Like most YouTube videos posted by , a 29-year-old surfer known for riding the world’s scariest waves, the clip posted on April 12, 2019, leads with cuteness.

Titled “Full Day of Surfing with My Brothers and John Gives Me a Board to Try!!! || Nate’s Big șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű,” it opens mid-frame like a raw home movie. You see Florence barefoot and giggling in surf trunks on green grass, shaggy brown hair cut in a DIY-looking mullet. Then he’s snuggling a fluffy cat and whispering, “Tell the viewers hello. Show them your pretty blue eyes.”

Unlike most of Florence’s videos, this one hints at the elephant in the room of Florence’s life, and also at the brilliant solution that has made him the unlikely breakout star of surfing’s most surprising new generation: the high-performance YouTubers creating an entirely new category of pro surfer.

The first clue comes in the video’s title. “John” is Nathan’s eldest brother, John John Florence, the two-time World Champion, the reigning king of American surfing. The second clue comes in a small-wave action montage that skips from Nathan surfing with enviable power and flow to John John surfing so much faster and better than Nathan—and pretty much everyone else on earth—that it’s almost embarrassing.

Back at his house on Oahu’s North Shore, Nathan turns to the camera and recalls the session in that montage, how he sat on his board and innocently told his brother that he was seeing air sections here and there. Nathan then slips into a different voice, channeling somebody harder and tougher—like maybe (and this is just a guess) John John. “ ‘Yeah. There is. Maybe I’m going to, like 
 go for one.’ ” Two waves later, Nathan says with the eternal outrage of an upstaged younger brother, John John launched a huge 360 air, stuck the landing, carved a turn, and then boosted another—truly elite, competition-winning stuff, tossed off in a casual surf.

Florence, now performing his own disgusted rage at the very sight of this, says, “I’m just like, You know what?’” Then he bursts out laughing and says, “You know what? I’m outta here!”

Outta the whole game, that is—outta the entire lose-lose proposition of competing head-on with his gifted brother, and instead into a game of his own invention, one he’s already winning.

Florence’s mother eventually found them a home on the sand at Pipeline, surfing’s ultimate proving ground. With superstars like Kelly Slater competing out front, the Florence boys dreamed of going pro.

“John was ultracompetitive, and he was winning contests from early on,” Florence says. “And I was not. I just sucked in events.”

Back then the only other path to pro sponsorship was that of the so-called free surfer. To succeed with this whimsical-sounding career, surfers had to show up at high-profile breaks whenever the cameras were rolling, surf well enough to get photos in magazines, and release occasional feature-length videos. Guys—and they were always male, like Dave Rastovich, Donavon Frankenreiter, and later Rob Machado—made a decent living this way in the 1990s and early 2000s.

“By the time Nathan came into his own, that world had already changed,” says Kai Lenny, a big-wave surfer from Maui. The free-surfer model had fallen apart—mainly because Facebook and Google devoured the global ad business, killing off most of the surf mags in the process, and because free YouTube content destroyed the market for surf videos.

John John survived—and thrived—by going the conventional route, winning the Championship Tour of the World Surf League in 2016 and 2017. Nathan needed a different strategy. He’d always been good in giant surf, so he tried competing on the WSL’s less lucrative Big Wave Tour—racking up good contest results at Mexico’s Puerto Escondido, in Portugal, and back in Hawaii. In 2019, the WSL canceled the tour outright, in favor of what the league called a “big wave platform” that no longer crowned a world champion.

That left the Billabong XXL Awards, an annual competition with prize money based on footage from the prior year. Florence dutifully flew around the world, charging watery mountains and sending in clips that made him a solid contender in 2020 and 2021—just in time for Billabong, in 2022, to shelve the XXL Awards.

Cue Jamie O’Brien, former contest pro and North Shore local, a childhood friend of the Florences who is 11 years older than Nathan. As surfing’s first successful YouTuber, O’Brien was—and still is—pumping out two videos a week, blending famous-surfer cameos and zany high jinks like riding Pipeline in an inflatable dinosaur costume.

“He actually came to me,” Florence says of O’Brien, “and was like, ‘Hey, what are you doing? You’re blowing it. You’re killing it on Instagram, but you need to get on YouTube.’ I was like, ‘Oh, my God, 100 percent.’ ”

Which is how Florence broke his back earlier this year at a spot on Maui called Jaws. He had just popped to his feet at the top of a wave, he says, when the entire wall went concave. “I just see 30 feet drop out below me, and I’m like, ‘Oh, my God,’ ” he says.

Florence plummeted through space, skipped like a stone down the lower portion of the face, then got sucked back into the curl. When he landed a second time, he says, his body went from bent forward in a safety position to flexed backward like a bow. “I felt the snap and was like, I think I broke my back.”

Scans later revealed a compressed vertebra, but Florence expects to make a full recovery. In the meantime, he’s still cranking out videos—watching the Eddie Aikau Invitational big-wave contest from shore, answering viewer questions with his wife, even doing standard influencer fare such as unboxing packages from sponsors like C4 Energy, GoPro, and Vans. Holding a bottle of CBD body oil, for example, Florence says into the camera, “Speaking of body oil, guess who started an OnlyFans? It’s a lot of XX-clusive content.” Florence launched his channel on the subscription service widely known for pornography in July 2021. But, he adds, “It’s not what you think. We’re doing tips and tricks 
 how to stay fit on land for the water.”

Florence isn’t the only pro making content, of course. Ben Graeff, a scraggly-haired New Jersey surfer who goes by Ben Gravy, does pretty well with videos of himself riding novelty waves like tidal bores, boat wakes, and Great Lakes dribblers. More to the point, a whole clutch of Florence’s Hawaiian peers are helping pioneer this new business model with content of their own. Koa Rothman, for example, another North Shore standout and childhood friend of the Florences, has a successful YouTube series called This Is Livin’. (Florence and Rothman also do the Nate and Koa Podcast together.) Kai Lenny, with production support from his sponsor Red Bull, puts out an infrequent but slickly produced video series called Life of Kai. Then of course there’s O’Brien—still at it, with more YouTube subscribers than any other surfer, 897,000 at last count.

Yet with more than 139 million total views and nearly a billion impressions in 2022 alone, there’s a case to be made that Florence now leads the pack. (He also has nearly double the subscriber count of his more talented brother.) Florence is cagey about exactly how much money he earns but calls it “compound growth.” As he explains: “YouTube starts to pay you from the ad revenue, you go on more surf trips because you’re getting money to travel, and you put out more content and bring more value to your brands. It’s a snowball effect.”

Florence adds that he’s already doing better than contest pros ranked in the top 20 on the World Tour. “Some of those guys don’t have a main sponsor,” he says. “How gnarly is that? You’re one of the 20 best surfers in the world. But a brand looks at you and goes, ‘You don’t have eyes on you. How can we get you to sell our product?’ ”

Meanwhile, Florence doesn’t have to worry about contest results or injuries suddenly derailing his entire career; he just has to be himself.

“So many people are a different person on social media,” he says, “they change their personality. I’m never going to do that. I’m going to be myself. I’m a weird dude. I’m a dork. I don’t mind putting it out there.”

The post How Nathan Florence Used YouTube to Achieve Surfing Stardom appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

This story update is part of the șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Classics, a series highlighting the best writing we’ve ever published, along with author interviews and other exclusive bonus materials. Get access to all of the șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Classics when you sign up for șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű+.Ìę

In 1998, Susan Casey, then the editor of Women șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű, a monthly șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű magazine offshoot, sent Susan Orlean to Maui, Hawaii, with the vague direction to track down a list of young womenÌęthought to be serious surfers. Orlean, who has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1992, did just that—only to find that none of the women actually surfed.

Luckily, a tip led Orlean to the small, remote town of Hana, way over on Maui’s east side. There she met Theresa, Angie, and Lilia, theÌęsurfers who would star in Orlean’s story of young women on the cusp of adulthood.

That piece, which ran under the headline “Life’s Swell,” eventually grew into the 2002 film Blue Crush,Ìęstarring Kate Bosworth, Sanoe Lake, and Michelle Rodriguez. The film performed all right at the box office, and yeah, some of the scenes of Pipeline are a little cringey (that’s what you get when you on surfer Rochelle Ballard’s body, or when you put North Shore big-wave surfer Noah Johnson in a blond wig for some of the action shots), but the movie eventually became a cult classic, inspiring all sorts of young women to head to the waves.

