By Kai Miller
A tiger shark tore her arm off at the shoulder, but 15-year-old Bethany Hamilton is still surfing-and winning. Kai Miller investigates why surfers will do anything to be in the curl.
In the summer of 1907, an uncanny phenomenon began making regular appearances up and down the beaches of sunny California. Word of this eerie marvel spread quickly among Southern Californians as the Golden State residents flocked to catch sight of the spectacle. They stood in awe as they watched this man, this George Freeth character, defy nature and walk on water. The crowds expected Freeth, like the hubristic Icarus with his precarious wax wings, to fall, sink, and drown in that ocean. Yet somehow, armed only with an eight-foot long redwood “surf craft,” Freeth stayed afloat and wowed audiences across California. Because of Freeth, a subculture known as “surfing” was born.
By the 1950s, the subculture of surfing had acquired its familiar laidback image of casual beach parties, shaggy blonde hair, and Beach Boys music. Underlying numerous evolutions in this beach style, however, is a steady focus among even the most casual surfers to seek out a piece of the dangerous and forbidden, in defiance of the mainstream. The surfers of the fifties and sixties rejected post-war obsessions with luxury and consumerism, while today’s extreme surfers sacrifice mainstream values of safety and complacence. Although surfers’ sacrifices have changed, the end-result, a dynamic surfing lifestyle opposed to the doldrums of mainstream activity, has remained constant. Many of us, if even reluctantly, look at these surfers in awe — these wave-bound zealots who will sacrifice everything just for a chance to walk on water.
For many surfing pioneers, riding the waves was an almost intoxicating experience that brought them closer to God. Like devout monks, these surfers sacrificed the mainstream’s life of convenience as they took up an ascetic existence devoted to wave worship. In 1954, the year of the first Makaha surf tournament, the hardcore Californian surfers started making pilgrimages to this Hawaiian town in search of bigger waves and a more defined identity within their burgeoning subculture (Lueras 115). Sarah Park, a reporter at the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, describes the migrants as a small group of Californians eager to sacrifice the typical luxuries of contemporary living just to surf in Hawaii. Park writes that, “The new arrivals have taken a cottage across the street for $10 a month each and [they] have scattered swim fins, spears, and surfboards around their new house-with-kitchen” (Lueras 115). This young cadre separated themselves, physically and ideologically, from the Southern California mainstream, rejecting “American Dream” luxuries of TVs, cars and comfortable living accommodations, all for the sake of surfing.
Buzzy Trent, one of these young Californians, exemplified this asceticism by keeping a garden with other surfers and spearing fish and turtles for dinner. Trent claims that “it’s a community thing,” adding, “We are over here strictly to surf” (Lueras 115). This surfing lifestyle was based upon a blissful sense of isolation and wave devotion, resembling the cloistered hippie communes of the sixties. In both cases, these social outsiders rejected American consumerism to provide for themselves and concentrate closely on their unique lifestyle. Although this rejection of modern convenience baffled mainstream America, to hardcore wave-riders, their sacrifices seemed minimal when compared to the joy and purity surfing provided.
