new surf dialogue

morning sun children

4/13/10

Finally some rain. The road has been a dusty, tin heap rattling affair these past two weeks. Many through ways along the coast around the Raglan area are yet to be paved, but well traveled, and the summer drought has left them washboarded and thick with dust that kicks up through the undercarriage of our trusty rusty campervan. We have been staying at Neil’s place, 2km off the paved highway, and twenty minutes from Raglan, and the famed left hander that Bruce Brown brought to the world when Mike Hynson and Robert August surfed here during the filming of The Endless Summer. They had the place all to themselves when those reels were shot, but today, Raglan is an international surf tourism magnet. Holy crap a lot of people come here.

But out here at Neil’s place, where the crickets and the cows are the only sounds one has to deal with, Raglan can seem

neil's place

 pretty country. We weren’t going to spend as much time here as we have. Both of us knew what a tourist trap Raglan was, but we both wanted to at least experience the place for a day or two, and I really wanted to see the lefts peeling off the multiple points of Indicators, Whale Bay and Manu Bay in the most intimate way possible. After a few great days of surf and freedom camping just outside of town – along one of those dusty dirt traps, where the views are dramatic sea cliff portraits to the horizon- we met Neil in the Manu Bay parking lot, he and I exchanging pre-surf pleasantries before getting into the Tasman with the sunrise, and he and Christine chatting after he had caught his share at Boneyards and the wind began to screw things up. When he found out that we were living out of the van, he offered us his place to stay at. He needed to leave for Auckland for several days, and was really hoping to find someone to house sit for him before he left. So we took him up on his offer, and have been here for nearly a week now. The waves keep coming too.

He bought the property a couple of years ago, and has been constructing an off the grid home built from old shipping containers. Think gravity fed rain water from the tap, solar panels for electricity and a composting toilet. The place isn’t 100% green – the stove top runs off diesel, but will be converted to bio-diesel, and the water is heated by LPG (liquid petroleum gas), but the efforts he has made are pretty inspiring, as is his generosity. He invites travelers and surfers to come and stay with him all the time, enjoying the company that helps fill in the gaps between the cricket chirps and cow moos.

He’s heading back here in a day or so, just in time for the next big swell, and we’ll probably spend an evening together before we head into Auckland ourselves to speak to a group of UW students who have come to study for the Spring quarter and are about to have their first WWOOF experience as a component to their study abroad. One of the professors leading the study is a personal friend of mine, and we are both looking forward to a familiar face.

The rain is such a sweet sound; draining off the rooftop, filling up the water tanks and calming the dust storms for our morning commute through the cow paddocks and wind farms to the seashore. Life’s a beach.

***

Febuary 10^th, 2010

We’ve been staying at the Waipare Homestead for two weeks now, after following John and Mihi’s lead. The house, tucked off the beach amongst Norfolk pine, Moreton Figs and copious kawa-kawa was built in the 1880’s out of Kauri wood – almost head to toe. Scrubbs (as he is called by everyone – Don being his proper first name) bought this place two decades ago, and he and his wife Louia have been hosting WWOOFers for 16 years. Within minutes I was deep into conversations on Miki Dora, Michael Peterson, and my Re-Thinking the Endless Summer theories. “You know, of all the surfers that have come through here, I’ve never had conversations like this with them! And you’ve only been here an hour! The history man, that’s where its at!”

 Scrubbs has been surfing since the early 1960’s and Louia, having grown up on the Mahia Peninsula – home to well known and well guarded waves, as well as being a Miki Dora hideout during the 1970’s- is a connoisseur of surf culture herself.

“Your doing you thesis on surf culture! Surf culture!” she exclaimed and giggled when I told them the purpose of my side of our New Zealand experience. “So you’re a bum! A good for nothing! Ha Ha! Come and help me dig a trench around Honey Lee’s tent outside. We need to keep her shit high and dry, right bro?”

The rain kept coming too. By morning, the roads where washed out all over the area, some rising 6 meters or more above their normal flow lines. A giant plum tree went down near the orchard that first night, and by the following afternoon, Christine and I, along with the two other WWOOFers – one from Florida who had been here for two months, and another from Germany who had spent time here four years ago and had just dropped by the previous day to say hello – were out in the intermittent downpours with chainsaws and branch wompers, hacking away at the felled debris.