Here, surf writer Daniel Duane chats with Orlean about how “Life’s Swell” came to be.

OUTSIDE: I just reread the Maui-girls story, which is so fun, and it kicks off with a totally sparkling lead. I understand how somebody just started reading it and thought, This is a movie right now.
ORLEAN: Oh, thanks. Doing the story was really fun, and it just kind of fell together. The writing fell together easily, which was nice.

Tell me how the story came to be. How did the assignment happen?
Well, it was kind of funny. I had been doing stuff for șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű, and Susan Casey, who was then running Women șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű, said to me, “How would you like to do a story about these girls who are big surfers in Hawaii?” Generally, I come up with my own story ideas. It’s rare that I respond well to someone’s suggestion. But I thought it sounded great. And as I recall, I basically got a flight and went, and when I arrived in Maui, I started calling the different girls whose names Susan had given me. And one after another, they said, “Oh, I don’t surf anymore” or “Yeah, I’m not that interested in surfing.” It was every reporter’s nightmare. It was like, “What? You don’t surf anymore? Here I am in Maui, and I spent all this time and the magazine’s money to come here, and none of you guys surf?” I was very discouraged.

I talked to Susan and sorta said, “Look, the story’s a bust, so sorry, but, you know, I don’t think it’s going to happen.” And she said, “Stick around another day or two, you know, see what you can find.” There was one girl on the list that I had been given who was a bodysurfer. And I had originally not called her, because that was not quite what I was looking for, but I thought, Well, she’s the last person on my list. Why don’t I call her? And she answered the phone, and we spoke a bit, and I confided in her and said, “I’m going crazy because this list of names that I was given, none of these girls surf anymore.” And she said, “Oh, those aren’t the real surfers. I don’t know who gave you that list. But those girls aren’t the real surfers. The real surfers are out in Hana, and I can introduce you to all of them.” And it was like, “Oh my God, are you serious?” She basically took me in hand and introduced me to this whole group of girls who were really serious about surfing. I think the other girls had surfed a little and it was kind of a short-term hobby, but these were the girls who were really serious about it and devoted to it. So it was sort of pay dirt. And it was of course the better story than the one that I had set off to do—or certainly the better subjects. I mean, they were exactly what I had hoped the other girls were all about, and they were just the wrong people.

Do you remember that first drive out to Hana?
Oh my God, yeah. Anybody who has done that drive doesn’t forget it, because it is a very challenging road. It’s not very far, and I’m a totally fearless driver—I have no fear of driving anywhere—but it’s the most harrowing drive, and [you’re] doing it in a rental car where you have no idea the quality of the car’s tires or traction. It was actually very interesting because Maui—certainly where I was staying—is very developed, very civilized, you know? You come to believe that all of Maui is very developed, so driving to Hana, it’s a real surprise to go through parts of Maui that are so wild and undeveloped and rugged. I mean, it was very cool.

How about when you came down into that town? You described going to that general store, and I know that general store, so when you come down into the town and you go to that general store, how did Hana itself strike you?
You know: classic small town, where everybody knows where everybody is. And clearly everybody knows everybody. I mean, all I had to do was stand there for a few minutes and I could find out where all the girls were. Part of what was really interesting was how you’re in a town where people truly keep an eye on each other and know each other literally on a first-name basis. It’s also very Hawaiian. I remember being in that store and seeing all those kinds of rice-ball snacks and Spam snacks, which when you’re in the main part of Maui that’s much more developed, more touristy, you don’t get quite as much a feel for—the real Hawaii, the Hawaii that is not for tourists but for the people who live there full time and really are part of the culture. And I really felt it there, like I was seeing Hawaii in a very different way.

I remember once being down at the beach there, watching kids after school surfing on small waves. I can’t remember the name of the beach, but it struck me as one of those rare glimpses of paradise there, the lives of those kids in the water. I guess I can imagine being there, and meeting those girls, and seeing them in the water and thinking, Wow, this is really a special scene out here.
Oh yeah. It seemed very authentic. That’s one thing about Hawaii—as a tourist, you can be frustrated sometimes, feeling like you’re never really seeing the place, that you’re always seeing some kind of tourist version of it, and this felt authentic. It also seemed idyllic—although that’s partly an illusion as well. A lot of these girls didn’t have intact families, and it wasn’t purely a kind of Mayberry experience. Some of them had fairly tough lives. So the setting is idyllic, and the idea that you come after school and go surf, all of that, of course, seems like paradise. But there’s a lot of complexity as well.

There’s a really nice description at the end of your piece. You described your plane sort of rising up over the island and looking back down and wanting to think of those girls as always there. And that story had such a life after your departure. I mean, of course, the writing of the article and then the movie that was loosely based on it. How does that memory sit with you now, when you think of that moment in the plane looking back down?
A lot of what interested me in doing this story was, when I’ve written about young people, the sense that the age at which you view them is an eternal age at which they will remain forever. You know, when you’re writing about adults, you aren’t thinking about the transitions their life will take. They’re an adult. They’re fully formed. You just see them as a person who you’re catching at a moment. I think when you’re writing about young people, for me, I’m always acutely aware of how transitory the moment is, and that the moment at which I am seeing them is just one very specific moment, and it will change. So there’s a lot of poignancy for me in those stories, because you know the minute you put it down on paper, they’ll have changed, and it will immediately become a sort of reference to another point of their lives.

In the case of the girls, too, I was catching them while they were inflamed with this enthusiasm, and they all fantasized that they would become professional surfers. As an adult who knew a little bit more about maybe how the world works, I knew that that dream was unlikely to come to fruition for most of them, if not all of them. So I was catching them also at a moment where they still believed in this possibility, and they hadn’t yet had the more rude awakening of reality that, no, they probably weren’t gonna make a living as professional surfers. So it’s capturing a dream in its most buoyant moment before the very kind of drab reality of possibility lands and punctures it.

I’ve been a surfer for 30-plus years, and I saw Blue Crush when it came out, and I’ve written and thought a lot about surf culture over the years, so I have a real sense of what a cultural milestone it was. I’m really curious to hear your sense of the relationship between the girls you met and their lives, and the story told in Blue Crush, and why it had the effect in the culture that it did at the time.
You know, it’s so interesting. I mean, I haven’t seen Blue CrushÌęin ages, so I can’t speak really authoritatively about it, but the girls were a little older in the movie, they had relationships with boys that were more developed. The girls that I wrote about, many of them were still kids. The girls in the movie, as I recall, some of them were working and they were just like, they kicked up their age a little bit, perhaps to give them a bit more independence and agency. But I felt that the intention of the movie was very close to the spirit of the story.

Why has this movie caught on? I feel like it’s an evergreen. I barely meet anyone who hasn’t seen it, particularly women who say, “Oh, yeah, we used to watch it in my dorm room in college all the time.” It’s one of those movies that, when it came out, I think the box office was unimpressive. It was fine. It wasn’t a blockbuster by any means. But it seems to have had a stickiness that many movies don’t have. Was it because it was an early movie about women’s surfing?ÌęFor all I know, it was the first movie ever about women’s surfing. Although I guarantee you that the number of women who have watched the movie who are surfers is probably low. Is it some sense of freedom and physical strength? I’m not sure. I mean, I think if you could identify what quality about it has made it something of a cult movie… I mean, the cinematography is great. The cast seems to truly embody the characters. Are they great actors? Who knows. But they certainly cast that movie perfectly. It seems to have captured the quality of independence and self-determination without being didactic that kind of caught people’s imagination.

How do you think the culture has evolved since then? The very fact that there was a Women’s șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű magazine in which the article first appeared seems an artifact of the time. And I’m curious to hear your thoughts on how our culture around women in sports and women being depicted as strong athletes with agency has changed. There’s that sort of curious quality in the movie, where the lead girl is both trying to surf Pipeline, which is this extremely dangerous technical wave, and dating an NFL guy who happens to be vacationing on the island. So she’s kind of in the braver position, there’s a sort of an interesting inversion. How do you think the culture has moved since then around those kinds of stories?
Well, I think it’s easy to forget how fresh the idea was at that time. I don’t remember the year that movie came out, but now when we see women in just about every sport, and women referees in the NFL, there’s been a considerable sort of speeding up of acceptance of women as athletes. And in fact, I would argue that many of the real standout athletes of the past ten years have been women. Serena Williams, Simone Biles. You’ve got the women’s soccer team and so forth. So I think that it’s been normalized in a kind of accumulative way. We’ve forgotten that, at the time that Blue Crush came out, at the time my story came out, it was kind of surprising.

