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There is a wave about a five-minute drive from where I live – a slabby, terrifying reef break that comes alive once a year on massive winter swells, producing barrels so big and hollow you could drive a Land Cruiser through them.
Every year I flock to the cliff face looking over it to watch local chargers tame the beast. I think to myself maybe one day I will paddle out. Surfers have an uncanny ability to imagine and project a fantasy before it is carried out – huge, graceful carves consistently run through our mind-scapes when we are seated in the lineup. But if the fantasy is never attempted, or the frustration never faced, could it live on like a haunting? I think I am haunted by this wave I will never surf, haunted by the life I will never live.
“I remember a child telling me in a session,” writes the psychoanalyst, Adam Phillips, “that the reason he wanted to be bigger was because he wouldn’t have to want to be bigger.” The quote comes from Phillips’ book ‘Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life,’ where he argues that perhaps our wished-for lives, the lives we live in fantasy, are often more important to us than our actual lives. We crave a life free of frustra-tion, which is tantamount to craving a life without the ability to identify and accom-plish our desires. It begs the question: what am I really wanting when I wish for and fantasise about paddling out on the biggest day of the year? Am I considering all the frustrations, the 30-second hold downs, the broken board washed up on the rocks, the terror of facing such a monster? Perhaps the only reason I want to surf this wave is so that I no longer desire to surf it. I fantasise about exotic, terrifying waves for their difficulty and the achievement of having stepped out of myself, if only for a moment, into the unlived life.
In 1975, Jeff Clarke was 17-years-old when he became the first documented surfer to ride Mavericks in Half Moon Bay, Califor-nia. Jeff and his high school pal, Brian, had watched the wave break half a mile offshore for years, but then a day came when all the conditions were perfect. “Today’s the day, let’s do this,” Jeff had said. “Theres no way I am paddling out there,” Brian responded, “I’ll tell the coastguard where I last saw you.” Jeff paddled out to a massive 20-foot wall detonating over reef and had no one to surf it with. No one witnessed the first five waves he caught. He spent the next 15 years surfing Mavericks alone.
The story of Jeff Clarke has become synon-ymous with the history of Mavericks.
Years before the fated day in 1975, his parents had built a home 100 feet from the water in Half Moon Bay. Although this is conjecture on my part, I think days had gone by when Jeff and his mates had seen it break. I think letting that blue-belly monster of a wave go unridden haunted him, pursued him in his dreams until he finally said enough is enough and went it alone.
Surfers are creatures prone to haunting obsessions. At the local surf store where I work, guys return from the shallow, cavern-ous reefs of Restaurants or the screaming terror of Grajagan and speak as if the Sirens had seduced them to an otherworldly paradise. A gnarly fall or a close call with drowning tinges the trip with a hallucinatory quality – as if the dreamlike parts worth remembering are shadowed by a close encounter with something frighten-ingly close to death.
It can feel at times that the persistence of awe-inspiring images on social media – the death-defying drops of Mathai Drollet at Teahupo’o, or Nathan Florence’s stoic mastery of Pipe, crowds and limits our notions of authentic self-expression.
Mathai and Nathan are wizards at what they do. Big-wave surfing is its own art form and has its own heterogenous modes of expression. But surfing is a garden of forking-paths. Films like ‘Sprout and the Seedling’ offered alternatives to the bro-centric vision of surf culture in the late 90s and showed viewers that the pursuit of waves could be an artistic one. I bought a log two years ago and still can’t drop knee. But the image of me surfing like, or coming close to fellow goofy- footer Grant Noble has left an indelible imprint in my imagination. It is an unlived life that is within the realm of possible identities I might pursue.
The perfect quiver is another obsession we can’t quite seem to free ourselves from. There are those who have been surf-ing thrusters their whole life and begin to concoct a fantasy of surfing mid-length twins in their twilight years, building out in their imagination the dream of paddling in early, drawing long, sweeping lines across open faces, the euphoria of being effortlessly in trim. This unlived life was always present, existing in parallel to the quiver of boards with elf-shoe rockers. Maybe they always dreamed of surfing less performance-like but never gave themselves the permission to, and this in turn lived on in the imagination like a haunting.
I once read that flowers must have butter-flies, mountains must have streams, rocks must have moss, the ocean must have seaweed, and people must have obsessions. When I see busy lineups, I often reflect on how lucky we are to have such a consuming passion. To the untrained eye, fighting a crowded peak for a wave might look like a selfish obsession, but there is something to be said for the innate selflessness of devotion itself, of giving oneself over completely to the mercy of an art form. Mastery of surfing requires a certain patience and tolerance that is inherently selfless; you cannot improve unless you respect your limitations as they rub against the ocean’s indifference, not to mention the hierarchy of talents more gifted than yourself. How humbling it can be to witness a local grom triple your wave count.
One of the most transformative aspects of surfing is the way it shapes our internal dialogue. When I think of who I might have been had my mates not dragged me out of bed one morning to go surfing for the first time, I picture someone less patient, less hungry and obsessive for new experiences and challenges. I think of the thousands of hours paddling like a predator on a hunt for its prey, scanning the horizon at sunset for opportunities to form, how these countless procedures and calculations of the ocean gave me a language centered on hard-won thrill and unfettered desire. My internal dialogue before surfing was tyrannical, full of self-recriminations. You can see the frustrations of beginners come to life when they reproach both themselves and others for not improving or getting waves.
I recently interviewed a painter who told me that one doesn’t always know when they are haunted, even when the audience does. No crowd of strangers has ever gathered to witness my obsessions repeat themselves in acrylic on canvas. Maybe it’s just in the nature of obsessions that we cannot gain that critical distance a third party might have. The value of the unlived life, the fantasy might be that we gain perspective by stepping into the shoes of an unrealised dream. We might look back and witness our obsessions we have doggedly pursued with a kinder and wiser outlook.
I still haven’t sent it at the local slab, but the promise of doing so continues to haunt me. A few weeks back, a friend and I paddled out at the point next to it. We traded a few waves before the slab turned on as the tide went out. He paddled over and I sat in the lineup watching him casually knife a take-off and tuck under a heavy lip. I dream of doing what to him comes so effortlessly and think perhaps dreamed pleasure is pleasure. What we suppose of ourselves, we become.
It is 6:03 in the morning. I am sitting in the carpark of my local beach break trying to keep warm before I put on my steamer. I watch the soft blues of the crepuscular hour fade into a violent frenzy of reds and oranges. Waves form and break apart in an ever-changing abundance of unique forms. I am both observing the raw beauty of it all and dreaming of sitting in the lineup as the sun emerges in the horizon, the feel-ing of intense presence we get when we surf, an eternal now. I open the boot and wax a dinged-up Gato Heroi pig with pinched rails, a board I haven’t surfed in ages. Why not pursue the unlived life, I think, why not step out of the confines we set around surfing and life and chase a more liberated form of self-expression?.
