The Dao of Surfing and My Fear of Flying

La Bamba probably had a lot to do with it. The movie hit theaters in 1987 meaning that I probably saw it on tape or HBO as an 11-year-old in 1988. I remember of course the performances of Lou Diamond Phillips and Esai Morales but ingrained in my head was Santo & Johnny’s “Sleepwalk.” Planes scared me, but I managed fine until a particularly bad flight from Long Island to Philadelphia shook me badly.

I went years without flying afterwards. I skipped weddings and made excuses not to attend other events. And when my wife at the time and I went to Hawai’i in 2010, I was just awful. I’d have to take xanax and wine just to get in the air. She used to complain that my fear of flying was keeping us from experiencing life. She was right.

I used to have a routine before I flew. The night before, and I mean every night before I flew, I’d drink wine and watch my favorite film, Riding Giants. If you’re not familiar, Riding Giants is the 2004 documentary about the history of big wave surfing, helmed by skate legend Stacey Peralta. The film focuses on three eras and regions, following Hawai’i in the 1960s through Greg Noll, North California in the 1990s via Jeff Clark, and Hawai’i again in the present day through Laird Hamilton. The film always resonated with me because it depicted people who had found their meaning and purpose through their engagement with the water. I felt wistful because I’ve always felt that I missed that calling, that purpose. But in watching the film, I could at least take part in their purpose and make share some of it. For whatever reason, it put me at ease and able to fly. I’ve posted the trailer below.

I realized following my divorce in 2015 that something had to change. I was living in Wichita and then Minneapolis while my boys were in Florida. Xanax and wine wouldn’t work since I needed to actually be able to drive once I landed. For a while I got reckless. I got comfortable with flying because in my certainty of crashing at least I wouldn’t have to be a divorced dad anymore. In a sense that was liberating. But it was wrongheaded. Stubborn. Foolish. And I worked to eventually come to terms with my new reality, something ten years in I still wrestle with.¹

But that still left flying, which in addition to being a necessary component of seeing my children was also a necessary component of living life. I found myself thinking of Riding Giants again, how young men and women boarded turboprops from California to Hawai’i in the 1960s and how Kelly Slater flies across the world at the drop of a hat to catch a good wave.

But mostly I thought about Laird Hamilton’s ride at Teahupo’o (pronounced CHO-poo) in 2000. The wave was a beast, slurping almost all the water off the reef to create a rhinoceros of a wave that challenged the absolute best of all surfers. Hamilton changed surfing forever that day. See it in a clip from Riding Giants below:

And there it is. Hamilton justified riding waves that could kill him by explaining “I don’t want to not live because of my fear of what could happen.” Internalizing that, more than anything else, got me over my fear of flying. And since then I’ve flown all over the place, including Hawai’i again in 2016, along with jaunts back and forth across the country. Last year, to Prague. And tomorrow, to San Francisco.

I’ve since become more and more fascinated with surf history, buying a reading as many books as I can. Matt Warshaw is probably the king of surf histories, publishing a number of terrific books, including The History of Surfing, The Encyclopedia of Surfing, Maverick’s: The Story of Big Wave Surfing, and more. I picked up David Davis’ biography of Duke Kahanamoku in 2016, and laughed when I read Peter Heller’s Kook: What Surfing Taught Me About Love, Life, and Catching the Perfect Wave. In 2016 I grabbed up a copy of Scott Laderman’s Empire in Waves: A Political History of Surfing and promptly placed it on my shelf, where it rested for years, admired, but unread.

I’ve wanted to talk about Point Break and the depiction of surfing in movies for as long as we’ve had the podcast. But I needed to pair it with something. And thus, I finally reached for Scott’s book. And y’all, it’s just fascinating. Scott ably teaches us about the origins of surfing, how and where it spread, about its commodification and commercialization, and even how surfers responded to genocide and apartheid in the 20th century. And we talked about all of this when he came on the podcast a few weeks ago. For me, this is one of my favorite conversations we’ve done simply because it’s just two new friends talking about something they both love. I think it comes out in the episode, which you can find below.

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About our guest

Scott Laderman  broadly explores the various ways that Americans have encountered and ascribed meaning to the rest of the world. His first book, Tours of Vietnam: War, Travel Guides, and Memory (Duke University Press, 2009), examines issues of tourism and memory in postcolonial Vietnam. His second monograph, Empire in Waves: A Political History of Surfing (University of California Press, 2014), combines the passion for wave-riding he developed while growing up in California with his professional interest in the history of U.S. foreign relations. His most recent book, The “Silent Majority” Speech: Richard Nixon, the Vietnam War, and the Origins of the New Right (Routledge, 2019), uses Nixon’s most famous presidential address to probe the last years of the war in Vietnam and the rise of the modern right-wing political movement.

With Edwin Martini, he co-edits the Culture and Politics in the Cold War and Beyond book series for the University of Massachusetts Press, and he has written for numerous popular publications, including the New York Times, Washington Post, South China Morning Post, and Star Tribune.

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I’m hoping to get out to Maverick’s while I’m at the American Historical Association Annual Conference this week and I’ve got a few more surf-inspired posts for you in the coming days.

In the meantime, what are your favorite surf films? Hit me in the comments below.

-JWH

1. I’m not necessarily the most fun person to be around during holidays.