Even for people who felt quite comfortable with the tenets of feminism, I don’t know that women doing certain sports like surfing had become familiar and common. It just wasn’t a sport that women had penetrated in a very public way. I think the ability of women athletes has been so amply demonstrated over the past ten or fifteen years that we’ve become fairly used to it. But back then it was still a bit of a surprise. And for these girls, there were not a lot of women professional surfers [who were] role models. That just wasn’t yet a familiar sight, and coverage of women’s sports, which I think is a huge part of it, was still given short shrift.

As a journalist and a writer, what was the experience of writing that article and having it turn out the way it did, and its transformation into the movie, and its long life to this day? Were there any lessons about the relationship between life and writing? And what makes a compelling story for you? Did you have any takeaway over the years, mulling that experience?
I think I’ve always been permitted the luxury of following my curiosities and my intuition about what makes a good story. And I’ve always shied away from the story that is about a woman performing something that is not normally associated with women, because that had become a kind of tired trope in magazines—you know, the first woman arc welder, or whatever. So I think that I’ve avoided those stories. There was something about going, “Oh my God, oh my God, there’s a woman doing a man’s job” that really offended me, because you think, Well, wait a minute, this shouldn’t be treated as a crazy freak show; we should accept it as that’s the way things should be, so let’s not turn it into a big deal. But the bottom line is, I didn’t write the story with that as the point. I just thought, This is an interesting thing to observe, and I don’t have to feel burdened by this idea that, oh, the big point of the story is girls doing a man’s sport, but instead let’s go past that and write about the experience that these girls have doing this sport. I think this goes to the more general sort of philosophy about writing and about looking for the story that really resonates. The thing that moves you as a writer is the thing you should go toward, rather than feeling like you’re kind of checking a box.

It seems to me that there really is a lesson for the young writer in there—that you just went after the emotional quality of these girls’ lives that resonated with you.
I think that’s what I’m trying in a fumbling way to say: that once you establish in your mind, “Oh, this is a story that has some special interest to me because it’s a bit unusual to see girls surfing,” then that’s not the story. That may be a justification for the story, but that’s not the actual story. The actual story lives in the emotion of it, and the characters, and the people, and the actual story—not the policy position.

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In the mid-nineties, while prowling the library at the University of California at Santa Cruz for anything remotely related to surfing, I happened upon an extraordinary book, a 1964 first edition of Willard Bascom’s .ÌęSurfing was a somewhat mysterious business in those days. I did an awful lot of it, mostly at a rocky point north of town. I spent even more time thinking about the beauty of breaking waves, the constant flux of sand, and how great it would be if I could predict either with any semblance of accuracy. But I knew almost nothing about the physical forces involved.

Like most surfers at the time, my best wave-forecasting tool was a battery-powered weather radio. Every night before I fell asleep, in those days before smartphones colonized our every waking moment, I turned on that radio to listen. An authoritative male voice, in a recorded statement updated every hour on the hour—as if speaking from some high perch with an infinite view of the sea—rattled off wind and wave data from every offshore buoy along the west coast. Starting in the far north, that man’s voice worked its way south, reporting each buoy’s local wind speed and direction, plus the direction, height, and interval of open-ocean swell.

My imagination always conjured images of these buoys bobbing and swaying in the night-dark ocean. If the swell reading of a particular buoy suddenly jumped in size—from, say, three feet at ten seconds to eight feet at 17 seconds—my mental image leapt with it. That meant waves were already on their way toward me, moving hundreds of miles across the face of the sea. The sheer excitement often infiltrated my sleep, causing me to awaken in the wee hours. I lived on a quiet street near a beach and would open a window to listen for the telltale thumping of waves. Over the years, I’d become acutely sensitive to the quality of this thumping, from the hollow slap of summer rills spanking the sand to the bunker-busting thunder of midwinter monsters. By counting seconds between impacts, I could also tell if a new swell had begun to hit. If it had, I’d lie there in bed and stare at the ceiling, running a subconsciousÌęalgorithm crunching local tides and likely winds to settle upon the best possible time and place for the following day’s surf.

Beyond that, though, my relationship to the sea was heavy on questions and light on answers: Where do surfing waves come from, anyway? What causes waves to break the way they do? What exactly happens when we catch a wave on a surfboard?

“The trick of surfing, of course,” writes Bascom, as if in response to the latter, “is to get the board moving and the weight properly balanced so that the down-wave slope drag can take over the work of propulsion at the moment the wave passes beneath.”

The scientific dorkiness of that prose suggested that Bascom’s imagined reader was a beach-town Beaver Cleaver, thumbing pages while scanning airwaves with his homemade radio—someone very much like Bascom himself, in other words. Born in New York City in 1916, Bascom went to college at the Colorado School of Mines in Golden and later took a job with the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego. The sheer squareness of Bascom’s writing thrilled me so much, in the library at UC Santa Cruz, that I took the book home. For months, I swam in Bascom’s curiously exhaustive treatment of a delightfully narrow topic: the physical dynamics of ocean waves and the beaches against which they crash.

This included: a sweeping treatise on the origins of all ocean waves; mathematical descriptions of their ideal forms; beautiful explication of exactly how gravitational interaction between the earth, moon, and sun creates tides; and rousing accounts of destructive tsunamis and rogue waves encountered by ships at sea.

I didn’t have much money for books in those days, and I returned the library edition when I finished school. By that time, though, Waves and Beaches had lodged itself on the surfer’s library shelf of my mind as one of the few truly indispensable titles, a book that any genuine ocean lover simply had to own in order to feel complete. In later years, after I got a real job, I tried to buy a copy but was disappointed to discover that Waves and Beaches was in such scarce supply and high demand that prices had become ridiculous. One can still find copies online for upwards of $100. So I was genuinely thrilled to discover, late last year, that Patagonia was publishing ($30). Better still, given how much time had passed, this new edition had been updated by an oceanographer named Kim McCoy who has spent years researching surf-zone wave dynamics, sailed and freedived all over the world, and, according to his “About the Author” statement, “recently completed an Ironman and will continue to swim, dive, surf, sail, rock climb, and paraglide until motion stops, viscous drag ceases, buoyancy is lost, and gravity ultimately wins.” Best of all, McCoy befriended Bascom in the later years of Bascom’s life, and even discussed possible updates to Waves and Beaches before Bascom’s death in 2000. McCoy, in other words, was the perfect man for the job.

Once I got my hands on a copy of this latest edition, I noticed several things right away. First up, McCoy and Patagonia clearly conceived of their project as simultaneously an act of preservation—reintroducing a forgotten masterwork—and a genuine continuation of Bascom’s oceanography, bringing it up to the minute as Bascom himself might have done if he were still alive. The physical design of Patagonia’s Waves and Beaches also demonstrates a quiet wisdom: sturdily bound in hardcover but without a dust jacket, and printed on heavy paper stock, it seems purpose-built to survive decades of repeated reference, trips to beaches in sandy daypacks, and passing along to future generations. Mesmerizing new photographs of giant ocean waves, plus easy-to-understand scientific illustrations, speak directly to our information-hungry modern minds; and the careful balance between Bascom’s original prose and McCoy’s additions reflect a perfect understanding that Waves and Beaches remains indispensable for every surfer, sailor, kayaker, kiteboarder, freediver, and beach lover who has ever wanted to know exactly how and why the water and sand behave as they do.

McCoy’s contributions feel especially on-point with regard to contemporary ocean-research technology, recent epic storms, and chilling detail about climate change and how it threatens coastal cities. I have also been delighted to find Bascom’s old scientific dorkiness sustained through McCoy’s newly precise insights about surfing. These include an 11-point summary of wave conditions ideal for surfing, such as: “The lateral speed of breaking—the sideways extension of the curl along the crest—should be between one and two times the onshore speed of the wave.”

They also include equations for calculating how fast a surfer must travel over water to catch a wave of any particular height—35 miles per hour for a 60-footer—and how fast a surfer moves when up and riding on giant waves at NazarĂ© in Portugal, an astonishing 50 miles per hour. McCoy even throws in legally dubious advice for anyone curious to experience the feeling of free-falling off a 30-foot wave face: just drive a car across a bridge at 30 miles per hour and jump out the window into the river below.

