new surf dialogue

January 30, 2010:

A north east swell was suppose to come in today. I woke up a few times throughout the night to the sound of waves crumbling along the bouldered point and manic moments of rain and wind. My dreams were deep animated wave songs that curved and melted off the backs of my eyelids in deep 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 club house. 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 waters 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.  Lueras writes,

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 Waipiro Bay, before the road washes out.

We know of a visitor’s center in Ruatoria, a one horse town off the main highway, a handful of kilometers 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. This is a good opportunity to initiate ourselves into the world of WorldWide Opportunities on Organic Farms. A perfect segue to introduce my core idea behind my “Rethinking the Endless Summer” thesis. With so many surfers travelling the globe, no doubt influenced by the photo’s and films that we all absorb from the multitude of resources available, I think that an unsustainable and irresponsible dominant travel paradigm has developed over the past 50 years.  Internet swell forecast tools, ever growing ‘surf camps’ developments in once pristine environments and wave-centric travel mentalities are strangling the soul of surf culture in my opinion, giving all of us a bad wrap in the wake of others laziness. So when Christine and I found out about the WWOOF program, which is a global network of farm hosts who allow travelers to volunteer their time in exchange for room and board, I thought it could be an interesting way to promote an alternative notion of surf travel. A way to spend the flat spells, to get local, to engage in cultural reciprocity and promote health, sustainability and to learn. In New Zealand, there are over 1000 hosts all over the country, many of which are spittin’ distance to a surf break.

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 go 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 in the back room of John and Mihi’s dairy, eating fresh smoked kahawai with hot chocolate and talking about the world, the Pacific Northwest, Maori-dom, 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 suppose 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 surrounding and emanating from us. Here we go…