The girls – Louia, her two daughters Honey Lee and Juliet, and Cassie, the Floridian WWOOFer all left for the AC/DC concert in Auckland a few days after Christine and I arrived. The two of us, along with Scrubbs, would spend the next several days locked into the dribbling beach break lefts and rights out the back door, and into conversations over the incredible history and perceptions that surfing has given to us. The mind altering lifestyle that becomes you, submerged in the ocean’s life lessons. Philosophy and politics and the madness of the human condition and spirit were passed around the dinner table each night. We hooted and hollered at our own surf movie screenings held in the living room. A viewing of The Endless Summer brought many of my idea’s back into perspective, and we cringed and cracked up at Bruce Brown’s horribly off-color imperialistic colonial comments about the “primitive” African’s that Mike Hynson and Robert August encountered during their search for the perfect wave. Thomas Campbell’s film ‘Sprout’ blew Scrubbs away with the embracing of boards long and short with abstract concaves, convexes and varied numbers of fins, and his generally brilliant artistic representation of the diversity of modern surf culture. However, in all the film’s beauty, filmed in exotic locations around the world, little attention is paid to the lives and livelihoods of the locals who call the exotic locales home.

  We also worked around the yard, helping get the grounds ready for the next wedding being held here in a few weeks, and harvesting heaps of organic basil, lettuces and nastirsum flowers and leaves for nourishment.

After a fun morning session the night after viewing Sprout, Scrubbs stoke meter about to burst, Christine and I had laced up our boots and were heading out to attack the Plum tree and pick some avocados after the three of us had just finished a potato and egg brunch. “I reckon the waves are still looking pretty good; probably time for another session,” Scrubbs announced, having just been down to the water to survey the scene. I started to say, “oh yeah? Christine and I were about to get on that tree again…” and was quickly cut off by a moment of hysteria from Scrubbs, “Fuck work man, the waves are better than this morning! Lets have another session! That other shit isn’t going anywhere! Priorities man!” So, when in Rome…

Scrubbs continued to stoke us out with all his local knowledge of the area’s surf breaks. We took a ride up the hill for a surf check one morning, and based off the visual clues we could acquire from a vista where miles and miles of coast could be observed, he directed us to the right spot at the right time, and I finally scored some decent surf in New Zealand.

A few of our days this past week were also spent on a friend of Scrubbs vineyard, helping them prepare the vines for the nets to keep off the birds. The berries are filling with sugar, and we enjoyed the change of pace and hands on experience with the local wine culture. However, we are increasingly in tune with the fact that New Zealand is in no way the ‘100% Pure’ landscape that the tourism board sells to the world. “That’s a fucking scam isn’t it,” Scrubbs quickly replied when asked about the slogan, and then raising concerns and giving examples of how polluted New Zealand has become. Choppers saturate the local squash and corn fields with chemicals on a regular basis; one of them swooping across the neighbour’s fields while we plucked new growth off the vines, causing both Christine and I to worry and wonder. “We were rained on with those little white pellets just the other day from a copter,” Louia mentioned during one of our conversations, referring to 1080.  “Fucking bastards.” One afternoon in Gisborne, we caught part of a documentary on the chemical 1080, which was playing on a sidewalked television outside a hippy store. It is used in New Zealand to kill the invasive possums, stoats, rats and other rodents, and a scary topic for biologists and environmentalists from around the world. The forestry practices have long been destroying the landscape too, as well as the cattle and sheep industry polluting and trampling the erosion prone hillsides and water ways, with signs up in all the campgrounds and holiday parks warning people to boil their water before drinking because of high bacteria contents.

Yesterday, we continued to plug away at the Plum tree, Christine going for an afternoon swim with Honey Lee and Juliet, me reading the through the stack of books on surf history and local folklore that Scrubbs had dug up for us. The sun has dried up the downpours and the road is waiting. Scrubbs and I hongi’ed and contact info was passed along to us; surf bros done south that would love to show us around. Off toward the South Island. Off to track down Miki’s ghost, and to volunteer our hands and stories on other New Zealand homesteads and farms.

