makes surf culture such a rich subculture, way richer than most subcultures. Surf culture is born out of the Wild - of men and women who seek daily commerce with a morfing landscape of possibilities, of possible rewards and punishments, of long efforts made for fleeting gains. Contact and intimate interaction with ocean waves makes and keeps people alive like almost nothing else. Surfers are alive with the sea, with a crazy wisdom it takes them years to know they have.

At the top of surfing's cultural hierarchy is a Senate of beautiful, gifted, often outrageously twisted individuals who have at least one thing in common. They are surfers, and surfing is an enlivening and awakening pursuit. Other subcultures have the same structure, of course, but how can you compare? We have a million kids dropping into spiraling ocean waves, putting it on the line each and every day.

Each time you surf, you come into contact with the world in a spontaneous and challenging way that is increasingly rare. Just that first rush of ocean contact grounds a day like nothing available to other people. Even rock climbers deal with static surfaces, but surfers deal with both transient, kinetic surfaces and equally transient and kinetic interiors.

But the real point is more fundamental.

Surfing was revealed by the Polynesians of Tahiti and Hawai'i, the same people that brought us the Aloha Spirit. Surfing and the Aloha Spirit: the two great gifts of the Southern Hemisphere to the Northern. Not forgetting Sir Edmund P. Hillary and countless other downunderlings. Up here in the Northern Hemisphere, things were run much differently. We had Technology and Biology - guns and diseases. There was bound to be a culture clash, and there was. North: 144, South: 3.

Nonetheless, the residue of a vital part of Polynesian culture successfully pollinated Northern culture to create modern surf culture. Nat Young and Dick Brewer have it right: Buffalo Keaulana is the Kahuna.

But then look beyond the Kahuna to the warriors - rank upon rank of them! Jose Angel and George Downing. Greg Noll and Ken Bradshaw. Eddie Aikau and Mark Foo. Those Southern Hemi boys on the North Shore in the winter of '75-'76 - Wayne "Rabbit" Bartholomew, Mike Tomson, Peter Townend, Mark Richards, Mark Warren, Shaun Tomson, Ian Cairns, Bruce Raymond, not to mention advance guards like Fitz and Paul Neilson - and those Steamer Lane boys of the '50s - Fred Van Dyke, Ricky Grigg, and Peter Cole. Lots more warriors, hundreds, one after the other: Derrick Doerner and Laird Hamilton. Bill Hamilton and Brewer himself. Midget Farrelly and Phil Edwards. Robby Naish and Mike Waltze. Nat's Nat and Kelly Slater. Glenn Hening and Pierce Flynn. Tom Pratte (patron saint of surf environmentalism) and Dale Webster (environmentalist and world's most hard-core surfer).

And then there are the chiefs: Duke Kahanamoku and Tom Blake, Mickey Dora and Gerry Lopez, Yvon Chouinard and Rabbit Kekai, George Downing and Tom Curren. Rank after rank of extraordinary individuals - people gifted with lives of unusual freedom and spontaneity, the reward of living daily with the Wild.

Think of the exploits of surfing's many greats - from Joey Cabell and Jock Sutherland to Gary Propper and Bruze Valluzzi, from Dewey Weber and Hobie Alter to Peter Pan and Hideki Matsumoto, from Gidget to Lisa Andersen - and ask what other sport compares?

Think about surfing's artists - John Severson, Rick Griffin, Russell Crotty, Ken Auster, Steve Valiere, and a hundred more - an incredible range and total comprehension of the experience Š of surfing. Each artist's expression grounded in experiences of the Wild.

Surf culture is continually reflected and illustrated in the lives of its diverse practitioners. Consider the range of characters the sport has created and been created by. Think of the constant honoring of our accumulating history. Consider how one generation educates the next in the ways of Surfing and, against all odds, the ways of the Aloha Spirit. Each time we surf, we should be continually aware of the presence of the Wild, and in so doing, we will be filled with the Spirit of Aloha.

© Drew Kampion, 2006