William Finnegan: Learning Curves

Here's a paragraph from Finnegan's excellent memoir Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life:

The ocean itself was another story.  I waded into the waves at Will Rogers, diving under pummeling lines of foam, thrashing toward the main sandbar, where the brown walls of the big waves stood and broke.  I couldn't get enough of their rhythmic violence.  They pulled you toward them like hungry giants.  They drained the water off the bar as they drew to their full, awful height, then pitched forward and exploded.  From underwater, the concussion was deeply satisfying.  Waves were better than anything in books, better than movies, better even than a ride at Disneyland, because with them the charge of danger was uncontrived.  It was real.  And you could learn how to maneuver around it, how long to wait on the bottom, how to swim outside, beyond the break, and, eventually how to bodysurf.  I learned actual bodysurfing technique in Newport, watching and imitating Becket and his friends, but I got comfortable in waves at Will Rogers.

--Barbarian Days -- page 71

Penguin Press, New York: 2015

Dream: Wave-Crash

Kelp-time. Slightly disturbing, disorienting dream last night (among many) about free diving off a rocky shoreline just down the coast. I was distracted and checking out a circular "tide pool" out near the impact zone. A surfer stopped to give me the heads-up the tide was changing, the swell was rising, and the waves were getting closer and closer, ready to take me out. I thanked him, wondered how I could have gotten so focused on the shellfish and such in the crater-like collection of rocks, and started checking my exits. The waves were indeed crashing closer and closer, and the dusk was falling hard. Where had the time gone? Suddenly I was cold to the bone and tired. I went to the shoreward side of the rocks, and there was a twelve-foot drop to water and rocks (a completely unrealistic effect, but it was a dream). I'd have to time my getaway dropping over that side. I'd need water on the rocks to cushion my fall, but I wouldn't want to be caught in the crater for a full-on wave strike. Suddenly, in a rush of thick, thick water and thick foam, I was over the edge and getting rolled deep. I came up gasping. A very odd dream, but the cold water, the salt, and the kelpiness pleases me, despite the rough handling.

Beach Time!

Sandy, salty, sunburnt, and sore-muscled: all the signs of a good day at the beach.

Postcard: Dream Fatigue (and Cave Surging*)

Or, Exhaustion And Excitement In Dreamland . . . .

Up late grading to meet a deadline--and the exhaustion carried over into the dreaming.
I'm wondering: Is this effect familiar to you also?

Just before I woke up, still exhausted, I was dreaming that I was on a mission to find a wetsuit, and so I walk into the surf shop, make my way to the O'Neill rack, but suddenly I've got to sit down. As I sit there on the lacquered wood bench, holding a new 6-5 wetsuit (kelp monster green), feeling how thick it is, how warm it promises to be, worrying how stiff it is, how much of a drag the added weight will be to my free diving, to my pop-ups, I realize that I'm just not going to get up and try it on. (Wetsuits, even today, are not fun to put on.) But in the dream, I'm trying to figure out why I'm so tired, for I didn't recall doing anything to deplete my energies in this way, wondering why I wasted this trip to the shop. Just too tired to even pull on the neoprene.

I woke up, chuckling at my dreamself. Still tired, but chuckling.


P.S.  The photo illustration isn't quite right, of course, since that's a watershot and the dream was dry-docked.  I chose it--a random accident from a free diving trip up north, I think--for the low visibility off-kilter perspective seems right for the dream-like effect.  And yet I say that having had some of the most amazing and crystalline water-dreams in the last year.  In fact, the photo illustration suits the following dream a bit better.


My favorite recent dream in that genre involved attempting to bodysurf out of an semi-underwater cave: I don't know how we ended up in there, voluntarily or not.  We had masks, snorkels, and fins, so we'd been free diving, clearly.  As the dream coalesced, we could stand up inside, but we'd throw ourselves forward into the rush of each breaking wave to stay centered and not smash against the cave's back wall or against any of these fanglike boulders there.  You could see about a foot of space above the water between waves, see nothing at all when waves crashed in, and see about three or four feet of space when the water sucked backward and outward as the next wave got ready to unload.  The idea was to dive into the receding water and ride the pull out of the cave, kicking and kicking to stay out and not be pushed back into the pit.  The dream was a full-on rush, very salty, very cold and wet, with odd lighting effects as the bright sun speared through the water into the cave, flashing and flickering off the bottom and off the walls.   Still, I recall getting tireder and tireder, realizing that we'd need to make our move really, really soon.


Oh, I was with someone else--hence the "we"--but I don't recall who that was; it didn't feel like my dive buddy Keith, but who else would it be?  I never looked to see, for why would I?  In the dream, I knew, you know?  But then, I am not sure I was myself in the dream either.  I think I was taller and blonder, more muscled!  Who was I, really?  Didn't matter: "I" was in that cave, working that water, loving the salt and cold and push and pull and even the anxiety.  Action had consequences there, and so had meaning too.

(In all, the experience in the cave reminded me of an actual day of diving back in April 1980 or 1981 when Charlie and I got caught outside up at Salt Point and had to fight our way back in once it became apparent that nobody else--except Dominic, actually--could get out and that there'd be no abalone-diving that day.)


When I woke up from the cave-dream, I wanted to know if I, if we, made it out.  I was that worried, that jazzed.  Of course, we did.  I woke up, didn't I, and I'm talking to you now, right?  We should try that cave again, don't you think?  Or is that just crazy?


*Surging: I'm thinking of this term as anyone who spends time around and in the water would expect, but also particularly as Mickey Munoz uses it in his recent No Bad Waves for riding the currents and, especially, the counter-currents.