William Finnegan’S Barbarian Days
Finnegan, aboard Alias, an Australian “surf yacht,” in Fiji, 1978. Photo Courtesy of William Finnegan.
"The speed runs were dreamlike. I had never seen a wave peel so mechanically." - William Finnegan
William Finnegan is the author of Barbarian Days, a memoir of an epic surfing life that won him a Pulitzer Prize in 2016. The Pulitzer Prize Board described Barbarian Days as “an old-school adventure story, and intellectual autobiography, a social history, a literary road movie, and an extraordinary exploration of the gradual mastering of an exacting little-understood art.” A lot happens in the book: he drops LSD and surfs big Honolua Bay, he bushwhacks through Polynesia, he dissects the sexual politics of Tongan interactions with Americans and Japanese, he navigates the Indonesian black market while nearly succumbing to malaria, and he discovers a perfect lefthander breaking off an uninhabited island in Fiji—a wave that would later become known as Restaurants. Here is an excerpt from one of his sessions there, in 1978—
Tavarua Island, Fiji, 1978. Photo Courtesy of William Finnegan.
As the tide peaked, something very odd happened. The wind quit and the water, already extremely clear, became more so. It was midday, and the straight-overhead sun rendered the water invisible. It was as if we were suspended above the reef, floating on a cushion of nothing, unable even to judge the depth unless we happened to kick a coral head. Approaching waves were like optical illusions. You could look straight through them, at the sky and sea and sea bottom behind them. And when I caught one and stood up, it disappeared. I was flying down the line but all I could see was brilliant reef streaming under my feet. It was like surfing on air. The wave was so small and clear that I couldn’t distinguish the wave face from the flats in front of the wave from the flats behind the wave. It was all just clear water. I had to surf by feel. This was truly dreamlike. When I felt the wave accelerate, I crouched for speed, and suddenly I could see it again— because the waist-high crest, seen from down there, was higher than the horizon.
The trades puffed, the surface riffled, and the hyperclarity was gone.
The tide dropped and we were back on the beach.
From Barbarian Days by William Finnegan. Reprinted by arrangement with Penguin Press, a member of Penguin Group (USA) LLC, A Penguin Random House Company. Copyright © William Finnegan, 2015.