***

After The Endless Summer, and as the 60’s progressed, surf culture continued to evolve in regards to the ways surfers rode waves – i.e. boards became shorter and styles more aggressive, hair grew longer, and the music louder – but it only further embraced the Romantic idealization of escapism, of surfers as world travelers seeking out the images of perfection that they were being fed by their own medias, and as the crowd situations hit critical mass in the surfing hot beds of California and Hawaii (again a by-product of their own medias and travels, with heaps of help from Hollywood). Surfers incessantly touted themselves as individuals, “escaping from the confines of a western society gone awry in search of a pristine, tropical paradise, unsullied by crowds and commercial industry,[1]” by living in harmony with nature, connecting to the direct energies and forces of the natural environment by riding mother ocean’s waves while travelling away from the polluted environment and idea of the city. Throughout the 1971 surf film “The Sunshine Sea”, the narrator reinforces these ideas by stating, “Riding a wave has become a basic expression of man in harmony with his environment,” and that “The ultimate message of surfing is the wedding of nature and man, a return to something simple, basic and individual. The surfer accepts the natural order of the world, a natural balance of man working with the environment instead of against it.” The ocean was a force to be respected, and one that was not easily tamed. Ford and Brown note how Auden, “summarizes the distinctive Romantic attitude to the sea as including the desire on the part of the man [sic] of honour and sensibility to leave the land and the city, to voyage on the sea as the true test of masculinity, the realm where the decisive events, the moments of eternal choice occur.” These sentiments have been strongly at play within our contemporary surf culture as it has fed off the images and messages of the 60’s and 70’s, even more so when big wave riding is figured into the equation.  In Alby Falzon’s Morning of the Earth (1971), surfers are shown ‘living off the land’ in the Australian countryside, shaping their own boards and surfing their brains out in uncrowded waters. The film takes the viewer to Bali, where the waves had just been “discovered” and the people still living off the land in a tropical paradise. These films were successfully selling a lifestyle and mentality with the best intentions, but other Westernized concepts would flood the surf world, and the reality of harmonious co-existence would fade.

                Enter the 21^st century. As world travelers (generally speaking), surfers and non-surfers alike, aren’t living any sort of harmonious existence with our environment, no matter how you spin it and surf tourism is manifesting greater socio-political concerns. Dr. Tony Butt, who has a regular column in The Surfers Path, a UK based enviro-surf magazine, recently reported his own findings on the surfers carbon consumption compared to the average non-surfing citizen. His stats were geographically specific (compiled from his own poll via The Surfers Path), but in all areas of the world, surfers are much greater carbon consumers, leaving unsustainable footprints as they escape the pollution and crowds of their home breaks by flying off to exotic locales, or simply from driving up and down their local coastlines looking for surf and relief from the crowds. We ride boards and use wetsuits made from toxic chemicals. We travel to places like Indonesia, and take advantage of foreign owned surf charter companies, hardly stepping foot on land or contributing to the local economic base[2]. In these third world surfing hot spots that do develop land based tourism, the thrust of Westernized economies into the areas often leave the locals staggering to catch up with the foreign investment that has taken advantage of comparatively cheap land, labor forces and lack of environmental regulations that are readily available, so that the travelling surfer can live the dream[3].

In a Surfer article on surf colonization, based off his experiences and observations in Bali – a destination highly glamorized and publicized by the surf industry since Morning of the Earth, Steve Barilloti explains that, “in the wake of the explorers inevitably follow the settlers…while the baseline activity of surfing is essentially non-exploitative, once surfers set up a collective around a marquee surf break suck as Jefferys Bay or Uluwatu, the impacts of human colonization – trash, roads, erosion, water pollution, development, environmental degradation, resource depletion – inevitably follows.”  In his surf travels, Barilotti has observed that, “most surfers travel not to experience another culture but to find waves similar to their home breaks but without the crowds. In many cases the indigenous people are an obstacle or a friendly nuisance to sidestep on the way to the water.” That is not living harmoniously, and  is also a sentiment that I second from both my own travels through Mexico and Costa Rica, and from all the surf media that I’ve consumed over the years. The waves are the thing for far too many surfers. The crowds, and the ‘surfers gaze’ created by the medias – a gaze prescribed by the images we consume and the desires they produce – are the inspiration for that endless summer ideal. Barilotti makes another important observation, that “surfers seem ill-equipped to handle the big questions of geopolitics and globalization. The surfing gestalt is based on cool indifference to concerns of politics, religion or class,” which would explain the justification of how surfers travel, never realizing or acknowledging that they themselves create the crowds, deepen the economic divide in undeveloped (at least in westernized concepts of the term) communities, and greatly contribute to global warming in their wanderlust,  and will continue to do so the more they explore and push the frontier boundaries. It would explain the profiting existence of dozens of foreign owned surf charter boats operating off the Mentawais in Indonesia, where surfers live and surf in luxury accommodations within spitting distance of communities ravaged by malaria and corrupt and racist governments[4]. Or that they are partly responsible for the social and environmental problems that arise when a place like Bali is turned into a cess-poll surf ghetto by non-local enterprises.