Best of all, McCoy’s edition allowed me to savor passages that I’d either overlooked or forgotten, like Bascom’s account of the dream job that led to the book’s writing. Bascom was in his late twenties at the time and already a researcher at Scripps when, in 1945, he got hired by what he calls the “World War II Waves Project,” at the University of California at Berkeley. This outfit had been established, Bascom wrote, “to develop scientific means of determining the characteristics of beaches and of the waves that would make it difficult for landing craft to approach enemy-held beaches.” Its work continued after the war and allowed him to spend five years exploring and surveying beaches up and down the west coast of the continental United States. It sounds like an awful lot of fun. In those simpler days of fewer people and rudimentary gear, Bascom and his colleagues would drive the amphibious landing craft right off the beach into gigantic swells. Having seen restored DUKWs in use for tourist outings, I was astonished to reread Bascom’s account of deliberately surfing big waves in one by gunning the engine down a wave face and riding back toward shore.

Equally enjoyable, in a very different way, was the chapter on subtle hydrological forces that create fleeting sand forms like little rills and cusps and pinholes—the kinds of things we’ve all noticed during our own beach walks but never even thought to spend days and weeks weeks happily explaining.

The post Ocean Lovers, This Little-Known Book from the Sixties Is Required Reading appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

Barefoot on the sand among adoring fans at the 2019 Billabong Pipe Masters surf contest on the North Shore of Oahu, Kanoa Igarashi looked mostly like what he was: a smooth-muscled, 22-year-old pro surfer with peroxide-blond hair and the youthful beauty of a boy-band teen idol in a comic book about young rock stars who become space warriors to save the galaxy.

As Igarashi psyched himself up to compete, though, and watched ten-foot barreling blue waves spit great gobs of white foam into the bright Hawaiian sun, he looked like something else, too: a star-kissed man-child who’d already won everything and couldn’t decide how he felt about it.

Allow me to back up. Igarashi has dual Japanese and American citizenship. He grew up in Huntington Beach, California, a.k.a. Surf City, with a Japanese mother and father in the role of hard-driving American sports parents. Igarashi got so good at surfing so fast that in 2016, at just 17 years old, he became the youngest rookie to qualify for the Championship Tour of the World Surf League. He won the , the largest surf competition in the world, in 2017 and 2018, and by early 2019 was the tenth-ranked surfer on earth, the second-ranked American, and absolutely huge in Japan.

That’s really the big story about Igarashi: Japanese pop-cultural superstardom. In 2018, he officially switched his national identity on tour from American to Japanese. His new country has around two million surfers and not a single serious challenger for the title of best and most famous Japanese surfer of all time. As a result, Igarashi, now 23, has had his image plastered on gargantuan billboards in Shibuya Crossing, Tokyo’s equivalent of Times Square. And for several years he has ridden a tsunami of sponsorship money in the neighborhood of $2 million a year from so-called endemic surf brands like Oakley, Quiksilver, and Red Bull, as well as more mainstream outfits like Beats by Dre and Japanese cosmetics and construction companies. Visa has fun ads in which Igarashi quite literally surfs a wave of cash cards.

More recently, Igarashi’s choice of flag has made him the single biggest human-interest story going into surfing’s Olympic debut at the 2020 Tokyo Games. Because, see, Igarashi’s mother and father not only surfed in Japan before moving to the United States but also claim to have moved precisely to give their unborn child the best possible shot at becoming a professional surfer. As if that weren’t awesome enough, Igarashi’s father is pretty sure that he and some friends were the first surfers ever to ride waves at the break in Japan where the Olympic competition will be held, 90 minutes outside Tokyo at Shidashita Beach, in the town of Ichinomiya. Meaning that Igarashi will compete for gold on behalf of family and country at his own father’s home break.

Destiny, anyone?

Nevertheless, on that sunny December day at the 2019 Pipe Masters, Igarashi could have seen his upcoming heat as a very big deal. Pipeline is still the most photographed surf spot on earth, grinding over coral reefs shallow enough to have killed at least 11 surfers and maimed the bodies and egos of countless more. And the Pipe Masters is still the biggest annual event in the sport, the jewel of the globe-trotting nine-event Championship Tour.

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My dream of surfing bigger waves took hold on a blue winter day several years ago, when I stood on a dune at San Francisco’s Ocean Beach and watched 20-foot swells peel into magnificent long walls. I was 45 years old, and I’d been surfing OB for 15 years, never venturing into anything above 10 or 12 feet, but all of a sudden I began thinking
 maybe.

Before I explain why, and how it all worked out, I should clarify that nothing I’m describing qualifies as what I’d consider true big-wave surfing. I’ve seen the latter in an awful lot of movies, and with my own eyes at Maverick’s, 20 miles south of Ocean Beach, and at a break on Maui called Jaws. By some accounts, big-wave surfing doesn’t begin until the face hits 30 feet. It becomes serious around 40, and routinely sees elite riders rocketing across 70-footers.

In the context of the sport, in other words, my little midlife impulse toward bigger surf blew zero minds and qualified strictly as pushing a personal limit. Hundreds of men and women in California alone surf waves as big or bigger without a second thought. I’d ridden a few 18- to 20-footers myself—back in my twenties, when I lived in nearby Santa Cruz and my entire life revolved around catching waves, my daily schedule dictated by tide charts and wind patterns.

But then I moved to San Francisco, married and bought a house, and had kids—“the full catastrophe,” as Zorba the Greek puts it. Just crawling out of bed every morning, trying not to end up divorced or go bankrupt or traumatize my children, felt scary enough. Recreational terror held no appeal. A dear friend of mine named Mark Renneker surfed Maverick’s almost every time it broke, and he is quite a bit older than me. So I paddled out there once, caught a ballpark 30-footer, and duly wiped out. I told myself I didn’t need whatever Maverick’s had to offer and that anyone who did was nuts.

That left Ocean Beach, a world-class break that, while not a true big-wave spot, is notorious for North Pacific swells heaving into giant A-frames that detonate on shallow sandbars like bunker-busting bombs. Unlike Maverick’s or the waves near Santa Cruz, Ocean Beach lacks deep-water channels, so there’s no way to paddle from sand to surf without a beatdown. Before you can even try to catch a wave, you first have to paddle through 75 yards of relentlessly inbound walls of whitewater.

During small swells, those whitewater walls hit like distracted joggers, bouncing you around. On big days, they hit like NFL linemen in pillow suits—slamming you backwards so far it can take 45 minutes of lung-burning mortal combat just to reach the outer breakers, which is where the actual surfing happens.

Even then, the side-shore current sweeps south so fast that you might paddle parallel to the beach for an entire session just to stay near the best surf, which becomes a problem when an unusually huge wave looms into view and you’re too tired to sprint-paddle out of harm’s way. Taking a giant lip on the head, you can easily get blown back into the whitewater zone, and then, lacking the willpower to ram past all those linemen again, clear to the beach. The subsequent three hours of torpid, cranky exhaustion on your couch, nursing a beer and a burrito, do not square with family life.

But life has more seasons than we think. It’s not just spring, summer, autumn, and winter. If we have kids, they grow up and stop laughing at our jokes. If we suffer self-doubt and fear of failure—and who doesn’t, at least some of the time?—we realize that those feelings never really go away, so we learn to manage them like a chronic disease. Daily joys like surfing turn out to be strong medicine. New ambitions within those daily joys—deeper powder, tighter singletrack, more trail-running mileage—restore our sense of life as an adventure while anchoring us in the gentle sunshine of the present.

Better still, when we push limits in midlife, we get a much better idea of our actual physical capacity and needs. Like at Ocean Beach on that blue winter day: I was in great shape from a summer of triathlons, and I knew I’d be fine as long as I didn’t get seriously winded. So I pulled on a wetsuit, grabbed a surfboard, and started paddling, committed to remaining within myself, keeping calm.

I can’t say it was a glorious success. Forty minutes of battling whitewater got me to what we call the 80-yard line, a gauntlet blocking access to the good waves farther out. On that particular day, the 80-yard line consisted of a constant drumbeat of ten-foot waves slamming down hard enough to snap my board. I tried to ease my way across but got hit and drilled deep, flipped around like a toy soldier, and pushed to the beach.

In surfing terms, I got shut down—never reached the outside waves, much less caught one. But I was also unharmed and even unshaken, so I felt more as if a door had creaked ajar. I told Renneker about the experience, said I’d like to join him on bigger days. Next chance we got, he led me back through all that whitewater and taught me to bypass the 80-yard line by diving down and swimming along the dark sandy bottom while dragging my surfboard by the ankle leash. It worked. I was astonished to find myself alongside Renneker in the relative safety of the takeoff zone.

