What I can give you is the top five waves to watch, because the waves you would surf depend on your ability. What’s the matter with me? My friend Bryan and I found this remarkable wave off Tavarua. There was no water on the island so we had to take our own provisions and we camped there for weeks. But there wasn’t the kind of extreme video game violence there is now. You get swiftly punished for any mistake, at every level. When you’re trying to learn, if you don’t pay close attention this sport will hit you in the head and really get your attention. But the surf out in front of our house was incredibly exciting. You travel the globe searching for the perfect wave. It was not just surfing. Set the scene for us. That guy was a young surfer I was knocking around with in Madeira. Photograph by Paul Nicklen, Nat Geo Image Collection, https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2015/08/150802-hawaii-surfing-south-pacific-ocean-surfboard-pipeline-ngbooktalk.html. Simon Worrall curates Book Talk. You also are intimately involved with the ocean. A New Yorker staff writer since 1987, Finnegan has reported extensively on conflict and culture in many different parts of the world, including Africa, Mexico, Central America, South America, Eastern Europe, the Persian Gulf, and the United States. So there’s a kind of physical and mental discipline to serious surfing that is quite useful in life. I’m still fighting off owning what’s called a long board, which is a much easier type of board to ride. I still ride a short board, which is more difficult. Your travels have taken you from New Jersey to Java. Talk about ‘The Code Of Boys.’. From a distance, it looks like playing in the water. There was a lot of ambient violence. I think of it as an old fashioned American boyhood from Tom Sawyer onward, but it reached a kind of extreme when I was an adolescent. Nobody thought anything of it. But that’s not really what surfing is. So she would understand that point. I miss a lot of waves because I’ve got a deadline or I’m busy reporting. You write, “Waves were the playing field…the object of your deepest desire. It was breaking so evenly, so perfectly, this long, long ‘left.’ You call it a ‘left’ because you go to your left as you catch the wave and start to run down the face. Follow him on Twitter or at simonworrallauthor.com. You are 62 now. Your book opens with you surfing in Hawaii at 13 years of age. I could later rationalize it, but as a kid of 13, I was sometimes desperate to be on shore. 2020 National Geographic Partners, LLC. A boy called Roddy Kaulukukui was my age, and we became fast friends after he and the other local kids started keeping their boards at my house. Not many other sports kids play include a fear of death as part of the fun. So if you know a spot that gets really good and isn’t crowded, you might never tell your best friend, let alone the readers of National Geographic! A lot of the kids spoke a local patois called pidgin. There are very, very few people who should be out there. Finnegan discusses his experience coaching Mollie’s rock climbing and eventually being coached on climbing by Mollie herself in his audio-book biography Climbing with Mollie (2020). William Finnegan continues writing and commentating on world and local events. You write beautifully about boyhood. But then, on Madeira, surfing with some young pros, I could see the difference. Say the word “ surfer” and we tend to think of a muscle-bound hunk with sun-bleached, blonde hair and Schwarzenegger-style pecs. I was hitchhiking everywhere by the time I was 14, traveling the coast looking for waves. [Laughs]. The sport is equal parts joy and terror, William Finnegan, says. All rights reserved. That’s such a trick question! It wasn’t at all like the California public schools I’d gone to. My father got a job in Hawaii. You have to keep yourself fit. Good waves are a source of incredible joy to a surfer, but they can turn dangerous quite easily, and suddenly they’re not so much joy as terror. It was actually after graduate school. Crowds are a huge problem in surfing now. We rented a little cottage on the backside of Diamond Head near the coast, and my parents sent me off to the local middle school, which turned out to be quite a tough place. A surfer launches off the waves of the Outer Banks of North Carolina. Surfing has got to be one of the most useless, unproductive things you can do. His book, Barbarian Days: A Life In Surfing, recalls his lifelong odyssey to such far-flung places as Madagascar, Sumatra and Tahiti searching for the ultimate wave and his quest for a different, more simple way of life. It’s this paradox. © 1996-2015 National Geographic Society, © 2015- It was so remarkable I couldn’t breathe. I had vague ideas about living in pre-industrial societies, foreign worlds uncorrupted by modernity, where I would learn new ways of being: a kind of handiness and comfort in the natural world that I didn’t have as a young kid growing up in Southern California. She’s actually quite tolerant. But a lot of what you did as a boy would probably get your parents locked up for neglect these days. I’d been surfing for a couple of years, so I was incredibly excited to be in Hawaii. I’d invite boys home from school, put on the gloves, and we’d just beat each other senseless right in front of our house. But before we could, two American surfers made an agreement with the Fijian government to build a resort. You say that you peaked as a surfer off the coast of Sumatra at the age of 26. I liked to box. An author shares his passion for the sport as well as his list of the top five waves. Sometimes I report in places that allow me to go surfing. There’s a lot of travel. What was the matter was that I was in my forties. Bryan and I took it so seriously that we never spoke the name of the island or wrote it down. He had just gotten divorced because his wife couldn’t handle surfing. It slowly, but steadily, degrades it. William Finnegan is an award-winning journalist and the author of five books. But a lot of my surfing now is on trips to Mexico or Fiji, Indonesia or Hawaii: some far-flung place that gets really good waves.

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