Quotes from William Finnegan

Still, I wondered what Sam, mental illness and all, might have to tell us about adulthood. Why, for example, did it seem to be always receding as a concept, even as we got older?

I already knew, in rough outline, what had happened to the Hawaiians—how American missionaries and other haoles had subjugated them, stolen their lands, killed them en masse with diseases, and converted the survivors to Christianity. I felt no responsibility for this cruel dispossession, no liberal guilt, but I knew enough to keep my junior atheist's mouth shut.

Everything out there was disturbingly interlaced with everything else. Waves were the playing field. They were the goal. They were the object of your deepest desire and adoration. At the same time, they were your adversary, your nemesis, even your mortal enemy. The surf was your refuge, your happy hiding place, but it was also a hostile wilderness—a dynamic, indifferent world.

In an inescapable way, we sucked, and we knew it, and humility was called for.

Surfing, to begin with, was not a "sport." It was a "path." And the more you poured into it, the more you got back from it—he

Writing felt like it justified, barely, my existence -- this extremity of obscurity I had chosen.

The power of a breaking wave does not increase fractionally with height, but as the square of its height. Thus a ten-foot wave is not slightly more powerful than an eight-foot wave—because the leap is not from eight to ten but from sixty-four to a hundred, making it over 50 percent more powerful. This is a brute fact that all surfers know in their bowels, whether or not they've heard the formula.

He read with a similar relaxed, long-haul attentiveness. We

the classes themselves, which were prim and undemanding, bored me in a way school never had before. . .So I passed the class hours slouched in the back rows, keeping an eye on the trees outside for signs of wind direction and strength, drawing page after page of surfboards and waves.

What was consistent was a certain serenity that followed a rigorous session. It was physical, this postsurf mood, but it had a distinct emotionality too. Sometimes it was mild elation. Often it was a pleasant melancholy. After particularly intense tubes or wipeouts, I felt a charged and wild inclination to weep, which could last for hours. It was like the gamut of powerful feelings that can follow heartfelt sex.

For me, and not only for me, surfing harbors this paradox: a desire to be alone with waves fused to an equal desire to be watched, to perform.

I had sessions where I got tubed on half my rides. I would trot back to Kobatake's, where Caryn was still asleep on our pallet on the floor, my brain aflame with eight or ten brief, sharp glimpses of eternity.

Being out in big surf is dreamlike. Terror and ecstasy ebb and flow around the edges of things, each threatening to overwhelm the dreamer. An unearthly beauty saturates an enormous arena of moving water, latent violence, too-real explosions, and sky. Scenes feel mythic even as they unfold. I always feel a ferocious ambivalence: I want to be nowhere else; I want to be anywhere else.

And in the outer islands she found, I think, a Hawaii more to her liking—not the Babbitty boosters and country-club racists of Honolulu. In snapshots from those jaunts, she looked like a stranger: not Mom but some pensive, stylish lady in a sleeveless turquoise shift, alone with her thoughts in the middle distance—a Joan Didion character, it seems now, walking barefoot, sandals in hand, past a shaggy wall of shorefront pines. Didion, I later learned, was her favorite writer.

My ambivalence about the sport we shared appalled him. It was heresy. Surfing, to begin with, was not a "sport." It was a "path." And the more you poured into it, the more you got back from it—he himself was the exuberant proof of that. I

She and I had survived long separations, and we had never been especially monogamous—she liked to quote Janis Joplin: Honey, get it while you can.

She had since grown used to some of the insular codes and cryptic slang of surfers, even the grunts and roars and horrible snarls, but she still didn't understand why, after spending hours studying the waves from shore, we often announced our intention to paddle out by saying things like, "Let's get it over with." She could see the reluctance—clammy wetsuit, icy water, rough, lousy surf. She just couldn't see the grim compunction. Once