A little over three years ago when I read The Desert and the Sea, I noted that Michael Scott Moore had also written a book about surfing. As the life-long Californian that I am, the sport and its aesthetic associations are familiar to me. But it took until a recent tropical obsession to convince me to pick up the book and follow his winding tale of “how surfing spread from Hawaii and California to the rest of the world, with some unexpected results.”
I enjoyed his world tour and learned something everywhere we went. Some of the locations did just seem like they were “strange” in that they were poor, but others had more depth. The chapter on surfing in Israel and Gaza was particularly interesting to me, of course: I’ve swum in the shore breaks of Tel Aviv, and seen the confluence of people who ride boards a short walk south in Yafo where the shore is unprotected. Embarassingly, I had never heard of the hasake before this book. I’ll keep my eyes peeled next time I’m in the country. Cuba and São Tomé and Príncipe were fascinating reads in the much same manner as Israel: locales where surfing is really foreign, really out of place. And his writing on Indonesia and Morocco made me want to bum there on the beach when I have some time off.
When I was a kid I went to surf camp and was too scared to stand up on the board. Since then, I have justified my non-surfing with the ocean’s frigid temperature along the northern Californian coast. The Germans in Moore’s book put me to great shame by continuing on nonetheless:
“Remember, we had no wetsuits!” Drath said. “My God, we froze!”… Yet in those days, more people on Sylt went swimming… “Why?” I said. Father and son, in unison, said, “Central heating.”
You can see the beginnings of Moore’s later work in this book. As always, he weaves a larger narrative alongside his journalist’s personal touch—telling a history of surfing as much as a story of a friend’s cancer. I think there’s a lesson there in the ills of code switching: Moore leaves no part of himself behind, and the book is better for it.
Curiously, it was challening to get my hands on the book. The physical edition is not too common these days and I had trouble finding a digital version. I’m not sure where the EPUB I found came from.
Perhaps, having finished the book, I’ll now find some time to actually get out on the waves.