                I think it is time to move away from the Romantic model of yesterday if we really care about surf culture and the one planet that we have (not the theoretical seven that it would take to sustain surfers at their current levels of consumption[5]).  I find it the ultimate irony, that surfing, an experience and culture once driven toward darkness by western colonial advancement and antiquated religious doctrine, is now the responsible for another wave of oppressive western colonialism and the new globalized religion of capitalism.

 Luckily, not all is doom and gloom and there are people and organizations and alternatives that we as surfers, can look to, support and engage in if we do decide to make global travel a part of our life. Surf Aid International, a New Zealand based NGO was “formed in response to travelling surfers observations of inadequate (often absent) health care facilities in many destinations frequented by surfers.[6]” Surfing doctor Dave Jenkins started the non-profit around the millenium after growing fed-up with the lack of basic health care available in the Mentawais, and focuses on delivering basic health needs, training local health workers and applying for grants that go toward indigenous causes. “We believe that everyone who partakes in the surfing culture, be it from reading, writing or advertising in a magazine, watching or producing a video or wearing a label, has a role to play in helping these people…we know that most surfers care – but in the past have lacked a relevant vehicle for helping.[7]”

                   While in Peru on a stint with Peace Corps., Dave Aabo, co-founder of WAVES for Development, was making weekend trips to the coast to sneak in surfs and release some stress. Some of the places he surfed, like Chicama and Máncora were developed surf towns. However, Aabo knew that they were towns were the locals weren’t necessarily reaping the benefits or in control of the situation. “If you look at a town like Máncora,” he explains in The Surfers Path, “it has become the Northern Peru surfing destination. There are surf camps, restaurants, nightclubs…However, it’s one of these places where the people benefiting are not the locals…they are often from Lima or they are foreigners.[8]” He was also deeply bothered by lack of cultural exchange and reciprocity that he witnessed. “There were people coming in, bringing in lots of money, bringing in their  $500 surfboards, $20,000 cars, strolling up to the beach, hooting and hollering on the waves and then leaving,[9]” so when he visited an undeveloped wave haven 30 miles to the south, he was inspired to make effort that would keep the inevitable forthcoming tourism development in the hands of the locals. “We knew it was a special place, and with a wave that good, it was only a matter of time before big things started happening here.”

                WAVES for Development (Water, Adventure, Voluntourism, Education and Sustainability) is getting the local kids in the water with hundreds of boards donated to the program, as well as teaching them board repair skills, entrepreneurship and English. The program has both a permanent staff and a cast of travelling volunteers and a mantra of “Making the world a better place through surfing.” For Aabo, WAVES is his contribution to re-thinking the wave centric travel mode, or as he puts it, “to use surfing to accomplish more than the selfish need of getting the best wave.[10]”

                Dr. Jess Ponting, who’s PhD is in the field of sustainable surf tourism believes that as surfers continue, “going on trips to exotic locations expecting to find the surfing paradise that they have seen in magazines only to find areas that are deeply troubled, sometimes with humanitarian crises on the land right near the breaks,[11]” that these experiences will continue to dislocate the Romantic idealized notion of surf travel. Surf culture will continue to evolve, as it has to in order to survive, and this new enlightenment should produce a desire to share, to help out and to learn from the communities that we encounter while on the search.

We need to embrace alternatives.  Make the trips count, and make them last, use the carbon footprint wisely. Spend some time getting to know the communities you travel to, doing some research before hand, seeking out local organizations that could use some help and figure out where you money  is going to. Whether it is traveling to Indonesia and helping deliver Malaria vaccines, or Peru to tutor a kid in English while they tutor you in Spanish before sharing a session in their backyard, there are heaps and heaps of ways to become involved while surfing too. On your next journey down to Mexico or Chile, see if there is a WWOOF farm near your destination. Get local, get creative, and get stoked.

In Duane’s, Caught Inside, he chronicles a year in his life getting to know his own surfing backyard in intimate detail; the history, the flora and fauna and swell details for all the off the beaten path breaks within an hour of his home. I’ve read about surfing icons retro-fitting their bicycles and kayaks to accommodate surfboards and camping gear, travelling locally for new perspectives and less environmental impact. There are so many options, so many roads less traveled, often right there at home. We just need to slow down and take a look out the window. What is out there? What are the possibilities right here at home? I know that when Christine and I return stateside, that all these stories and experiences are going to encourage us to stop and smell the roses and lilacs and home sweet home sea breeze scents even more then we already do.

