Surfing has come of age. Like rock and roll, it was once strictly for young people, edgy and alternative and physically way too demanding for anyone over the age of 27. But those young people grew up and they’re still at it. For millennials it’s hard to maintain a sense of cool when your parents are heaving their boards into the same breaks and when, according to the marketing people, there are upwards of 35 million surfers worldwide, in a sector that’s worth at least $10 billion per year.
Now comes the season of the surfing memoir. The 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Biography was won by the very brilliant Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life by William Finnegan. A staffer at the New Yorker, Finnegan is in his sixties, and charted with candour a career of hunting for stories and waves, often at the same time.
Iain Gately has also reached a certain age; he has had a hip replacement. The Secret Surfer is the account of his hobbling progress back into action, back towards the head-high face of a breaking wave. He had always been a competent surfer, but had never gained access to the green room, the fabled space inside a barrelling wave where — if you time it just right, if you position yourself correctly between the crest and the base — you find yourself enveloped in a translucent tunnel of water, zooming towards the shrinking light. It is one of those places on earth where lives are changed, like the summit of certain mountains, after which nothing else comes close. (William Finnegan recalled standing tall in a tube a couple of hours into an acid trip, which must have added a little something to the experience.
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