Watching those beastly things roll toward us, then floating up and over as they spun into foamy roaring tubes, felt like leaning over the balcony of the oceanic opera house and bearing witness to grandeur. Renneker rode several waves with such unfussy ease that I tried one myself, paddled hard as the wave bore down, felt my surfboard start to glide, and was about to hop to my feet when I looked down the blue cliff ahead and chickened out.

Ashore, Renneker kindly said it wasn’t my fault, that my surfboard was too small. He introduced me to a brilliant board designer named Dave Parmenter and helped me order a so-called big-wave gun—a nine-foot, six-inch spear painted fire-engine red.

I’ve been on this journey eight years now, constantly training to be fit enough. I swim laps in the off-­season, lift weights, bodysurf. I wouldn’t say I’ve got anywhere near mastery, nor am I immune to serious thrashings, which I receive frequently. But there are beautiful moments, too—burned into memory as a fusion of feeling and image. Surfing’s weird that way. The focused fun of soaring on a great wave so deeply immerses one’s consciousness in flow that it’s quite normal to finish the ride of your life unable to replay it mentally. Looking back, if I see anything at all, it’s that initial instant when I’ve just caught a wave and stood up, taken control of my surfboard, and looked down the line of flight as if into a wormhole through emotional space-time, giddily anticipating the natural acceleration that obliterates self-awareness.

Curiously, though, I’ve found equal satisfaction in the discovery of genuine personal limits. A few months ago, again with Renneker, I paddled out in the biggest and most powerful surf I’d ever seen at Ocean Beach, each massive pulse like a runaway 18-wheeler speeding just under the surface, pushing us upward as it rolled below, then dropping us off its back. Renneker wasn’t remotely scared—he’s ridden 50-foot faces elsewhere—but I watched in astonishment as brilliant young surfers pulled into barrels the size of subway tunnels. When my own chance came, I paddled to the speeding brink of a watery cliff and, just as I had eight years before, chickened out. An hour later, I got another chance and had to yell at myself—for real, out loud—Don’t be scared! Don’t be scared! Hopping to my feet, I was airborne, separated from my surfboard and falling through space.

By the time I surfaced, I’d been pushed back across the 80-yard line, then well into the whitewater. Soon I was on shore. Walking up the grassy dune, I turned and saw Renneker, a tiny black figure on the now silver sea, glide along a mercury wall.

Later, as darkness fell and headlights gleamed on the city streets, he walked up, smiling. I told him how impressed I was, that I’d seen his ride and, having come up short myself, knew exactly how much skill it took. He said something equally kind—saw my wipeout, awesome that I’d tried, crazy-difficult conditions—and I realized I’d been wrong about Maverick’s, about big surf in general. I’d been wrong because I hadn’t known the pleasure that comes from really trying something at the outermost edge of one’s own ability—­enjoying a certain pride, to be sure, but also earning the tenderness toward oneself and others that comes from authentic risk.

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First, a thesis: Americans driving cars kill Americans riding bikes for the same reason that Americans in pandemics refuse to wear masks, and Americans who love assault rifles get panicky at the mention of gun control, and Blue Lives Matter types freak at any suggestion that cops shouldÌętry to kill fewer Black people.Ìę

Before I elaborate, a word about where I’m coming from: progressive politics, obviously, but also climbing. Cycling only entered my life ten years ago when I trained for the Escape from Alcatraz triathlon in San Francisco, where I live. Triathlon training involves a shocking amount of cardio—12 hours a week of swimming, running, and cycling—but I loved the endorphins and got hooked. For years after, I spent summer Saturdays on long rides through coastal redwoods and wine country. I took up other cycling disciplines, too: did most of a century ride as triathlon-training,Ìęflew to Oregon to race in at Alpenrose Dairy,Ìęmountain-biked clear around the Big Island of Hawaii by linking dirt roads from beaches to country inns.

Like every avid cyclist, I started noticing articles about riders maimed or killed by people driving cars and trucks: a father of two out for a toodle , California,Ìęwhen a driver ran him down from behind; a young woman when a trucker made a hard right and ran her over. I heard stories from friends: a middle-aged dad cycling through vineyards when somebody swerved onto the shoulder for no apparent reason and killed the guy; a friend of a friend in D.C. who was commuting to work when an inattentive driver left his children fatherless. I noticed also that people who killed other people with cars or trucks rarely got so much as a moving violation unless they were drunk or high.

So I stopped recreational road biking and moved all of my triathlon bike training indoors. Eventually, new bike lanes started appearing all over town, some even well protected. I told myself I’d crawl out of the basement when they built enough of them to link together a long, safe ride. As the years passed, though, I traded triathlons for a midlife return to rock climbing in Yosemite.Ìę

Cycling friends laughed. You’ve got to be kidding me, they said. You climb in Yosemite and you think cycling is too dangerous?Ìę

Damn right. In climbing, the danger is high but also predictable, manageable. That’s the whole point. I’ve climbed for decades and trust myself to make good decisions. In road biking, the danger is more like the risk of getting struck by lightning while running around on a mesa during an electrical storm with a tin hat on your head. The only decision that matters is whether to run around at all. Every time you ride a bike on a road with cars, you depend absolutely on every human being driving every one of those cars not to make a careless, casual, no-big-dealÌęmomentary oops-level mistake that leaves you maimed or dead. Given the human propensity for such mistakes, that’s a nonstarter for me.Ìę

Also: the bad stories never stopped coming. My daughter went off to college last year and met a terrific young man whose father, a guy very much like myself, was cycling in Napa County on a lovely Saturday morning in August 2012, as a perfectly sober but sleep-deprived nurse drove her BMW in the opposite direction. At roughly 9:30 A.M., the nurse turned left, apparently without first checking to make sure there wasn’t a cyclist going the opposite way, and killed that young man’s father. Law-enforcement officers showed up, looked around, and determined that, yep, the cyclist had the right of way. The perfectly sober nurse was 100 percent at fault in this 100 percent avoidable killing of another human being. In fact, all she would’ve had to do to not kill that young man’s father was think, Oh boy, before I make this turn, I better look carefully to make sure I’m not going to kill anybody.ÌęAnd sure, she tried her best to save his lifeÌęand was clearly traumatized by the incident. But she was only convicted of a misdemeanor, with a penalty of community service. Because, see, in our system of laws and civic responsibilities, and despite how remarkably easy it is to not kill cyclists, that nurse’s error just wasn’t considered a big deal. In fact, homicide by automobile mightÌębe our country’s least-penalized way of killing other human beings.

So, of course, let’s build heaps of cycling infrastructure in every American city. Cycling is unbeatably healthy, fun, social, and good for the planet, and good infrastructure makes it a lot safer. But let’s also find a way to fix our cultural infrastructure.Ìę

Existing laws, after all, seem well conceived to punish drivers who kill cyclistsÌęand thereby encourage safer driving. New York and many other states have “reckless endangerment” laws against behavior that puts others at risk when someone acts in a way that deviatesÌęgrossly from that of a hypothetical reasonable person in the same situation. Non-cycling examples include leaving a loaded gun where a child might find it, and dropping a bathtub off a tall building. And California law specifically forbids reckless driving, defined as driving in any way that the driver knows could cause injury, and also the unintentional killing of people with cars. The latter, known as vehicular manslaughter, amounts to a misdemeanor if done while violating a traffic law—speeding, running a red light—and simultaneously failing to exercise the degree of care that any reasonable person would under the same circumstance. Vehicular manslaughter becomes a felony when a driver’s negligent behavior creates such a high risk of death or serious injury to others that it suggests disregard for human life.

On the face of it, these laws should apply pretty much every time a driver kills a cyclist in a situation where the driver is at fault. If you’re in control of a 2,000-pound hunk of steel moving 55 miles per hour or more on a road equally open to cyclists—which is to say, most roads in the United States—and you make a sudden left turn without first ensuring there isn’t a rider in the way, then you have clearly put others at extreme risk in precisely the same way as somebody who drops a bathtub off a tall building without first looking at the sidewalk below. Or, to paraphrase the language of the California laws,Ìęyou have created such an extreme risk of injury or death to others that you have indeed displayed gross disregard for human life.

