Finnegan's Waves
"I wanted to learn new ways to be. I wanted to change, to feel less existentially alienated, to feel more at home in my skin, as they say, and in the world." – William Finnegan, “Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life”
Binx Bolling, the protagonist of Walker Percy’s mid-20th Century novel “The Moviegoer,” famously remarked, “To become aware of the search is to be onto something.” In the case of author and New Yorker writer William Finnegan, that search has always led back to the ocean waves.
His new memoir, Barbarian Days (Penguin Press, 2015), is a shimmering, sun-drenched meditation on the titular ‘surfing life’. Born the eldest of four children in 1952 to TV-producer parents and raised alternatingly in Southern California and Hawaii, Finnegan writes, “My utter absorption in surfing had no rational content. It simply compelled me; there was a deep mine of beauty and wonder in it.” From an early age, Finnegan chose the path of a “sunburnt pagan,” ultimately forsaking his Catholic faith, jobs, a few (or several) girlfriends and most land bound obligations to chase his passion for the storm.
As a young man the late-1970s, the enchantment of a life pursued against the mise-en-scène of exotic waves compels Finnegan and friend Bryan di Salvatore to undertake a surf odyssey to the South Pacific (the “South Seas”), Australia and across Indonesia. They surf nearly unknown breaks in Tavarua, Fiji. They live in rented beach shacks. They take up odd jobs to afford new “hot buttered squashtails” and “rounded pintails.” After an extended layover teaching school at the end of apartheid in South Africa, Finnegan finds his way to a comparatively bourgeois existence in San Francisco circa the mid-1980s. Here he meets Mark “Doc” Renneker, who would eventually become the subject of Finnegan's 1992 New Yorker profile “Playing Doc’s Games”. Surfing, Finnegan learns from Doc, is not a sport but a path – “the more you poured into it, the more you got back from it.”
And this has certainly been true for the author. In language that is introspective but not quite indulgent, Finnegan acknowledges “the big psychic hole” surfing fills in him – it is his refuge from the world. More specifically, it is his refuge from the traumatic experiences afforded a writer who reports from or beyond the edges of civilized society. After watching a fellow journalist pronounced dead following a gunfight in war-ravaged El Salvador, Finnegan ‘hides out’ for a week at La Libertad, that country’s much-acclaimed big wave. He does the same near Malibu in the middle of reporting a piece on two warring skinhead gangs from L.A. County. “Surfing was an antidote, however mild, for the horror,” he says.
Save the periodic surf vacations to places like Madeira and Fiji, Mr. Finnegan’s present-day wanderings are mostly confined to local Atlantic Ocean waves near his Manhattan residence. The surf pilgrimage of his youth has ended. And yet the siren song of a ridable wave still inspires Finnegan “to flee [his] desk and ditch engagements in order to throw [himself] into some nearby patch of ocean.” As he says, “That cracking, fugitive patch is where I come from.” Landlocked or otherwise, readers of this beautifully written memoir will come away with a greater affinity for Finnegan’s many waves, and a better understanding of this surfer’s quest.