***

March 20, 2010 Milton, New Zealand 9:08am

                I spent yesterday morning milking the goats with Jack, feeding the chooks and a bit of weeding with Christine out front to make room for more strawberries. The three of us cleaned a honey comb out of its bee box wood frame, and put it in a cleaned up empty ice cream container for Christine and I to enjoy as we continue our adventure through the islands. After our afternoon tea, Jack told us stories from childhood, the ones that have shaped the man that he is today. How his Maori culture called him back from his Jehovah’s Witness up-bringing, how the histories of Aotearoa and New Zealand are looked at now with enlightened visions inspiring new concepts for the countries future. He told us about the mischief  and epiphanies, the good and the bad. Then we laid mud mats down around the garden, and enjoyed an evening tea of ceviched mussels and butter soaked blue cod and thanked each other for the hospitality, knowledge sharing, and old fashioned good times.  

                Christine and I need to pack up the van once again, and continue heading south. The swell is there and the winds offshore, hanging around the Catlans and Southland, but a new weather system is moving in quickly. Cyclones and tropical storms are raging around the seascapes of the Tasman and the Pacific. It’s all one big wave really, this trip, this life, at least that’s how I see it, and we’ve only begun to drop in. Kia Ora.

[2] See Ponting.

[3] See Ponting, Reeves, Barilotti.

[4] See Ponting, Barilotti.

[5] See Butt.

[6] Quoted from Ponting.

[7] Jenkins quoted in Barilotti.

[8] Quoted in Endo

[9] Ibid.

[10] Ibid.

[11] Ibid.

Works Cited:

• Barilotti, Steve. Lost Horizons: Surfer Colonialism in the 21^st Century. 2002.
• Brown, Bruce, Director. The Endless Summer. Columbia Pictures. 1966.
• Brown, David and Ford, Nick. Surfing and Social Theory: Experience, embodiment and narrative of the dream glide. Routledge. 2006.
• Butt, Tony, PhD. Are Surfers Environmentally Friendly? The Surfers Path. #71 April-May, 2009.
• Crawford, Carin. Waves of Transformation. Self published master’s thesis. www.lajollasurf.org/wavesof.html
• Duane, Daniel. Caught Inside: A Surfer’s Year On The California Coast. North Point Press. 1996
• Endo, Tetsuhiko. The Stoke Virus. The Surfers Path. #75, Dec/Jan 2009/10.
• Freeman, Jim and MacGillivray, Greg, Directors. The Sunshine Sea. 1971.
• Jamieson, Philippa. The Wild Green Yonder: Ten seasons volunteering on New Zealand’s Organic Farms. New Holland Publishers. 2007
• Kampion, Drew. Stoked: A History of Surf Culture. Gibbs Smith. 2003.
• Leuras, Leonard. Surfing: The Ultimate Pleasure. Emphasis International, 1984.
• Moser, Patrick (editor). Pacific Passages: An Anthology of Surf Writing. University of Hawai’i Press. 2008
• Ormond, Joan. Endless Summer 1964: Consuming Waves and Surfing the Frontier. Film and History: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Film and Television Studies. 35.1. 2005. P.35-51.
• Urry, John. The Tourist Gaze. Sage Publications. 2^nd ed. 2002.
• Warshaw, Matt. Surf Movie Tonight!.

***

January 28^th, 2010

Christine and I are taking our time and not letting the lack of swell bum us out to much. We are in Waipiro Bay right now, having parked our home under a N.Z. evergreen across the quiet dirt track that outlines the cobblestoned south side of the bay. I think this place needs a good extra foot or two of swell from the northeast to really start to take off and show some form and function for a solid dance routine between the surf starved and the lonely long legged wavestress that I observe rolling along the point, but not breaking, in a tortuous mother natured strip tease. “Wow, this place has some serious…,” and Christine chimes in and finishes my thought, having heard a few days of the same comment, “potential, right?”

 I took the fish[1] out last night after the tide had dropped and caught a few knee high dribblers breaking just inches above the boulders. Another couple joined us here at the bay, an English couple from Cornwall, Hugo and Rose. We had seen them the day before, as both of us were driving the same southerly path, pulling over at a couple of the same bends and viewpoints on the East Cape to look for swell. This spot was too much of a coincidence, and demanded a formal greeting, as we are well off the main highway, and toward the end of a narrow, bumpy and secluded empty road well north of the Gisborne area. We communed our food and cooked up a nice big pot of Mae Ployed pasta and silver beets with extra butter and sardines out of the tin. We passed the peace pipe and talked about our journeys so far, with Hugo and Rose having spent a month here already.