In practice, though, these laws almost never apply, because police officers and district attorneys have to decide whether to press charges. Those decisions require judgment calls about what terms like “reckless” and “negligent” and “reasonable person” actually mean. As it happens, cops and DAs frequently decide that speeding, running red lights, swerving onto road shoulders at 55 miles per hour, or making left turns without first checking for cyclists is merely the behavior of a perfectly reasonable person.

Which brings me back to my thesis about Americans finding it perfectly reasonable to refuse to wear a maskÌęin a pandemic, loseÌętheir minds at the thought of restrictions on their assault rifles, and fightÌęfor the freedom of cops to kill Black people.Ìę

A culture that considers none of the above reckless, negligent, or a display ofÌędisregard for human life is a culture that places extraordinary value on every individual’s freedom to endanger others, especially in service of that individual’s personal safety: the feeling of safety I get from believing in Donald Trump’s worldview is far more important to me than any risk that I might pass a lethal virus on to somebody more vulnerable than myself; the feeling of personal safety I get from stockpiling assault rifles is vastly more important than the role widespread gun ownership plays in our astronomical rate of firearm deaths;Ìęand, to extend the thought,Ìęthe feeling of safety I get knowing that I won’t suffer any consequences if I kill somebody with my car, isÌęvastly more important to me than the risk posed to cyclists by my not having to worry about killing them.

This odd notion of freedom looks even more peculiar in light of the fact that American culture simultaneously denigrates the freedom to endanger oneself. Even as we are astonishingly permissive of behavior that endangers others, we enforce strict motorcycle helmet and car seat-belt laws. We demand that auto manufacturers include expensive airbags, roll cages, and other features aimed at protecting the occupants of cars, while requiring absolutely nothing aimed at protecting anybody that these same cars might hit.

And just in case this seems like the way of nature, consider BASE jumping, which is illegal almost everywhere in the United States, even as we allow the purchase of assault rifles alongside eggs and milk at Walmart. In Europe, the opposite holds true: BASE jumping is legal all over but gun ownership is highly regulated. That’s because Europeans venerate the freedom to risk one’s own life but not the freedom to endanger others. European police officers, furthermore, do not generally carry guns and kill .

Of course, our cultural infrastructure is distinctive in other ways, too. For one thing, it venerates the big over the small, the heavy over the light, the powerful over the weak, the fast over the slow, the easy over the hard. In matters of transportation, it also venerates the car over absolutely everything else. That’s why, despite laws in every state giving cyclists equal claim to the road, many of us drive as if cyclists are merely annoying interlopers for whom no driver should ever have to modify behavior.Ìę

Among the few slender rays of sunshine are so-called vulnerable road user laws (VRUs), promoted by cycling-safety advocates and currently on the books in ten states. VRUsÌęprovide stiffer penalties—six-month driver’s-license suspensions, large fines, and even 30-day prison terms, especially for drivers who injure or kill cyclists while breaking traffic laws. But widespread adoption of suchÌęlaws may already be threatened by weakness in the knees among their very own advocates, some of whom apparently worry that VRUsÌęwill only give police new means of oppressing the oppressed.Ìę

That leaves most of the country still dependent on older laws. It also means that our biggest hope for real change lies with dramatic cultural transformation: cops and DAs willing to redefine the behavior ofÌęa “reasonable” driver as not including vehicular homicide,Ìępublic shaming of drivers who kill cyclists,Ìęcelebrity public-service campaigns about how remarkably easy it is not to kill cyclists,Ìędriver’s-ed courses that actually hammer home a cyclist’s equal right to the road. But these are all tall orders and, until they appear imminent, I’ll stick with rock climbing.

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One afternoon on a Northern California ranch, as wildfires threatened around the state and the power company shut off electricity to prevent new flare-ups, chef woke from a nap and decided he wanted to shoot something.

Fair-haired and barrel-chested at 40, and already on the short list of the world’s great chefs, Skenes rubbed his bleary blue eyes, slipped his feet into delicate white sneakers, and walked outside to the enormous truck he jokingly called Rambo. Under the back seat, he had a machete, a samurai sword, and a double-bladed battle-ax—“street-fighting stuff,” he told me with a chuckle, knowing exactly how insane that sounded.

Street fighting didn’t appear to be imminent, so Skenes opened Rambo’s camper shell and, between yawns, grabbed a carbon-fiber rifle fitted with a scope, ballistic range finder, and bipod—like something a professional assassin might get for Christmas. He placed the rifle in firing position on a picnic table and took a seat behind it with a box of very large bullets.

Nearby sat Jonathan De Wolf, the shambolic culinary director of the company Skenes founded, Saison Hospitality, and also Ilya Fushman, a physicist and big-time venture capitalist who happened to be Skenes’s regular hunting and fishing buddy.

Earlier that day, Skenes and his pals had shot a mess of quail after driving three hours from San Francisco to the ranch, a private hunting operation called : as in, drink ale, shoot quail—ideally not in that order. After checking in, they’d dropped their luggage in a bunkhouse and listened to warnings about fire danger so extreme that cigarette smoking was forbidden everywhere but on the concrete patio, which also included a grill. As for that grill—a steel and brick firebox built into the wooden framing that supported the patio’s roof—Skenes was well aware of the danger that might pose.

At Ale & Quail, customers book in advance and tell the owner what they want to shoot: bobwhite quail, chukar, pheasant, whatever. Early on the morning of a customer’s hunt, a game-bird hatchery delivers the target critters; Ale & Quail employees then release those birds into bushes and trees. (Skenes would later insist that normally he doesn’t hunt like this, and that if I hadn’t been along he would have done something more serious.) It isn’t cheap—$785 per person for a day of fun—but such outings have become popular with California’s tech crowd. During their hunt, Skenes and the boys only had to load their shotguns and follow a guide with a pair of dogs—a German shorthair to find the birds and a black Labrador to flush them.

Every time a bird flapped, shotguns swung and I dove. De Wolf had a rough time, couldn’t hit a thing. Fushman did great, averaging maybe 60 percent. Skenes never missed. Whenever he pulled the trigger, a bird died. “I don’t know what to tell you,” Skenes said. “I shoot and they fall.”

Now the birds lay on the patio, waiting for Skenes to pluck, gut, and grill them—a tantalizing thought, given his reputation as heavyweight champion of the open flame. The fire-centric fine-dining establishment that made Skenes famous, called Saison, has long been one of the most expensive in San Francisco—at one point, dinner for two, ballpark, could run $1,800—and his new restaurants, in San Francisco and Los Angeles, both called Angler, are dedicated to the not so simple pleasures treasured by every serious hunter and fisherman: proteins rare and pure, expertly killed and cooked over fire.

More important, after one of the most meteoric rises in culinary history, and before the coronavirus pandemic shattered the restaurant industry, Skenes plotted a change in direction. Hunting trips like this one served as inspiration for a mysterious venture he was calling , the website for which offers only a single photograph of an elk herd and a link to request an invitation.

But before Skenes grilled those birds, he was in the mood for a little sniper practice. Hence the bipodded rifle on the picnic table. The wild grass beyond his muzzle looked parched enough to burst into flames if you glanced at it wrong. On the far side, 450 yards away, a dirt bluff rose a hundred feet. Word had it that a metal plate six inches wide hung from a chain somewhere on the bluff, for target shooting, but we were too far away to tell for sure.

Skenes scanned with binoculars, then looked through the rifle scope. He made some fine adjustments to the bipod. He chambered a shell and said, “This is going to be loud.”

A thunderous boom concussed lungs and ears and was met instantaneously by a metallic clang! ”țłÜ±ô±ô’s-±đČâ±đ.

Skenes chambered another shell, did it again: boom–clang!

He looked back at us with a faint smile, as if to say, OK, skills intact. Skenes encouraged his friends to try.

De Wolf: boom–thud. At least he’d hit the bluff.

Fushman: boom–clink. Hit the chain supporting the plate—not bad.

Skenes chambered another shell. Boom-clang!

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On a warm, breezy February day in 2000, Jeb Corliss strappedÌęon a parachute and stepped to the edge of a 310-foot sandstone cliff in South Africa.

To Corliss’s left, the Umgeni River poured green and clear off the cliff to become Howick Falls, a gargantuan shaft of water that crashed off rock ledges and thundered into a deep pool below. Straight ahead, in the direction Corliss intended to soar after opening his parachute, whitewater rapids flowed into a forested valley.

