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Its vistas, while breathtaking, are not comfortable to look at, as are, say, the shorelines of the Hawaiian Islands, which are of such exquisite femininity even when impossibly massive and heroic and immodest. And married with these endemic qualities of the landscape is the pervading presence of the adjoining sea. Although the land and water are profoundly separate, the aesthetic union created is a kind of emotional symbiosis. You cannot look at one without being deeply affected by the other’s proximity. But the sea, I would submit, one-ups its partner in terms of physical impact, not only through its apparently endless enormity but in the force of its personality. It is a three-dimensional and lively entity, that watery world. It has depth and mobility and with these qualities come the capacity to cover the adjoining land if it is moved to do so, to subsume the earth and make it a part of itself. At any given time the sea is not only what it is (calm and tranquil, say; a soothing influence), but it is also its capacity to be something else (a medium for wave riding); and then, a moment later, something else altogether (a destroyer and killer). Imagine gazing at the Mona Lisa with the knowledge that her little-girl smile could at any moment transmute to a vicious snarl or a lascivious smirk or a goofball grin. An indication of caprice as to the artist’s intent would add an edge to the fascination, no? It has been
claimed that the Eskimo language boasts some ridiculous number of terms
for snow, thirty-something, I seem to recall. There is a school of anthropology
that postulates that this large number of nouns for “snow” reflects not
only a utilitarian need (ease of communication between Eskimo as to what
sort of snow fell last night), but an actual difference in perception as
well. In other words, goes the theory, when an Eskimo looks at snow, he
doesn’t merely notice more about the snow; he actually “sees” it in a much
more detailed way. The problem with this theory is that one can’t just
ask the Eskimo if he perceives the snow in a way different from, say, a
Trobriand Islander plunked down wide-eyed and shivering in the Arctic.
The Eskimo may rattle on about how crusty or grainy or sparkly or deep
the snow is (while the Melanesian is stumped in going beyond “white and
cold to the touch”), but his words don’t tell us anything about his inner
life.
For a surfer, this Sea of Cortez beside which I am camped is an altogether different sort of piece of water from the Pacific Ocean, the illusoriness of the boundary distinction notwithstanding. (Big Blue is a contiguous presence, worldwide.) This is despite the fact that the two may appear identical to an observer standing on the beach - both are wet and stretch to the visible horizon. There is a corollary to the assertion that the sea is at any given moment capable of being something other than what it is: bodies of water, like human beings, are not created equal, in terms of what they may be. The Sea of Cortez, for example, is largely incapable of producing good surf, due to its limited breadth. This narrowness results in what surfers and oceanographers refer to as a short fetch; “fetch” is the reach of unbroken water across which wind can blow in order to raise a groundswell. By contrast, the Pacific Ocean has a fetch of many thousands of miles. Looking south from my last west coat campsite, for example, there is nothing of any significance to impede the production of a groundswell until we come upon the pack ice of Antarctica, some 8,000 miles distant. So even when the sea is flat, you may still find yourself gazing horizonward with an alertness in your surfing soul, for - however many miles out there, however many days’ journey away - there likely is a slew of waves in transit in your direction at that very moment. In July 1996, world champ bodyboard-surfer Mike Stewart experienced in a very personal way the implications of the Pacific’s vast reach. Stewart was on a surf trip in Tahiti when he learned that a huge groundswell was battering the islands to the south - some of the smaller, low-lying atolls had disappeared underwater. The next day the head-high vanguard of the northbound swell arrived in Tahiti. Within 24 hours, the island’s south facing reefs were under full, thunderous assault. Through satellite imagery and modern communications technology (and with the expertise of wave guru Sean Collins), Stewart realised that the size, location, wind vortices and projected track of the southern ocean tempest that had spawned the big swell were exactly right for him to try to accomplish something that had never been done before, never even been tried. It was the chance of a lifetime. Stewart spent two days in Tahiti searching for a break that wasn’t mutated out-of-control. He finally surfed the peaking swell in near-survival conditions, then packed up and flew to Hawaii. Arriving simultaneously with the likewise north-travelling groundswell, he surfed the legendary speed break on Maui called Maalaea, which he was told hadn’t gone off that big and fast since the ‘70s. Wild-eyed with hair still damp, he mad-dashed to the airport to catch a flight to the mainland. And so it went. Steward followed the swell’s northward progress, next surfing the classic Newport Beach, California, break known as The Wedge. Although the storm that had parented the great swell was blowing itself out thousands of miles to the south, the vigour of its wave-progeny had diminished but little during the journey north: The Wedge was maxing in the 25-30 foot range. Speeding up
the coast by automobile, Stewart surfed central California at two secret
spots reachable only by boat. Here, after five days of crazed travel and
extreme conditions in the water, he began to feel a synchronicity with
the groundswell’s rhythms, and to sense its idiosyncrasies; to develop
what he terms “an anthropomorphic” relationship with the waves he was riding.
The swell “had taken on a personality”, he later wrote. “Like a friend…
(or) a primitive life form.”
Stewart’s was a conceptual and logistical achievement of no small merit. And being a wave rider of great talent, his quest resonated on a creative level as well. In his wave-pursuit across the vastest of oceans, Mike Stewart had enabled himself to personally, holistically, experience the process of the continual transfer of energy through the matter on a grand scale. And he knew that the elemental progenitor of that energy was the sun itself. In its giving up of the heat to the sea and the land and the air, our local star is the creator of all the earth’s winds. It is the wind that creates waves. Finally, as the physicists now tell us - and as Eastern philosophers have long implied - the “stuff” of matter is waves, if on the tiniest and most ephemeral of levels. The universe vibrates in many ways, and on many planes, producing many different realities: from vibrations of nothingness (of space itself) spring galaxies and stars and planets and human beings; similarly, from the sea’s vibrations arise the groundswells that traverse the limited physical realm of our world. And perhaps consciousness itself - the universe turned inward to reflect on its own vibrations - manifests itself as yet another plane of vibration. Another sort of wave. In Search of Captain Zero is available wherever books are sold. For more of Allan Weisbecker’s writings and a selection of his travel/adventure photographs, go to www.aweisbecker.com. The following is a list of articles Allan has written for the magazine:
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