NOVEL THINKING

So if you know a spot that gets really good and isn’t crowded, you might never tell your best friend, let alone the readers of National Geographic! So there’s a kind of physical and mental discipline to serious surfing that is quite useful in life. The wave turned out to be the best either of us had ever seen: a real highpoint not just of that trip, but of my 50-year surfing life. But the surf out in front of our house was incredibly exciting. William Finnegan is a staff writer at The New Yorker and author of works of international journalism. The Code Of Boys was a code of silence. What lessons has surfing taught you that were useful in your life? So she would understand that point. The sport is equal parts joy and terror, William Finnegan, says. Talk about ‘The Code Of Boys.’. It didn’t seem strange at all then, but now that I have a 13 year old myself it does seem strange to look back on. I had a real fear of drowning. I’d invite boys home from school, put on the gloves, and we’d just beat each other senseless right in front of our house. It’s not a nine to five job. I got in a lot of fights and had trouble understanding people. There are very, very few people who should be out there. I’d been surfing for a couple of years, so I was incredibly excited to be in Hawaii. Surfing has got to be one of the most useless, unproductive things you can do. But you inevitably get slower, weaker, less nimble and have to ride heavier equipment. But a lot of what you did as a boy would probably get your parents locked up for neglect these days. You write beautifully about boyhood. I was gone nearly four years looking for waves, but it’s true I wasn’t only looking for waves. I’m still fighting off owning what’s called a long board, which is a much easier type of board to ride. It’s flexible enough and my editors are tolerant enough that I can often get work done when the waves are bad, which they often are around New York, and be ready to jump when they get good. We got some fishermen to take us out and climbed a mountain. I think of it as an old fashioned American boyhood from Tom Sawyer onward, but it reached a kind of extreme when I was an adolescent. Bryan and I took it so seriously that we never spoke the name of the island or wrote it down. I still ride a short board, which is more difficult. It was warm, uncrowded and challenging. But a lot of my surfing now is on trips to Mexico or Fiji, Indonesia or Hawaii: some far-flung place that gets really good waves. Your travels have taken you from New Jersey to Java. These guys were paddling rings around me. He had just gotten divorced because his wife couldn’t handle surfing. A surfer tells you: “A chick has to understand if she marries a surfer, she marries surfing.” What does your wife think of your surfing? There’s a lot of close attention you need to pay, not just for safety reasons, but to be able to surf at all. She’s actually quite tolerant. You dropped out of college in Santa Cruz and headed for the South Pacific. With surfers that’s closely held information. You find it on the island of Tavarua. A lot of the kids spoke a local patois called pidgin. My father got a job in Hawaii. Bill Finnegan defies the stereotype. His book, Barbarian Days: A Life In Surfing, recalls his lifelong odyssey to such far-flung places as Madagascar, Sumatra and Tahiti searching for the ultimate wave and his quest for a different, more simple way of life. [Laughs]. You are 62 now. There was no water on the island so we had to take our own provisions and we camped there for weeks. At the same time, they were your mortal enemy.” Expand on this. In a photograph taken in 1966, William Finnegan, author of a memoir on surfing, carries his board to the beach near his home in Hawaii. There were a lot of race-based gangs and “haolies”—the local word for white people—were pretty scarce. That’s what boys do: they box. It’s this paradox. © 1996-2015 National Geographic Society, © 2015- An author shares his passion for the sport as well as his list of the top five waves. William Finnegan continues writing and commentating on world and local events. By the end of that season we figured there were only nine people who knew about it and we all took a solemn vow of silence. I miss a lot of waves because I’ve got a deadline or I’m busy reporting. William Finnegan is an award-winning journalist and the author of five books. Sometimes I report in places that allow me to go surfing. Nobody thought anything of it. Crowds are a huge problem in surfing now. Your book opens with you surfing in Hawaii at 13 years of age. You write, “Waves were the playing field…the object of your deepest desire. I’m not sure I ever got any of that. So, Pipeline on the north shore of Oahu; Chopu in Tahiti, which is perhaps the most dangerous wave in the world but incredibly exciting to watch; a place in South Africa called Jeffrey’s Bay, which was in the news recently because a pro surfer was attacked in the water by a shark; then Honolua Bay, on west Maui; and finally, Cloudbreak off the coast of Tavarua, in Fiji. So much for that. Corporal punishment at school and at home was also standard: whippings, spankings, beatings with paddles by school officials. You say that you peaked as a surfer off the coast of Sumatra at the age of 26. I was a white kid from a suburb in Southern California. Boys would do terrible things to each other, but you didn’t want to be a snitch, so you didn’t go to adults about it. My friend Bryan and I found this remarkable wave off Tavarua. I was travelling with my friend, Bryan Di Salvatore  and we had been looking for waves in Samoa, Tonga and other parts of Fiji, when we heard about this place. It was breaking so evenly, so perfectly, this long, long ‘left.’ You call it a ‘left’ because you go to your left as you catch the wave and start to run down the face. But that’s not really what surfing is. Good waves are a source of incredible joy to a surfer, but they can turn dangerous quite easily, and suddenly they’re not so much joy as terror. Finnegan discusses his experience coaching Mollie’s rock climbing and eventually being coached on climbing by Mollie herself in his audio-book biography Climbing with Mollie (2020). I could later rationalize it, but as a kid of 13, I was sometimes desperate to be on shore. That’s such a trick question! All rights reserved. He today lives in New York City with his wife Caroline Rule and daughter Mollie. It slowly, but steadily, degrades it. You have to keep yourself fit. What’s the matter with me? A New Yorker staff writer since 1987, Finnegan has reported extensively on conflict and culture in many different parts of the world, including Africa, Mexico, Central America, South America, Eastern Europe, the Persian Gulf, and the United States. The Pipeline, in Hawaii on O'ahu's North Shore, notorious for huge waves which break in shallows above a jagged coral reef, is not for the faint of heart. Reading the waves, getting to know a break, or getting wired as we say, involves a kind of semi-scientific oceanographic study of a very small patch of coast. There’s a lot of travel. In the last couple of years I have done stories in Australia and Madagascar, which both get good waves. When you’re trying to learn, if you don’t pay close attention this sport will hit you in the head and really get your attention. I made friends in the water, too. From a distance, it looks like playing in the water. But there wasn’t the kind of extreme video game violence there is now. For the first time in my life I started training on land, trying to forestall the inevitable. A bookish kid who went on to become a staff writer for the New Yorker, he fell in love with surfing at the age of 13 when his family moved from Southern California to Hawaii. We would use the Hawaiian term for Whatchamacallit, which is da kine. He has specially addressed issues of racism and conflict in Southern Africa and politics in Mexico and South America, as well as poverty among youth in the United States, and is well known for his writing on surfing. Photograph by Paul Nicklen, Nat Geo Image Collection, https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2015/08/150802-hawaii-surfing-south-pacific-ocean-surfboard-pipeline-ngbooktalk.html. A boy called Roddy Kaulukukui was my age, and we became fast friends after he and the other local kids started keeping their boards at my house. What was the matter was that I was in my forties. In a photograph taken in 1966, William Finnegan, author of a memoir on surfing, carries his board to the beach near his home in Hawaii. I had vague ideas about living in pre-industrial societies, foreign worlds uncorrupted by modernity, where I would learn new ways of being: a kind of handiness and comfort in the natural world that I didn’t have as a young kid growing up in Southern California. Best friends Ha’a Keaulana, right, and Maili Makana dive under a wave near their Hawaiian hometown of Makaha, a tightly cloistered community where surfing is a link to cultural identity. Follow him on Twitter or at simonworrallauthor.com. It was not just surfing. It was actually after graduate school. But before we could, two American surfers made an agreement with the Fijian government to build a resort. Take us back to that time in your life. I am sure our surfing readers would love to hear your Top Five surf sites. Looking back, I probably never surfed that well again. It wasn’t at all what I expected from the magazines I was marinated in at that age. But then, on Madeira, surfing with some young pros, I could see the difference. We kept it up for years, always thinking we would get back there. There was a lot of ambient violence. That guy was a young surfer I was knocking around with in Madeira. Kids were left to take care of themselves without hovering parents. Not many other sports kids play include a fear of death as part of the fun. But it does have a certain act-and-consequence severity to it. The most exciting waves to watch are generally the most dangerous waves in the world. A surfer launches off the waves of the Outer Banks of North Carolina. I saved some money from a job at a railroad in California, and headed to the South Seas, Australia, Southeast Asia and Africa. In the sixties and early seventies there was a pretty extreme laissez-faire style of parenting, at least in Southern California. I was hitchhiking everywhere by the time I was 14, traveling the coast looking for waves. He said, “It’s as if you or I were married to a fanatical shopper, who spends their whole life waiting for the malls to open.” [Laughs].

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