Corliss knew that big waterfalls can create enough air turbulence to destabilize a parachute, but he was 23 years old at the time, relatively new to the sport and driven by hungers and agonies he hadn’t begun to name. Corliss had not yet honed his judgment through two decades as the international face of professional BASE jumping—of seemingly crazy leaps from the world’s tallest bridges and skyscrapers, violent deaths of fellow jumpers, and gruesome injuries of his own.

Ambient winds were light and the view stunning. Corliss counted down: Three, two, one.

Just a kid really, he and adopted the conservative prone posture of a BASE jumper who considers the act itself plenty exciting and doesn’t need to up the ante with flips and tricks. Arms spread wide, with a small pilot chute clutched in his right hand, Corliss accelerated toward terminal velocity—BASE jumping is sometimes crassly referred to as committing suicide and choosing to save yourself—then threw the pilot chute, which triggered his main chute. At that instant, he made a seemingly minor error: he allowed his left shoulder to dip below his right. As a result, the main chute opened asymmetrically and swept Corliss directly into Howick Falls.

Sucked inward and downward by the roaring water, Corliss bounced off a rock ledge hard enough to snap his sacrum, break a vertebra, and dislocate his tailbone. Impact with a second ledge shattered his right knee and left foot, and broke every rib on his right side. He fell another 100 feet into the deep pool at the base of the falls. Underwater, turbulence thrashed his body, then released him to the surface, where he drifted into the shallows.

Corliss recounted all this to me last winter while steering his big Winnebago RV northbound on Interstate 15, toward a skydiving center east of Los Angeles. Dressed entirely in his trademark black, with a gleaming bald head and a toothy, square-jawed snarl, he spoke in a measured but relentless torrent of dramatic anecdotes and self-analysis. Corliss can talk for hours without a break, as if storytelling is at once his deepest compulsion and crucial to the performance art that has become his life.

Broken and immobilized in the pool below Howick Falls, Corliss said, he’d lain perfectly awake as freshwater crabs dug into his torn flesh.

“When I hit the cliff, it sliced my butt open,” he said. “Like, flayed me open. They were attracted by the blood and were eating the open wound.”

From the passenger seat of Corliss’s RV, I asked how that felt—you know, just out of curiosity.

“The helplessness and not being able to move and having really small creatures chew on you is
” He paused. “Unpleasant. I would say, if you can, avoid that at all costs.”

“So where does that experience rank in your personal pantheon of pain?”

“At the top, for sure.”

Paramedics eventually reached him and prepared a syringe of morphine.

“I was like, ‘No, I don’t want morphine,’ ” Corliss recalled. His face stiffened, as if the world should have known that any pain medication would undermine the central project of his time on earth.

The paramedics, he said, “looked at me like I was a complete lunatic. They’re like, ‘Your back is probably broken. Your hips look broken. Your legs look broken. Everything looks broken. And we’re going to have to carry you out and probably bounce you off every rock, and it’s going to take six hours. You need pain medication.’ I’m like, ‘No, I don’t want it,’ ” Corliss said. “And they’re like, ‘You’re going to have to give us a good reason.’ I’m like, ‘I know what hurts right now, and when I go to the doctor I want to be able to tell him what hurts. If you give me that shit I’m not going to know.’ ”

So Corliss lay in elective agony for hours while the dumbfounded rescue workers rigged a cable across the Umgeni River and hauled him up and out, and then to the trauma unit of a nearby hospital. There, even as doctors stitched his wounds, he continued to refuse pain medication. Worse by far, though, in Corliss’s telling, was the six weeks of recovery in a hospital room, where he was entirely dependent on a nurse with a bedpan every time he wished to relieve himself. (“If there’s a hell, it’ll be a bedpan for me,” he said.)

Corliss pulled off the freeway into the windy desert town of Perris, then took a wide, quiet country road past sun-parched grass below the San Bernardino Mountains. Turning into the palm-lined driveway of , he rolled to a stop in the big asphalt lot and finished the waterfall story with one of his standard narrative moves: an abrupt shift from horror to reassurance that all was for the best.

“The funny thing is,” Corliss said, killing the engine, “that accident was a catalyst for my entire career. If I had not hit that waterfall, had I not been injured that way, I would never have become a professional BASE jumper. I would have had to continue being a graphic artist. And I really do think that one saved my life. It helped me work through a lot of psychological problems I’ve had since I was young.”

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Pandemic climbing stories came first. Stop-and-go traffic at Joshua Tree, people flocking to Bishop, California, for all-day bouldering at the Buttermilks and then beers at the brewery. Next up, an American surfer in Costa Rica violated a beachÌęclosure only to get with a twitchy trigger finger. Not long after that,Ìęsome random stand-up paddleboarder in Malibu noticed that widespread civic responsibility—fellow citizensÌędoing their part by staying home—left the waves uncrowded, so he paddled out and caught a few until police in a powerboat cornered and .Ìę

The truth is, I get it.

The great tonic of outdoor sports lies in precisely what we all need right now—flow, escape from one’s own haunted mind, communion with the eternal. At a time when every other human threatens to infect us, it’s only natural to seek solitude on open ground. No wonder Southern Californians coped with parking-lot closures by hiking and biking miles to quality surf spots like San Onofre and Trestles. There’s something downright sane about heading outside, doing what we love, and keeping healthy.

Plus, it’s cultural—orÌęshould I sayÌęcountercultural. Surfing and climbing both went mainstream in the mid-to-late 1950s, when postwar conformity became so oppressive that young Americans craved authentic experiences and lifestyles less consumed by keeping up with the Joneses. , the 1968 Zapruder film of our entireÌęcontemporaryÌęoutdoor culture, follows four California buddies—Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard among them—in a van, spurning the straight and narrow for an epic surf/ski/climb road trip clear to Argentina.ÌęIn the sixties, hard-partying New York rockÌęclimbers known as the Vulgarians got laughs by ascending big cliffs while stark naked. Yosemite hardmen (and women) made a stand-alone sport out of dodgingÌęparkÌęrangersÌęto live on the cheap in caves and cars, survivingÌęon abandoned cafeteria leftovers while plotting first ascents. In the early seventies, when President Richard Nixon used his home in San Clemente as the Western WhiteÌęHouse—think Mar-a-Lago—the Secret Service banned surfing nearby. To this day, the surfers who defied that banÌęand got chased by military policeÌęremain legendary. Flouting the law is in our blood.

Hollywood still milks that outlaw image in blockbusters like Vin Diesel’s XXX series and the Robin Hood thieves of Point Break remakes—free-solo climbing, big-wave surfing, wingsuit flying, international bank robbery. That tradition likewise remains undead in the pleasure we all get from real-world exploits of modernÌęelite athletes. Capitalist consumer culture will always teach that life’s deepest purpose lies in the endless boring toil for money, with a close second place going to the expenditure of that money on ever more possessions, necessitating further toil. So when Alex Honnold free-solos El Cap, or when Keala Kennelly charges a death-or-glory barrel at Teahupoo, everybody else gets a vicarious thrill from watching somebody risk death just to feel what it’s like to be alive.

For those of us dedicated to tamer versions of these pursuits, the spurning of expectation brings so much happiness that we don’t just think it’s smart to break society’s rules now and then—we know that it’s vital to the well-lived life. But all cultures have weaknesses, often on the flip side of their strengths. Think aboutÌęNew York, the epicenter of America’s outbreak. The cityÌęgets much of its cultural magnificence from the unfussy willingness of locals to squeeze through crowded sidewalks and subway cars, holding the same handrails and breathing the same air as everybody else. Unfortunately, while that’s great for sowing a sense of common humanity, it also turns out to be great for spreading a virus.

In our case, outdoor adventure sports cultivate admirable individualism and free-thinking pursuit of good times,Ìębut they can also make us a wee selfish, overly focused on private pleasure. Everybody knows by now that the crowds of young urban climbers driving to the eastern Sierra doubtless included a few asymptomatic carriers of this novel coronavirus, potentially infecting vulnerable locals in a rural area with vanishingly few intensive-care beds. Anyone not currently living a mile underground also realizes that hospitals are so desperately inundated with the critically ill that old calculations about injury or death—I’m pretty sure I can stick this landing—no longer hold. When ski-resort closures sent hordes into the backcountry in early March, an avalanche near Telluride, Colorado,Ìęleft a snowboarder badly injured. The ensuing rescue brought dozens of people into dangerously close contact with one another, and the snowboarder himself wound up in an emergency room, consuming medical resources already being taxed.Ìę

For the time being, caution equals caring. And, yes, it sucks. I was planning to climb a big wall in Yosemite this spring with my daughter—our first together. Now the entire climbing season looks iffy. But there is consolation. Before the novel coronavirus, we burned emotional energy worrying about overcrowded national parks and climate change. Those worries will come roaring back when all this is over. For now, though, deer wander carless roads in Yosemite Valley while coyotes amble Chicago streets. Vehicle traffic in and around San Francisco, where I live, has fallen so much that normally hectic city boulevards feel downright peaceful. California skies are the clearest I’ve seen in decades.

