THAT SMALL MADNESS
Nick Carroll reflects on a fading obsession.
Like many surfers you might call ?hard core?, I?ve always thought surfing would be lifelong for me, that I?d walk hand in hand with it to the grave and that being forced to give it up through injury or infirmity would be a kind of metaphorical death.
Yet now I?m no longer sure. In the past two years, viewing it through the lens of a cool and slightly amused internal curiosity, I?ve watched myself pass up chance after chance to surf. I?ll pull into the carpark, take a look, think about it for a minute or so, then shrug and drive off, even when I have no particular place to go or other thing to do. (After all, my whole life is set up to allow me to surf whenever necessary.) I?m just bored with small waves, I think, no surprise there ? but on the increasingly few days I feel that quickening urge to get out there, it?s just as likely to be two foot as six. Weeks will go by without me bothering. And in the past six months, a small line of sorts has been crossed; at least a handful of times, I?ve turned and driven away from the best waves of the year.
What the hell is going on? It feels as if something is being pulled out of me by the roots, or more precisely perhaps, lifting away; losing force not painfully or quickly, but steadily, like a slowly dropping easterly swell in the face of a wind change. It?s letting me go.
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What?s the nature of obsession? Here is a dictionary definition: ?The domination of one?s thoughts or feelings by a persistent idea, image, desire, etc.? The word has a Latin root, lending it a classical air or tone, but the root meaning itself is interesting: it derives from ?blockade? or ?siege?, which seems curiously apt. An obsession lays siege to your thoughts and feelings, co-opting them to its cause, driving you to acknowledge it at every possible turn.
The word has a disturbing edge. When my wife began using it to describe my relationship with surfing ? probably around the time she came to the North Shore with me for an extended honeymoon and realised exactly what she was in for ? I rejected it, feeling a vague resentment. What was I, some sort of weird uncontrolled person, mentally ill in some way because I?d found something worth doing with my life?
My wife never meant it that way. Much later she told me it worried her; she could understand the thrill of surfing, but the obsessive element felt to her like a fault line, like something gone slightly askew, and she worried where it might lead me. In time I began to understand; but at the time, I was actually angry. One of the many things demanded of you by an obsession is a belief system: a structure, intellectual, spiritual, physical or just plain magical, or even all four at once, built around it and out of the materials that sustain it, providing it with shelter and shape that those materials couldn?t possibly erect on their own. My ideas about myself and what I?d chosen to do were under what felt like hostile and caustic attack, and I didn?t like it.
Which surely would seem ridiculous to a disinterested observer. I mean, surfing, what is it? A person riding in on an ocean wave? Left to itself, this is nothing. But placed in the hands of an obsessed surfer, it takes an entirely different shape.
Surfing wasn?t ever really part of my life plan. I was a pretty innocent little kid. I?d go to school all week and work hard, I suppose, or at least get the marks required. Tennis was my sport. I?d catch the bus or get a ride to tennis on Saturday mornings, do lessons till lunchtime, then play in competitions in the afternoons. ?Cool? was never part of that equation. The beach was something we did on weekends, part of weekend life, and I just didn?t know anything about surfing at all. I was just myself; there was no layer of ?surfer? on top.
When I started to surf, it wasn?t in an obsessive way ? more fluky, sort of unplanned, the way you come across a new acquaintance, or a neighbour you hadn?t met. There was the beach, there was surf, there was a surf-o-plane, then a Coolite foam surfboard. My little brother was obsessive about it from the word go, but he was always thrown to the possibility of obsession, I think; dreamy and vague at times, he could sometimes seem almost uncontactable, even to me or his closest friends. I didn?t have the instant connection with surfing that Tom had. He immediately dived into it, treating it as a perfect natural path to proving himself as his own person.
But then a few different things happened. The first thing that happened was that our mother died. She?d been ill for a very long time and it dislocated us in so many different ways. As a family we drifted away from each other, each in our own worlds. Our household became quiet. When Mum finally died it wasn?t much spoken of. We didn?t go to her funeral; we got the news and hunkered down, expecting it to pass. The sense of dislocation entered our lives and primed us to connect with something else, and surfing ? all that salt water ? was that thing.
What we didn?t know then was that it was ?. cool. We didn?t know about the cultural dressage of surfing whatsoever. We just knew there was a bunch of kids at the beach and they went surfing. But when we started to surf, it was almost as if a veil fell from our eyes. All of a sudden we came into contact with an entirely different type of society ? this group of kids a bit older than us who were renegades, almost. They felt like wild boys, they were doing wild things, things we could barely imagine. We weren?t allowed out the Peak, it was made very clear to us that we weren?t allowed there, so we surfed down the beach, and over the months to come we slowly began to sneak out there occasionally and try to find some waves under the guard of the big guys, who didn?t like it much, but after a while sort of tolerated our grommety presence.
By ?big guys? I mean guys who were a year or two older than us. If we were 13 they were 15. So it wasn?t exactly a huge gap; just magnified by the times, and by the circumstances.
