Sets are “larger waves, which usually come in groups” to have a place “wired” is to “come to understand deeply” offshore winds, “as I hope I’ve made clear, wreathe waves in glory.” It’s a nearly 450-page book filled with majestic passages on breaks and rides trust us to figure the lingo out on our own.īut, oh, the rides, they are incandescent. Finding the hidden - the search - is what it’s all about.Ī minor complaint on the language: Finnegan has a tendency to earnestly overexplain, particularly in early chapters. Surfing, Finnegan realizes, is a way into places, people, and a whole language that would otherwise have been hidden. “These people never appeared in mainland magazines,” he writes. He befriends Glenn Kaulukukui, an excellent surfer his age from an ohana, a surfing family whose seriousness and style Finnegan admires. At school he falls in with a white gang called the In Crowd, whose racism was “situationist, not doctrinaire.” The beach they live closest to was “just a patch of damp sand, narrow and empty.” Paradise, like anywhere else, is more complicated and ugly up close.
It’s here in Hawaii that the book, and Finnegan’s serious surfing, begins. His time in a poor, public junior high “was occupied almost entirely by the rigors of bullies, loneliness, fights, and finding my way, after a lifetime of unconscious whiteness in the segregated suburbs of California, in a racialized world.” The fighting gets only worse after the Finnegans (there are six of them) pick up and move to Honolulu.
He boxes friends in his front yard, gets into fistfight after fistfight. His life in Southern California in the 1950s and early ‘60s sounds in many ways halcyon, full of beach gear and Volkswagen buses and wharf rats and characters with “PhDs in having fun.” It’s also filled with violence. … That cracking, fugitive patch is where I come from.” “With me it’s not a matter of packing up or staying on,” he writes, “but rather of being always half poised to flee … to throw myself into some nearby patch of ocean. Surfing, he realizes deep into this sweeping, glorious memoir, is home. Surfing is the through line, the one constant in a peripatetic life. Before he was a celebrated magazine writer (and author of five books), he taught high school in a poor, black part of Cape Town, South Africa tended bar and washed pots on Australia’s Gold Coast worked the freight trains as a brakeman on the Southern Pacific and pumped gas in the San Fernando Valley.īefore, during and after all those careers, in nearly every stage of his life, Finnegan has surfed. William Finnegan is a staff writer at the New Yorker where, for nearly three decades, he’s covered civil wars (in South Sudan and Somalia), tracked narcotraficantes (in Mexico) and embedded with gangs of neo-Nazi teens (in the Antelope Valley).
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