Before eating, Hugo and I were standing along the heaps of driftwood and cobblestones, overlooking Wapiro. The rugged hillside is awash with evergreens, rough lipped shrubs, seaside grasses and rocky faced cliff drops facing the sea and wrapping this entire natural splendour around the bay, coming straight from the depths of the western Pacific and rising several hundred metres or more.  Wide winged hawks drift up and down with the shifting pockets of wind kissed air. Mozzies buzz and dive for any of our flesh they can find. The sun had set behind the hills, and small, too small to ride, sets of waves were breaking in uniformed regularity along the sweeping point. So much potential…

“Sometimes I feel so lucky to have this as the thing that I do…surfing…surf travel…having this as such an intrinsic part of my life, it all seems so unreal, so ridiculous,” Hugo mentioned as our bodies and eyes faced the northern landscape. The dusk was turning our view into a Wolfgang Bloch painting. The bay and landmass turning  multiple shades of dark grey, with small brush strokes and scratches of brown and red visible amongst the darkening hillsides streaking across the most natural canvass, adding dramatic nuance, depth and complexity.

“Yeah man, to have this as what you do, surfing, travelling off to places like N.Z. in search of waves and all that is attached to that search; like this,” as I motion with my hands from right to left, to drive home the overwhelming grandeur of our immediate environment. “We are pretty fuckin’ lucky. And sometimes I think about other people’s passions; the things in their lives that keep them going, give them that fired up excitement, like NASCAR or college football, and I just don’t get it. I think they are fucked up and crazy. But I know that is a closed minded thought to have…self-righteous…judgmental…There are other ways to feel what we feel…We are lucky though, so lucky to see and feel the world through our surfers gaze.”

January 30^th, 2010:

Spent the day in Gisborne City. Making contact with potential farm hosts to show us around their fruit tree, shorn sheep and bee hive lifestyles.

The library is a noisy adventure with no restroom. Have to head next store to the police station. Put 20 cents on the counter and pee away.

At Woolworths we buy real, authentic New Zealand minced lamb for pan fried burgers. Silver beets for vitamins and ruffage. Mineral waters for drink. Cheese is already in the chilly bin. Whittaker’s chocolate for pre-dreamstate indulgence.

Head down a dirt road, north of town and on the beach. There is a nice grassy knoll off to the right, just need to scoot our house across a patch of sand. Steadyyyy. Steadyyyyy. Tires begin to bury themselves. Chassis sits up real nice and comfortable on a patch of grassy hard pack. We are fuckin’ super stuck.

Dig and dig and dig. Shove timber under the tires. Punch the van and scream obscenities. Repeat. Back door lock seems to break. Continue the madness for one hour. Bloody knuckles and hungry bodies.

The sun begins a final descent beyond the hills. We are debating a hitchhike into town or a night buried in the sand.

“Someones coming…,” Christine says, “…pickup truck…yep, GDC on the side.” Gisborne Dept. of Conservation. Paid land stewards and enforcers of law and order amongst the sand dunes and tide pools.

Curly haired beer belly man gets out of his government vehicle. Che Guevara’s face printed on his red t-shirt, ‘Cycling Revolution’ printed below.

“Looks like you could use a hand. Thought I’d come down, take the dog for a walk and pull you out. Been watching you from town for awhile; from the camera up there,” he mentions as he points out the survelliance machine up on the hill, pointed right at us. Big Brother here to save the day. “You got a tow hook under there?”

Christine blushes, thinking to herself of how she had changed her top awhile ago, hoping he hadn’t been zooming in for a closer look. “You guys ever see the movie Whale Rider,” he asks, while reading my anti-capitalist punk rock t-shirt, “filmed right around the corner here. Pretty good film I reckon.”

We kept busting knots and rope braids, the bastard van acting like a rock wedged between two boulders. Our Marxist angel drives off to get reinforcements, as darkness blankets the day. The stars come out and unseen waves break gently on the offshore reef. Somewhere near here, Moko the dolphin patrols the Gisborne coast line.

With crayfish rope procured from a buddy’s house, the van is ripped from the granulated stone, one pedal to the metal surge that sends the van in a mad fishtail. Up and over the ditch, wanting to tip over as I struggle to control the unexpected herky jerky climax from the drivers seat.

“Yeah! Just a little bit of fun for the night in Gizzie for ya.”

“Yeah, piece of cake man. Nice and smooth. What was your name by the way?” I’m a bit stunned really, so is Christine.

