Journey to the Sea Page 9

  As George Freeth and friends revived the Olo board, an increasing number of Hawaiians followed suit and surfing quickly became a major feature in Waikiki again. Full-time ‘beach boys’ did what their forefathers had done – hung out at the beach, surfed, fished and talked story amongst themselves. Only by now there were new spin-offs. Tourists. They loved watching these bronze watermen gliding with the waves, and as more and more arrived each year, more and more of them left with basic surfing lessons under their belt. The word was spreading to other lands. And Waikiki was emerging as something more than a busy port on a remote island. Its backdrop, Honolulu, was turning into an American city, and so popular was this seductive ‘island lifestyle’ that the authorities began using surfing, and the beach-boy image, to sell Hawaii as an exciting holiday spot for the super-rich of America.

  One super-rich man, Henry Huntington, owned a little railway line back in southern California. He was so struck by the surfing he saw at Waikiki that he invited Freeth over to do a ‘Hawaiian surfboard riding’ display for the public. Freeth agreed, the people loved it, and Huntington left his name with the beach that some say still represents the heart of Californian surfing today. Much of what we call ‘surf culture’ these days originates, sometimes indirectly, from there. But it has never been a Californian thing, surfing. Hawaiians showed them how.

  There were others in the islands who helped plant the seeds of the global surfing culture we inhabit today. Duke Kahanamoku, an Olympic swimmer, inventor of the front crawl and a Hawaiian respected around the world, decided he’d spread the knowledge of surfing to other nations whenever he possibly could. In the early days of the twentieth century, Duke covered a lot of miles – up the east and west coasts of the USA, and eventually across to Australia, putting on surfing displays wherever he went. And everywhere he went people were inspired by what they saw.

  What Duke taught was a Hawaiian thing. He didn’t just show people how to stand up on a piece of wood; he taught them to fashion the right shape and make the correct equipment for the waves they had. But it wasn’t just practical. Duke also showed people a Hawaiian spirit of goodwill, which the islanders call aloha, and an attitude to life that is harmonised by the sea. As well as bringing the sport of his ancestors to these new countries, Duke was transmitting a ‘vibe’ from his own ancestral world.

  Soon it went to Europe. The earliest known surfboard in this part of the world is a fine example of the Hawaiian spirit that comes in the package with surfing. It was a gift, sent in 1936 by members of the Waikiki Outrigger Canoe Club to an English dentist named Jimmy Dix, who lived in rural Somerset but holidayed in Cornwall each summer. He’d seen surfing in an encyclopaedia and written off to the club for information on how to build his own surf-board. One day some months later, a twelve-foot-long hollow wooden board made by Tom Blake arrived with the postman. There was a short note with it, which read: ‘From the surfers of Hawaii, to the people of Great Britain.’ With this one gesture of aloha many lives were to change.

  French surf culture began soon afterwards, only this time through the prism of Hollywood when a film producer who’d surfed in Hawaii spotted similar, perfect waves in Biarritz. He shipped some boards over and made a few connections. Soon France too was tapped into Hawaiian energy, direct. And so it spread through Europe – in one country after another, people appeared on the beaches carrying long thin planks and playing the Polynesian way, in the most violent of seas.

  Somewhere along the line the Americans had taken over Duke’s role as chief messenger of the surfing gospel, spreading the good news of wave riding around the world through magazines, books, films. Perhaps the most effective of all evangelists were their servicemen, who surfed and left boards in Japan, Africa, the Caribbean, and dozens of other locations where people didn’t yet know they could have fun in the ocean the way Hawaiians had done for centuries.

  So too the Australians, who’d quickly become an expert water culture after the Duke’s early visits and the growth of the lifeguard system. Aussies spread the art to the deepest corners of the East and reintroduced it, Hawaiian-style, to Pacific islands that historically had never passed the canoeing stage. They went all over the world as lifeguards and heavily influenced the surf cultures of Europe and South Africa. Others went deep, like Australian Peter Troy, a wandering 1960s surf monk who found sublime waves in deepest Indonesia and other parts of South-east Asia. He and other hermit-like disciples recognised nirvana when they saw it, but only because, a couple of generations back, Hawaiians had told them what it looked like.

  Thus the sport of the original Hawaiian culture became a sport of the whole world – rich, poor and even landlocked countries cultivated their own surf cultures. In Brazil, surfers today are national heroes; in Israel there’s a famous rabbi who surfs; in England you can do a university degree in Surf Science. In the Andaman Islands some local tribes saw surfing for the first time just a few years ago when a boatful of professional surfers explored the area; and Bulgaria’s surf team travels for fourteen hours to surf knee-high windy radioactive lumps of water, Hawaiian-style.

  So the sweet fruit that early Hawaiians grafted and enjoyed for themselves over centuries produced the seeds of a new, global, surf culture. It is actually a sub-culture, which makes it less tangible, harder to understand for outsiders. Today, surfing is thick with diverse life forms and numerous mutations of the original pono-inspired play of ancient Hawaii. In fact, riding waves is probably the only thing we ‘sub-cult’ members have in common. That, and the way we do it, which in case anyone should ever forget, is wave riding, Hawaiian-style. Calls us bums, call us what you want, but hey, at least we’re helping keep the universe in good order.