Better still, when the pandemic passes, we’ll find our wildest places looking better than ever, refreshed by this much needed break from humanity.

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For a movie so outwardly uncomplicated, , by directors (and brothers)ÌęJeff and Michael Zimbalist,Ìęis remarkably hard to define. The simple version goes like this: Momentum Generation is a gorgeously shot feel-good documentary, filled with spectacular surfing footage on waves big and small all over the world, about the lives and friendships of eight male pro surfers and one surf filmmaker who all got to know each other back in the early 1990s, when that surf filmmaker was producing a low-budget surf flick called .

EveryoneÌęwho paid attention to surf media in the 1990s will have heard of Momentum, not because it was artfully made—it wasn’t—but because the 1992 film'sÌęscreechy punk/metal soundtrack and hyper-aggressive slash-and-aerial surfing really did announce the arrival of a new generation of young dudes who shredded waves into way smaller pieces than the reigning old dudes.ÌęEvery surfer who paid attention to surf media for even a portion of the past 25 years will also know the names and faces of most if not all of the stars ofÌęMomentum Generation: Shane Dorian, now widely recognized as the world’s greatest big-wave surfer; Pat O’Connell, co-star of the sweet-but-canned surf flick ; Rob Machado, arguably the only pro surfer ever to have built a lucrative career on a combination of brilliant surfing and lovely hair; Benji Weatherly, social glue and tender heart of the crew; Ross Williams; Kalani Robb; Taylor Knox; and, of course, Kelly Slater, the best and most famous surfer all time.

This brings me to a more complicated way of characterizing Momentum Generation—as anÌęexuberantly hagiographic work of celebrity journalism trading openly on the putative pleasures of glimpsing inside the charmed lives of people we are presumed to alreadyÌęadmire and envy.

The film, which ,Ìębegins with the deft establishment of thumbnail backstories for each surfer: Slater talks about growing up working-class in Cocoa Beach, Florida, and the emotional toll of his father’s drinking and his parents’Ìędivorce; Knox talks about watching his father beat up his mother; Robb describes painfully impoverished days on the beach, with no adult supervision. The boys excel at surfing, become friends while rooming together at Weatherly’s home on Oahu, and thus begins a joyous Act Two in which they win contests as the aspiring filmmaker Taylor Steele—of the original Momentum, not Momentum Generation—launches their collective journey toward surf-world fame.

The emotional center of Momentum Generation—the Act Two crisis, if you will—hinges on two very different events. The first comes when Slater has two world titles and is chasing a third, and suddenly finds himself behind Machado in the rankings. Machado and Slater face each other in a semifinal at the 1995 Pipeline Masters contest and trade perfect waves that put Machado on track to fulfill his dream of becoming world champion. Machado emerges from a big tube and Slater, sitting upright on his surfboard nearby, raises one hand to offer a high five. Machado veers to consummate that high five, and the surf media goes nuts with ecstasy over this apparent display of brotherly love and shared passion for surfing in a seemingly cutthroat competitive setting.

The enduring nature of that ecstasy, the legend of the High Five Heard ’RoundÌęthe Surf World, has always been testament more to the excruciating lack of meaningful content in surf competition than to the significance of the high five itself—because, really, who cares? So I appreciate the willingness of Momentum Generation to explore darker aspects of this incident. Slater, it turns out, by luring Machado into that high five, and for reasons that have to do with arcane surf contest rules, cost Machado priority for the next wave. That loss of wave priority made it easier for Slater to beat Machado and seize the world title for himself, crushing Machado’s dreams and plunging him into self-doubt and despair.

Several talking heads argue that Slater did this on purpose—a genuinely ugly move, if true, exploiting a friend’s essential kindness and desire to be liked as a way of destroying him. Machado clearly leans toward that explanation himself, and fairly seethes with bitterness as he talks about it in Momentum Generation; Slater rejects this interpretation outright and appears hurt by the implication.

The second big turning point in the filmÌęcomes when an older surfer named Todd Chesser, longtime mentor to the boys,Ìędies in giant surf off Oahu's North Shore in 1997.ÌęMomentum GenerationÌępromptlyÌęenters a blue period in which our grieving heroes drift apart and struggle to grow up, and one of the more peculiar aspects of surf culture begins to shimmer around the edges of the story. Machado, depressed about Slater’s high-five and Chesser’s death, and eliminated from the contest tour because of an injury, works to rehabilitate his career by making a solo surf film with Steele, director/producer of the originalÌęMomentum. They come up with the idea of Machado takingÌęa soul-searching solo surf trip across Indonesia, with his hair in the long spectacular curls appropriate to a Central Casting seeker, and call itÌę.Ìę

Putatively a documentary,ÌęThe DrifterÌęis good stuff: Machado achieves the last word in Spiritual Hair, is one hell of a beautiful surfer, and really does seem like a decent person. He looks great, inÌęThe Drifter,Ìęlying around by himself in foreignÌęhotel rooms, staring thoughtfully into mirrors and writing in his journal. He looks great alone on local Indonesian busses, staring moodily out the window as the world goes by, and alone on cool old motorcycles on country roads,Ìęand alone on boat decks, staring at the sky. And if you’re wondering how he could really have been alone, given that every one of those scenes has to have been staged and that a film crew was clearly with Machado everywhere he went, well, that’s what I’m trying to talk about.Ìę

Starting as far back asÌęThe Endless Summer,Ìęin 1964, surf movies have always been like porn: the action is the point, with a loose little storyline to break the monotony. Porn storylines are almost always fictional—pizza guy, remodel carpenter, office hanky-panky. Surf storylines, by contrast, are almost always documentary: two buddies chasing the summer around the world, searching for the perfect wave; depressed Machado growing out his hair and looking in the mirror for enlightenment. So many surf filmmakers have made so many such films for so long that the entire culture has grown comfortable with the idea of famous surfers participating in fabricated versions of their own lives—gorgeous, enviable, inspiring, but essentially fictional—and presenting them as real, or at least, real enough.Ìę

InÌęMomentum Generation,ÌęSteele and Machado even talk about makingÌęThe DrifterÌęin terms of their hope that it would recast Machado’s image in ways that might be good for enticing sponsorsÌęgoing forward.ÌęMomentum GenerationÌęthen uses footage fromÌęThe DrifterÌęto the same end that it was used inÌęThe DrifterÌęitself: to create a mood of depressedÌęsoul-searching and show viewers ofÌęMomentum GenerationÌęthat, during the blue period when the boys were estranged from one another, things got, you know,Ìęheavy. Put another way, the putative documentary calledÌęMomentum GenerationÌęlets us know (by accident, not because anybody cares) that the putative documentary calledÌęThe DrifterÌęwasn’t really a documentary at all, and then deploys putatively-documentary footage of clearly staged scenes fromÌęThe DrifterÌęas if they are real—or, rather, in the same spirit in which that footage was used inÌęThe Drifter,Ìęwhich is to say, with absolute comfort in the idea that any line between the real and the fabricated is itself anÌęillusion.Ìę

It’s all so meta-meta-postmodern that I’d have to go back to graduate school to have any hope of accurately quantifying the sheer emptiness of its deepness. That quality oozes intoÌęMomentum GenerationÌęitself when the blue period yields to a joyous reunion of our heroes. Wiser and warmer from the passage of years, they rekindle old friendships in full view of what must have been a minor Air Force of camera drones supported by a SEAL Team Six of water photographers, in absolutely stunning sunset light—staging a core emotional moment in their lives as if it were a Miller Lite commercial.Ìę

I don’t mean to say thatÌęMomentum GenerationÌęis not pleasurable to watchÌęand well made, because it is. Nor do I mean to say that these men are inauthentic and their friendshipsÌęinsincere—because again, they come across as decent guys, and are appealing to watch and listen to. I mean only to say that image-fabrication has become so routine in the surf-flick genre from whichÌęMomentum GenerationÌęemerges that it becomes impossible to tell if you’re watching fiction or nonfiction, or if it even matters.Ìę

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