“Jamie.”

“Cheers Jamie. Thank you so much dude.”

“Yeah, well now’s when I pull out my Colt .45 and rob ya! But seriously, no worries mates. I had a good buddy driving round the States once. He broke down and some good folks took him in, fixed his car for free and gave him the keys to their cabin for the night. I reckon that’s what people should do for each other.”

Off he drove, leaving us to calm down and figure out the rest of our evening.

“Holy shit. I can’t believe you didn’t tip over. The van was like a feather in the wind. Jesus Christ.”

“I wasn’t expecting that. At all.”

We pulled around the gravel cul-de-sac, a few meters from where we had been stuck. Cheese, bread, tomato and mustard feast. Lamb burgers will have to wait. The chocolate doesn’t. Swatting at a handful of mozzies diving for our earlobes, we pass out in exhaustion.

Daniel Duane was right, the surf trip story lies not within the details of ridden waves, but of the rides to those waves. He says in his novel Caught Inside, “The broken truck axle and the six hour hike through the Baja desert for help are far more likely to be repeated years later than how “I made this superlate drop, and then the wave hit that inside bowl and just throated me.” The story is imbedded in the people, places, and things one encounters while on the search, or even while pocketed into an empty perfect wave session in the confines of paradise.

January 31, 2010:

A north east swell was supposed to come in today. I woke up a few times during the night to the sound of waves crumbling along the bouldered point and manic moments of heavy rain and wind. My dreams were deep animated wave songs that curved and melted off the backs of my eyelids in bleeding reds and blues; no doubt feeding off of the aural songscape drifting in through the windows of our van.

 A cup of green tea and walk around the bend with the sunrise reveals no wave party. Swell lines rise and fall as the ocean tidal surges ebb and flow over shallow and deep contours near the shore. This swell just isn’t quite big enough, not at the right angle or just not in the mood to curl her turquoise top into a walled up face capable of inviting a wave rider onto the undulations of her cheeks and chin. The rain takes a break, but only for a moment, and Christine and I have a cup together and I move the van under the cover of a open aired, but roofed, dirt floored parking area attached to the vacated fishing clubhouse. With camping chairs and books in hand, we read and wait out the rain, hoping that the rising tide will us bring us a gift.

In Leonard Lueras’s, Surfing: The Ultimate Pleasure, he points out that flat spells have long driven surfriders to frustrated lengths. He references a 19^th century Maui circuit court judge, Abraham Fornander, who authored, An Account of the Polynesian Race: Its Origins and Migrations, which details a specific ancient Polynesian “surf coaxing ritual,” where distraught surfers, with the help and guidance of  a kahuna, would whip the water’s surface with strands of pōhuehue, or beach morning glory, until the waves returned. A chant would accompany this action. Translated, the pōhuehue chant reads:

Arise, arise you great surfs from Kahiki,

The powerful curling waves. Arise with the pōhuehue.

Well up, long raging surf.

Fornander, as Lueras describes, also documented chants of demigods intervening with oceanic quietude for the sake of discontented surfers. 

A chant about Laenihi, a Hawaiian woman with celebrated mystical powers,

recalls how she forced winds to blow and caused “the sea to be aroused from

its calm repose.” This wave generating wind, called the Unulau (or trade wind),

did its mystical thing, and as the chant notes: “Early that morning the surf

began to roll in. When the people rose from their sleep and saw the surf, they

all began to shout and yell.”

And with the stoke flowing through their bodies, they no doubt paddled out and had an epic session. Unfortunately, I know of no kahuna, and have no demigoddess to plead to. I have the stories though, and the meditations that they invoke, to help ease the ever so slight growth of anxiety over our inability to find a pocket of perfect, empty waves. So we sit and read, eat apples with peanut butter, drink tea and grow a bit nervous with the rain squalls. Eventually, we decide to drive out of the Bay, before the road washes out.

            There is a visitor’s center in Ruatoria, a one horse town off the main highway, just north of Wapiro. There is internet access there and telephone, so we hope to make use of it to check the weather and make contact with WWOOF hosts.

The visitor’s center was all closed up though. We go across the street to Mijo’s Dairy to ask around about it opening today, and the woman behind the counter thinks for a moment and says a bit apologetically, “nah, probably gone home for the weekend. What were you needing, the internet?” We told her we did, wanting to check the weather, see if this rain was coming to an end, to check the swell, get in touch with some people.

“Well, I guess if you just need it for a few minutes you can use our computer. Don’t think it would hurt anyone,” says the man now standing next to her.