But the thing I most remember about surfing in those days is that it was ****ing really HARD. It was really, really, really hard. I think that was the beginning of surfing being welded into an obsession for me; the fact that it was so difficult and there was so much suffering involved. (Another word here, by the way, used often in connection with surfing: the word ?passion?, Greek root, meaning ?to suffer?.) I can remember paddling out at times and being caught inside and having to roll my board over and over again, making no progress, and literally crying like a baby because I couldn?t get out. I?d be rolling, getting pounded, paddling, and crying all at the same time. But not giving up ? accepting the anguish as part payment for being given entr?e into this new world, into these feelings of the ocean and of riding waves and just every now and then the extraordinary reward of sliding down the wave face and setting the rail and feeling the board just run away the way it does. The magical feeling of that. In the presence and memory of that feeling, I?d forget the tears, the anguish and pain and fear of the big waves, forget everything but it.
Thus it began to weld itself into something deeper than fun. God, that is a flimsy word, isn?t it? Fun! Fun! The word has no root, by the way; it floats in the language pool with no anchor, connected tenuously to the idea of a prank or humorous hoax. Yeah, I can see that ? having ?fun? is like having a joke played on you. I think of it in connection with surfing and can?t help but rather dryly laugh.
Anyway because it was so difficult I began to picture it as being somehow magical, and the people who were good at it began to take on somewhat mythical dimensions in my eyes. Being a tennis player, I?d imagined what it might be like to be a Ken Rosewall or a John Newcombe or somebody like that; but they didn?t seem mythical to me the way a good surfer seemed mythical. Because the anguish in tennis was different. It was the anguish of competition ? just hitting the ball was a piece of cake.
So I began to picture these people as being magical. I?d watch them, Wilbur Fowler or Derek Hynd or Gordon Walker, 15 to my 13, and wonder to myself what secret knowledge did they have, what secrets they might possess that allowed them to casually surf these barely touchable waves.
I think that?s how obsessions work. They require you to believe there is something a bit magical or unearthly about them. In this way surfing to me began to feel perhaps like a religion might feel: full of rituals, and magical things you couldn?t understand and weren?t even meant to, and it was all tied up in that sense of loss, that need to drive away the fear of death.
And beyond all that, there was the sea ? the limitless space, the liquid desert, the absorber of human obsession throughout human and literary history, from The Odyssey to Moby-Dick, from the Polynesians to Cook to Kon-tiki ?the epic tales of oceanborne adventure, tragedy, romance. I soaked them all up, young reader that I was, between copies of Tracks magazine, pinballing between Captain Goodvibes, Captain Ahab, and the little captains of Newport Peak, the flickering images on the local cinema screen, the endless sunburning surfs.
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And so we built those beliefs, the foundations of them anyway ?. And as surfing got easier and I got better, and my star rose among the local surfing population, for the first time it dawned on me that surfing was cool, that my teen social status had somehow shot through the roof without me being aware of it. With that worldly recognition of my new obsession, I plunged wholeheartedly into it. I was a true convert to this religion of surfing, and like any religious person, I proselytised. It?s part of why when it came time to live an adult life, or at least simulate one, I got a job at a surf magazine, because I wanted to spread the word. I wanted to justify in a way what I?d taken on. I wanted everyone to see what a great thing this was, but I was torn by it, because at the same time I didn?t want other people in the water at all. I swore and scratched and psyched and hated. You could not have what I have. It could not be yours because it would be less magical as a result. But me, I would feed on it, like an animal. I would surf for hours, get all sorts of rashes, surf on the most terrible days. I?d get stoned and go surfing for **** hours and forget what time it was. I would froth.
Froth is one of those things in surfing by the way that is held in high regard. The Carroll brothers are known for frothing; it?s a source of amusement to many of our friends. But this thing often praised in the surfing lexicon, this willingness to put everything else aside in order to catch some waves, also has a desperate, greedy edge. It will fight to keep itself alive inside you. I remember a short story sent to me by a surfing acquaintance some time after we?d met; he told the story of how he?d met this girl and they?d had a child, but then he?d felt himself forced to leave them, in order to go surfing in Hawaii. He felt called to do this thing and that he had to leave his wife and child to do it ? almost like a sacrifice. He himself seemed baffled by it, offering no explanation, and indeed seeming also to embrace it. I read that, and it was as if I was seeing the surfing obsession from outside for the first time, and it caused me some horror.
I think that?s why for a long time after that my relationship with surfing contained a certain duality. At times I tried to become a normal person, yet every time the obsession would drag me back in. It would find a way. I left Tracks magazine and began working my way into the mainstream media. I was working for a big newspaper in Sydney and one morning the surf was phenomenal ? 10-12? and super clean. Nothing was stopping me. I got into work an hour or two late, which wasn?t a bummer, but it wasn?t like me, the ?me? they knew being the one intent on adulthood. Everyone asked what I?d been doing. I tried to explain it but soon I realised that what I was saying made no sense to these people. It was the obsession talking, and people can?t understand an obsession; its very language betrays it as incomprehensible. Think of how many times you?ve heard people misunderstand it!
