Origins: Anaheim

On a hot afternoon in Anaheim, my wife and I stood near the front door of our three bedroom end unit townhouse, speaking casually to our neighbors.

Mary and Robert are the finest neighbors we could have hoped for. They are a strong family of friendly but not overly evangelical Christians. My wife and Mary gossip freely and vividly, Mary often lowering her voice to that sewing circle whisper tone as she dishes out the juice on the other residents in our complex. They have two daughters, Gabby and Audrey, ages 8 and 11, who love to play outside with our kid for hours at a time.

On this particular afternoon, Gabby and Audrey were trying desperately to convince my one-year old daughter Guinevere that eating small rocks out of the planter dirt was neither a socially acceptable nor hygienically recommended practice. Gwen wasn't listening. She was very entertained by their insistences, but simply couldn't fathom why they continued depriving her of the tasty dirt morsels.

I watched the kid, chuckling quietly, while Mary and my wife spoke.

"No, we really like you guys as neighbors." Mary was saying. "Robert and I were talking about that. I mean, you could have been anyone. Travis could have been a drug dealer, or a heavy metal fan, or something."

"Actually." My wife interrupted, "Travis does listen to heavy metal sometimes."

"Well, we've never heard it." Mary defended. "No, you guys could have been anything, and instead we just live next to a surfer."

That caught my attention.

A surfer?

Did she just call me a surfer?

In retrospect, I suppose the term must have made sense to her. After all, most Saturday mornings, she would see me driving in to the parking lot behind our townhouses with a surfboard in the back of my truck. I would unload the board into the garage, where several other surfboards could clearly be seen. I would then begin rinsing out my wetsuit with the garden hose, eventually hanging it up on the back porch to dry.

Could she be right? Was I actually a "surfer"?

Did that mean that I needed to read Surfer magazine? Did that mean I should rush out and buy surfer clothes, or learn surfer talk? Actually, that requirement wouldn't be terribly difficult to incorporate. Living in southern California since my earliest memory, I already possess the incredible ability to utilize the word "dude" in every possible part of speech - noun, verb, adjective, descriptive pronoun.

Dude.

On any given day, if one were to open the refrigerator door at my wife and my humble townhouse, and look in the butter tray, it's very likely that there would be a partially used stick of surf wax. But, is that what makes a surfer?

As a weekend warrior to the surf, I had to admit that much of the pleasure that I'd taken in surfing had little to do with riding waves. Waking up early on a Saturday morning, drinking a large cup of coffee in the car on a sparsely populated urban freeway with the window open and the music loud, pulling up to the beach, stretching into the wetsuit, waxing the surfboard, walking to shore, tying the leash, surveying the scene.... the whole ritual of surfing, starting long before I even reach the water, is part of the sport's allure, but surely that's not what makes a surfer.

I used to have some friends who lived in Brea and surfed every weekend at San Onofre, a nearly 45 mile commute to fight the crowds and wait in line for parking at the popular state beach every Saturday and Sunday morning. With that kind of dedication, one would have to call them surfers.

I knew a longboarder who was an ambulance driver in Covina and liked to surf at “the cliffs” in Huntington on the weekends. The commute was a full hour one way. But, he loved it. He moved to Anaheim several years later, and I saw him about a year ago. He's married, and has since stopped surfing.

Then, I've knows guys who live in Huntington Beach, and who surf a anywhere from few times a week to a few times a year the same way anyone else might go jogging or walk their dog. Sometimes, they surf just to “get wet”. Other times, they'll drive by the beach, and look at perfectly ridable surf but decide not to go because it's windy.

There's Dale Webster from northern California, recently profiled in the surfing documentary film “Step Into Liquid”. Dale is the world record holder for surfing on consecutive days. Dale surfed for 10,407 days in a row. He surfed over 28 years from the Nixon administration to the second of the Bush presidencies. He surfed on the day of his wedding, and the day of his daughter's birth.

Most visibly, there are the professional surfers, a breed unknown before the 1970s who have since become the backbone of a worldwide marketing frenzy. They are the elite few who travel the world to exotic locations and surf for photo shoots, video footage, and contests. The images of professional surfers and their surfing adventures are then used to sell fruit snacks, surfin' chicken, barbecue ribs, fast food burgers, breakfast cereals, sports drinks, bottled water, carbonated soda, diet soda, energy drinks, automobile lot sales, sports cars, sedans, sport utility vehicles, hotel rooms, vacation packages, boots, slippers, sneakers, sports shoes, sandals, pants, jeans, shorts, jackets, sweaters, dress shirts, tee shirts, watches, dvds, videos, home video games, computer games, jewelry, bedsheets, pillowcases, music albums, cell phones, sunglasses, posters, Christmas cards, camera equipment, political endorsements, and – lest we forget – surfboards, surfboard bags, leashes, fins, deck traction pads, surf shorts, bikinis, salt water rash guards, wetsuits, and surf wax.

So what is a surfer? And what is this thing we call surfing? Is it a sport, a spiritual path to a meditative inner serenity, or just a leisure activity of the white middle and upper class with no productive value whatsoever?

In 1966, Bruce Brown released his classic surfing film, “The Endless Summer”. The film presented a picture of surfing and surfers in 1966. The film is still wildly popular, being sold in surf shops, retail shops, carried on the shelves of video stores, and broadcast on cable television.

But, surfing today is a world apart from Robert August and Michael Hynson's trip around the world.

In the same year the endless summer debuted, in a nearby studio in Southern California, Adam West and Burt Ward started production of “Batman” the television series. The flash in the pan hit series featured a surf music reverb guitar introduction, ridiculously camp dialog, Burt Ward's series of 352 “Holy” exclamations (from “Holy agility” to “Holy Zorro”), and the often remembered scenes of Batman and Robin dishing out dialog while climbing up the side of a building – quite obviously filmed with the camera turned on it's side.

But the perpetually 32 year old caped crusader Batman is completely different now. He's been touched by Frank Miller, Garth Enis, Doug Monech, and Tod McFarlane. The first Robin is gone. Robin was replaced. The second Robin is dead. The last Robin was a girl. In a graphic novel by British writer Alan Moore, Batgirl was kidnaped by the Joker, shot through the spine at point blank range, stripped nude and photographed. The pictures were sent to her father and Batman. Batman's been nearly paralyzed and had his job taken over by a murderous vigilante. Tim Burton, Michael Keaton, Jack Nicholson, Joel Schumacher, George Clooney, Val Kilmer, Jim Carrey and California's current Governor in a giant ice suit have all played at the immortal hero. Batman's DC Comics was acquired by Warner Commnications in 1976 , which became AOL Time Warner, owners the WB television network and WB Kids programming. Batman returned to televison in a new animated television series in 1992. The new show produced a series of videos, dvds, comic books, coloring books, action figuires, fast food kids meal toys, tee shirts, and underwear.

Progress.

The Russians aren't our enemies anymore, James Bond even respects women sometimes (or so his producers claim), and our grade school age children will absorb three thousand discreet marketing messages today while every fourth one of us is going to eat a hamburger, with fries and a coke.

And, now, more than ever in a long history of thousands of years since ancient Polynesian man caught his first waves, we surf.

Or, at least, I did today. And, I can't see any reason why I wouldn't tomorrow.

More Later.

-Travis
copyright 2004 Travis R. English.