Twenty minutes later Christine and I are in the back room of John and Mihi’s dairy, eating fresh smoked kahawai,  drinking hot chocolate and talking about the world, the Pacific Northwest, Maori-dom (John is Maori from Ruatoria and Mihi is a born and bred local Ngati Porou woman), shearing sheep, the university and the love of not having to travel. John used to surf, has an old 9’3’’ back at the house, but his knees have given up on him.

The rain continued to rain. Wasn’t supposed to stop for days. Mihi gifted Christine one of her hand knitted unspun wool sweaters. John told us to come back to carve some whale bone. They insisted that we call up their friends, Louia and Scrubbs in Anaura Bay, about an hour south of Ruatoria. They are long time WWOOF hosts, and real good people they told us. John said that Scrubbs was an old kiwi surfer with a cache boards and of knowledge and stories about this place, and Louia a Maori woman who organized fashion shows with the local kids, amongst other artsy endeavors.

John needed to get on with washing the outside walls – best done when the rains came because it saves water – so we leave for Anaura, cruise along Hwy 35, where the rivers and streams swell up and wash out the tar sealed road around this bend and below that dip. Our windshield wipers squeak across the glass in mad dashes, and the defrost struggles to keep our line of sight clear with all the humidity from the outside surrounding and emanating from us.

                                                                                                    ***                                                                                                   

                World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms (WWOOF) came to New Zealand in 1973. A UK woman named Sue Coppard had initiated the program in 1971, based off her own desires to get out of the city and learn about farming and home gardening. Kiwi Philippa Jamieson wrote The Wild Green Yonder, a book about her 10 month experience wwoofing around her native New Zealand explaining, “The idea of WWOOF is about learning…an excellent opportunity for wwoofers to gain practical experience in organic farming and gardening, and at the same time the hosts benefit from having an extra pair of hands, and enjoy the cultural exchange with their wwoofers.” Signing up for the program is as simple as picking out a country with a WWOOF program (at last check, I counted 36 programs/countries around the world, many of which are in wave blessed areas. In New Zealand, there are over 1,000 hosts within the program!!), pay a membership fee and you’re in. There are WWOOF programs in other wave blessed countries like Portugal, Mexico, Ireland, India, Costa Rica or Chile. Besides New Zealand, surfers can re-visit Ghana and Australia as Brown and company did in The Endless Summer. When you are travelling through your host country, you simply ring up or email a farm host (hosts are found on the WWOOF website, or through the WWOOF book that you can purchase with your membership) a week or two in advance (although, as in our experience, hosts often can use your help immediately) and see if they can use your help. In exchange for room and board, generally you volunteer 4-6 hours/day around the property/farm with whatever needs tending too.  In our experience here in New Zealand, each WWOOF stay has been a unique experience. Our first hosts simply needed help with their homestead upkeep, leaving ample time to surf and hang out talking and sharing in the daily lives of our hosts and their kids. The next host was a bit more labor intensive, as they had a decent sized home garden, as well as chooks[2] and a handful of cattle to look after. We were left on our own, as the couple we stayed with were off in town and busy leading lives off the farm, and we were encouraged to work a few hours and play a few. Go check the surf, tramp[3]  around the bush[4] and parks in the area, or just to relax. In the late afternoon, Christine and I would dig up potatoes and carrots, snip some kale or other greenage, and cook up a family feast. Now, we are staying on a beautiful property south of Dunedin, and are fully immersed into the workings of a functioning family farm. We have been working alongside Jack and Debra, helping them with their goats and bees and wood piles and fences. The coal and wood (that I stock up first thing in the morning) fired stove heats the house and shower water, and is used for cooking our evening tea where we gather around the table and discuss life until our day grows dark and our beds call for our company.

I thought that this program sounded like a great alternative to the current dominant idea behind surf travel that hadn’t strayed from the Endless Summer paradigm of the early 60’s. One that would give back to the communities that I travelled to, while consuming their waves and enjoying their landscapes. It would also serve as a learning tool for both Christine and I in our future home gardening, self sustaining, low impact lifestyle that we’ve been working on together. Plus, when traveling for surf, there is never a guarantee that the waves will be there waiting for you, so in the downtime why not learn and share and build cross-cultural bonds? Sure beats going stir-crazy, or travelling up and down the coastlines burning fuel and getting pissed at the lack of perfection that the surf mags and movies had promised.

***

[2] Kiwi for chickens!

[3] Kiwi for hike!

[4] Kiwi for woods!