So. I gave up on that kind of life. Instead, then and at every turn since, I went back to surfing. Relax and enjoy your problem, I thought to myself.
Pursuing that great goal of early adulthood ? a career! ? I moved my young family to California, and for the ensuing six years, I suffered again for my obsession. Morning after morning, before the excoriating 12-hour work days that are an essential part of the California Dream, I got up at 4.30am under fog and ran for miles down the track at Trestles to surf cold kelpy three-foot waves with forty of my best buddies, surviving on swells sent seven thousand miles across the ocean from New Zealand, drip-fed from the same storms that were hammering Australia with winter southerlies. I fed my obsession on these crumbs, feasting on the occasional five foot day and an annual week of North Shore juice, leaving my family alone for hours on south-swell Sunday afternoons. I was determined, in some burning deep part of me, to keep it alive.
At the same time, though, I don?t know how else I would have survived that time and place. Those tortuous runs through the dark, those bleak tastes of salt water and drip-fed swells, were my only antidote to the world?s greatest consumer economy, the freeways and shopping malls and endless pressure to buy, buy, buy. Have what you want! it said. So I turned my back, ran down the Trestles track, and surfed, no matter what.
My obsession, that small madness, kept me sane.
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After that it was almost as if I felt a reward was due. I was able to go travelling. I went to the Mentawais, I went to G-land, Fiji and Tahiti. I surfed and dug myself in deeper. I took the reward of the obsessed surfer, which is the occupation of a place in a great surfing lineup where you are afforded one of the great waves, and the ability to ride it somewhat in the way it?s intended. A seat in the great house of surfing. Yes, it built arrogance in me, but it also built understanding and comprehension, for another thing obsessions do is cause you to pay attention ? to try to understand things. I think there is an evolutionary argument to be made for the obsessive gene: without it, it?s very hard to imagine how people would persist with things as long as they do, despite the fact they don?t have an answer, or even the certainty of a question.
Part of the duality is that I?ve been able to gain all sorts of insights into the nature of the subject of my obsession. Trying to figure it out became a persistent feature of my surfing life. The obsession drove me to observe very closely what happens when you ride a wave, and over time it began to relieve me of needing to think of it as out-and-out magic, because I began to see the things that worked and the things that didn?t, and began to see surfing as a series of movements, and waves as predictable wind-driven energy, surfboards as a series of planing surfaces and thicknesses. Simple things that did what everything else did within the laws of physics and the world.
People laugh at me and call me a ?Professor of Surfing?, and other such stuff. I laugh back, but I also wonder, maybe I have been luckier than I know with this ? maybe it?s taught me to think.
But even with that I was always uncertain. At some point, for instance, I?d come across this piece of magical thinking in my head ? that one day in return for what it had given me, the surfing obsession was going to ask everything of me. 100%. And I was probably going to define myself by how I was going to answer that call. I would hear strands of the Clash song: ?Guns of Brixton?: ?When they knock on your front door, How you gonna come, With your hands on your head Or on the trigger of your gun.? I would carry the gun of my surfing prowess, my commitment, to that meeting, and let the chips fall where they may. It didn?t occur to me that this was sick thinking, until later?until now, actually, as the obsession begins to lift.
What I do now understand is what my wife was worried about: that at some point I would do something like what my acquaintance had done, throw aside the things that were truly more important in my life, prefer the magical over the real. That?s one thing I guess that she no longer needs to fear about me.
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My little brother, though still deep in the grip of his own magnificent saltwater obsession, is most interested in my changing surfer?s heart. ?It might just be the hormones ebbing,? he suggested.
He has a point. There?s something curiously male about the surfing obsession, something single-minded and driven and unflinching, which feels very much attached to testosterone?and I am of an age.
Yet for good or ill, it?s given my life shape, and I wondered aloud how its slow departure might affect my perception of surfing itself ? how surfing might come to feel if I were no longer driven to do it. ?Well,? he mused gently, ?it might be more fun.?
Fun! That facile word again! Yet isn?t it the word du jour for surfing today? My obsession seems to be receding not just in sync with age and hormones but in almost perfect sync with modern surfing?s big cultural arc, away from the unknown, the dark risky magic of the 1970s, and toward a place where finally, everybody will surf ? just for fun. Was it luck after all in the first place, surfing the way I?d felt it and fallen into it, just a fortunate or unfortunate act of timing?
Meanwhile another part of me doesn?t want it to go. Here it is, surfing, this thing I?ve been trying to understand almost all my life, and just as I?ve grown up enough to edge close and grasp it, it flits away! Come back! I half yell, half laugh, my fingertips almost at its trailing edge, don?t go! I never really got you! I didn?t get a grip! But it slides away, just out of reach, leaving me, well, just myself, I suppose.
Ted the Kiwi
> 9 months ago, 17 May 2013
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). So where are you in the obsession to last wave stakes? I have been though periods of being able to live without the surf for a while but once I get back in the water and get some good waves it becomes a habit that needs to be fed constantly.....like when you are getting lots of something else your desire for it increases yet if you are in a lull patch you seem to be able to survive without (not for that long though 
