Going surfing with Susan Orlean

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The girls wanted me to surf, but I assured them that wasn’t going to happen. They insisted — pleaded even — but I wouldn’t be budged. At the time, we were on a beach in Maui, Hawaii. It was the beach of your dreams, with powdered-sugar sand, an impossibly blue roof of a sky and thick, foamy waves that thudded with a percussive beat and fury. I took note of the reach of the waves and stepped several feet back. The girls were amused by my obstinance and fear. They were tan and barefoot, and ranged in age from barely in their teens to a wise old pro, who was 16. They had spent their entire lives on the beach, and they saw nothing but invitation in its power.

These days, surfing is popular and a little bit domesticated. Kids do it as an after-school sport. Groups of girlfriends go on Costa Rican surfing retreats. Out-of-shape dads squeeze into board shorts and paddle around. Surfing doesn’t seem as exotic and scary now as it used to. But a quarter of a century ago when I found myself in Maui, surfing was still wild, almost outlaw. It had an edgy charisma. As solitary and existential as mountain climbing, surfing was even more elemental: a body and a board and nothing more versus the infinite might of the ocean.

Female surfers, especially, were a rarity (no one can claim that early surfing wasn’t sexist and racist and exclusive), so I hardly expected to discover this posse of fearless girls, slim and quick and tan, when I had ventured to the far reaches of Maui. I watched them for hours skimming along the surf as if it were a smooth slide of ice, and then plunging back for another turn as soon as one ended.

The girls referred to themselves as “beach rats”, and they really were. Parental supervision was scant; school was tolerated at best and they seemed most at home in their mismatched bikinis and rash guards, hopping in and out of the water all day long. I was awed by their strength and their guts. The waves were mountainous, but even the tiniest of this gang charged in gamely, and even if they were spat out and pounded, they laughed it off and went out again.

I grew up in Ohio, near lakes and rivers. Even though I was a strong swimmer, the idea of flinging myself into something that pulsed and thundered the way the Pacific did was as daunting a prospect as riding a bull. But it was something more that drew me to write about them. What I saw in these girls was a poise and freedom that I had never encountered in teenage girls, and I was mesmerised.

My life at 13 and 14 was full of worry and self-assessment, and I did a lot of fussing with my clothes and worrying about my social status and mooning over boys. That felt like the very nature of a teen girl’s existence. But everything was different with these surfer girls in Maui. They delighted in each other’s company, and they relished being sandy and dirty and messy, and they couldn’t care less about boys except to compete against them on the waves. They were what made surfing so cool and untamed because that’s what they were.

A few years after my trip to Maui, I moved to Los Angeles. My first short-term residence was in Malibu, and from my back porch I could see surfers bobbing in the waves. Even at dawn, even on chilly, grey days, they were there, as if they were a feature of the oceanscape. At the Malibu grocery store, I would bump into barefooted surfers in beaten-up wetsuits, and they had an aura of invincibility that I could barely fathom. Surfing was slowly making its way into the culture, but even as it became more familiar, its bewitching glamour remained intact.

Every sport is a physical demand but surfing always felt like something more. It makes a statement about confidence; that in itself has an allure that is easy to yearn for, dream about, hold in awe. Even now, in its tamer incarnation, that cool remains. I never did get on a surfboard, but even just immersing myself in the culture of surfing was a thrilling ride.

Susan Orlean is an author and a staff writer for The New Yorker

‘At The Beach’ by Tod Papageorge is published by Stanley/Barker

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