Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life by William Finnegan reminded me of the famous Hotelling model, a location model propounded by economist Harold Hotelling in 1929.
The premise of the Hotelling model is rather simple. It imagines the whole world on a straight line. Different people are located at different points on the line. Of course, it is absurd, one might say. However, such simplifications are elegant ways to imagine concepts with clarity. Much like how Abbott’s Flatland while ostensibly critiquing Victorian culture, also makes us realize our inability to think in higher dimensions. There are fancier updates to the model over the 90 years since its appearance, but the basic model is this: An individual located at a point on the line has to “travel” a distance on the line, to acquire a good located elsewhere on the line. The farther you are as a customer from the point of interest, the costlier it is to travel the line.1
Why did “Barbarian Days” remind me of the Hotelling Line? Because on the line I am located so far from water. I am on the other end of the Hotelling line when it comes to surfing.
Mountains beckon to me, and I find them accessible and pleasurable to hike. Even the disasters narrated in Into Thin Air are not dramatically hard for me to imagine. Water presents a different story. I was raised lived seven miles from the beach, but the city was arid and swimming was a luxury. I struggle to do multiple laps in calm waters. To be in the water is unnatural. I feel like a fish out of water. So, I stare at the deep-sea divers, sailors, open-water triathletes and surfers, and consider them with angst and respect.
So, here I am on the other end of the Hotelling line on the water. Should I read the book? Should I, having never surfed? Hence, I began Finnegan’s book with trepidation. How many different ways can one describe water going whoosh overhead? The book succeeds in an admirable number of ways.
Water and Space
To be in the water is somewhat like space exploration with less-than-light-speed drives. We are simply suspending ourselves in the medium, untethered, and fighting ceaselessly against the wickedness of gravity. In his Challenge of the Sea, Arthur Clarke talks about the analogy.
In our own time, men have peered through the portholes of a bathyscaphe into a region, only inches away, where they would be crushed in a fraction of a second by the pressure of a thousand tons on every square foot of their bodies. […] Centuries in the future, and light-years from Earth, there may be men peering out of portholes into the still more ferocious environment of a dwarf star.
Finnegan, through his words, describes how surfing takes you “there”.
Surfing is also often synonymous with prurient gazing as in couch-surfing, channel-surfing, and web-surfing. But, as Finnegan shows, true surfing is deep. It is a commitment. It is a way of life and a “test of faith”. To be in the thrall of walls of water, to be “cruelly rumbled”, as they rise several feet to beat, rhapsody and break on your body. As the author finds himself surfing off the coast of Madeira, Spain, caught in the deluge of violent waters, exulted and tired in their swirling madness, with the stillness of purpose: To do the counterintuitive, to stay still, to hold one’s breath, then to breath and to live another day.
When we search for someone on land, we instinctively look east and west, north and south, but not above our heads. Underwater, our dimensions suddenly expand. We are sandwiched between the shadows dancing on a distant surface and the beguiling charm of depths. Surfing floats on this skim.
A hollow wave was roaring off into deeper water. Not possible. It felt like a runaway train, an eruption of magical realism, with that ocean-bottom light and the lacy white canopy.
Life on Land and Water
The book is not just a long essay about the author’s love of a sport that has gone irrevocably mainstream. Barbarian Days are also about wanderlust, traveling around the world across continents (travel of self-discovery similar to Phil Knight’s Shoe Dog) – from the equator to the antipodes, finding friendships and solitude.
The book is full of surprising detours, sometimes miles away from the ocean, including an exquisite drive in stuttering, overheated car on the verge of dying, through the desolate Northern Territories (where orphaned young joeys were given away as pets), to the marshy flats of Darwin, ending with a semi-shocking intrusion amid a haircut.
Ultimately, the book is a contemplation on lost loves and growing old, distance and fondness, life, and companionship.
Remember the best friends (like Roddy) that we made through our childhood and teenage, some of whom we never met again. Recall those splendid moments of quietude with them; the wellspring of understanding that the best friends have for you, letting you be just yourself. This book evokes the warmth of that companionship, on land and at sea.
Highly recommended.
—
Notes:
- This feature can be used “taste differences” (horizontal differentiation) between products, firms, and choices. For instance, think of United and Delta as being located at opposite ends of the line. A customer who has flown miles with United doesn’t want to fly Delta. In the Hotelling model, this would be a customer located closer to United on the line.