Zero Break Excerpt | Books

Zero Break: An Illustrated Collection of Surf Writing, 1777-2004

(from the introduction)

Captain James Cook, celebrated master and commander of the Resolution, in the service of God, King, and the British Navy, dropped anchor at Tahiti’s Matavai Bay in late 1777 and rowed ashore for a quick surf check. A single canoe-paddling native was riding the small waves along the northern point. Cook was impressed—not just by the strange new “amusement” itself, but in the near-rapturous state it seemed to produce, to the point that the surfer showed no interest in the sunburned visitors, or their impossible three-masted vessels floating in the waters nearby. “I could not help concluding,” Cook wrote in A Voyage to the Pacific Ocean, the wildly popular multivolume account of his third and final venture, “that this man felt the most supreme pleasure while he was driven on so fast and smoothly by the sea.” First written account of surfing. Bull’s-eye.

Having spent way too much time slogging through the millions of banal, overwrought, mistaken, or otherwise stoke-sucking words published on surfing over the past two-hundred-plus years, I now find myself veering pretty regularly into the near reaches of surf world burnout and cynicism. Follow your passion diligently enough and it often becomes...a job. Yet I still marvel at Cook’s “supreme pleasure” sentence, at its compact elegance, and how the wonder and simplicity of his words mirror the wonder and simplicity of wave-riding itself. The opening paragraph of Genesis ends with “and the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters,” and I don’t think it’s too ridiculous, and maybe only a little imperialist, to say Cook’s passage gives surfing its own creation moment. (Staying with the religious analogy for a moment, I’m happy to credit Cook alone for the first surfing reference—just as Genesis is credited to Moses and not to unknown author J or whoever—even though scholars agree that it was likely written by the surgeon of Cook’s consort ship, Discovery, and further ghosted by a London editor.) Cook is an antidote for surf world burnout and cynicism. The day I read his stoked little dispatch and don’t feel cheered is the day I throw the boards and wetsuits on the curb and drive east to begin a new life somewhere in the foothills.

Cook is also the obvious starting point for a surfing anthology. Where it goes from there, after the rest of the small but reputable surf-lit canon is accounted for (Mark Twain, Jack London, Tom Wolfe, and a few others), is pretty subjective. Glancing at the Zero Break table of contents, it looks as if I’ve favored either darker pieces or comedy. Other editors would probably select differently: more travel-adventure pieces, for example, or more surfer profiles. But I’ve always thought the mother lode of surf-writing material, fiction and nonfiction, is located along the seam between the surfing and nonsurfing worlds, and that this material is best processed as comedy or tragedy. (Two of my favorite pieces are missing from this collection: the Jeff Spicoli sections of Cameron Crowe’s Fast Times at Ridgemont High, and William Finnegan’s 1992 New Yorker essay “Playing Doc’s Games.” Crowe has never granted excerpt rights for Fast Times, and, in fact, has never allowed the book itself to be reprinted. Finnegan is saving “Games” for his own surfing book.)

Not counting the six excerpts that make up Zero Break’s opening section, all but one of the pieces included in this anthology were published within the past forty years. This is partly a function of supply, as the number of surf-themed essays, articles, and books shot way up in the early ’60s. But it’s also a matter of quality. Surf writing, in general, has improved steadily over time. It’s also worth noting that all but five of Zero Break’s pieces were written by nonsurfers, or surfers writing for the nonsurfing reader. Surfer-to-surfer text is arcane and insider, encoded with first names (Andy, Kelly, Corky, Lisa), unlocated places (Bells, the Bay, the ’Bu), and slang that can be fun or indecipherable or both (“Bru, that sunset is mental!”). None of the pieces included here demand any real surf knowledge on the part of the reader. Then again, a little context and perspective never hurt, and the evolution of surf writing is a worthwhile story itself.

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Zero Break: An Illustrated Collection of Surf Writing, 1777-2004