  CONTEMPLATING ITHACA

  MARY LOUDON

  THEY SAY THERE are no sharks around the Greek islands of Ithaca and Cephalonia but I know that’s not true. I have seen a soap shark in Cephalonia, in Sami harbour, and it was approximately two and a half metres long and very heavy-looking. Of course, soap sharks are harmless to humans and more scared of us than we are of them. But I didn’t want to meet one when I was in the water myself.

  So it was partly about exploring my visceral fear of the deep, of the exotica lurking beneath (which translated itself into a fear of something identifiable, like sharks). And it was partly the idea of getting there under my own steam, a tiny dot of human being in that magnificent wilderness. But really it was the sheer beauty of the endeavour that made me decide to do it: to swim from the beach-garden of the villa in Fiscardo, Cephalonia, where we were staying, across the sea to the opposite island of Ithaca, hazy with distance, mysteriously indistinct.

  I am obsessive about swimming. I swim nearly every day, a mile or so in my local pool, which is something I’ve done since my teens. If I can’t swim because the pool’s shut or there isn’t time, I run instead, but I prefer to swim. I’ve swum all my life. My aquatic background was a privileged one. I was lucky enough to grow up with a broad stream running through our garden, which my father and I dammed with large stones when I was little so that it was deep enough for children to swim in. There was also a good local swimming pool, plus two school pools that we were allowed to use, one of them outdoors. Such riches seem to me now almost an outrage.

  On family holidays, I pestered constantly about being able to swim. It didn’t matter what type of water, or where, or what temperature. I swam in the sea, in rivers, lakes, pools and freezing-cold mountain streams. I even threw myself, completely unbidden, into a couple of filthy canals. The first time, I was severely reprimanded; the second, I was violently sick. But like a dog that sees water and barks for a stick to be thrown into it, I cannot let it go unremarked upon. I cannot see it without experiencing instant longing.

  Contemplating Ithaca with my three-month-old daughter in my arms, I considered my desire to slip into the waves beneath the bedroom balcony. That desire had a lot to do with physical and mental challenge, with being something insignificant in an overwhelming environment.
It wasn’t really so far off the beaten track from the delights and demands of new motherhood. It also had to do with adventure. Unlike the environments of the walker, runner, biker or skier, a distance-swimmer’s terrain is mostly indoors, confined within an unremitting cycle of tumble turns. The Ionian sea is a far cry from your average UK leisure-centre pool. The Greek islands themselves, like the Alps or the Bahamas, have a resolute identifying image: they are understood in a shorthand of golden sand and azure seas. A journey of my own across a stretch of water in such paradise, a journey probably uncharted by other swimmers, was a thrilling prospect.

  We were on holiday in Cephalonia because we have friends who live there.

  ‘You’re crazy,’ says Angelo, when I tell him what I want to do.

  ‘Are you worried about the wind?’ I ask.

  The afternoon winds are notorious around Cephalonia. After midday the sea chops up as if someone were whisking it from above and it is suddenly easy to understand why the ancient Greeks believed in the wrath of the sea gods. Violent and unkempt, the afternoon sea lends itself naturally to a belief in creation’s reward and punishment. Often the wind persists into the night, but by morning, just before sunrise, it drops and the water reassumes a look of blank innocence.

  ‘Forget the wind,’ says Angelo. ‘There are terrible currents out there. It’s a shipping channel. There are tankers. Really, this is a crazy thing. Dangerous. Don’t go alone.’

  Angelo and his wife Sophie have spent many years sailing. They live on a boat half the time. They have crossed the Atlantic, negotiated successfully with tyrannical storms. Angelo knows what he is talking about. But I have no intention of going alone.

  ‘Come on, Angelo,’ I say. ‘Come with me in your dinghy. We’ll go in the morning before it gets rough.’

  ‘You want to swim to Ithaca? You’re crazy,’ says Angelo. ‘My God, it’s over two land miles.’

  A couple of rounds at the leisure centre.

  ‘You could go fishing,’ I suggest.

  ‘Okay,’ says Angelo. ‘So it’s a fishing trip. Now you’re talking.’

  It’s actually very easy to let go of land. The sensation of being released from it increases the further out to sea you swim, rather like watching countryside recede from the window of a climbing plane. As pebbles and sand gave way to an abundance of murky-brown weeds, and finally to nothing but the thick blue deep, I turned to wave at my husband and daughter on the villa balcony but could see them no longer. I put my face back into the water. There were no fish to look at this far out. Everything was too far below for me to see it. There was just the sunlight reflected and refracted back upwards in millions of silvery shards. I was wearing a snorkel and mask in order to swim most efficiently and so as not to choke on the waves. This meant that I had my head in the water almost the whole time, which was both good and bad for the imagination. Good was the glorious meditative state I found myself in, particularly in the middle of the swim, arms and legs in rhythm, sun dazzling upwards from beneath, so that at times I was almost able to kid myself that I was upside down, suspended. Bad was thinking soap shark, or octopus. The previous day, I had spied an octopus wound around the anchor chain of a small boat. It was so enormous that I persuaded myself for one insane moment of panic and ill logic that it was a drowned anaconda.

  From time to time I raised my head to see where I was going. I was heading for a particular rock, a golden triangle rising from the water, and taking guesses as to its actual height. I had no sense whatever of the current that swept me nearly a diagonal mile from my chosen route. Moreover, it was only when I raised my head that I had any sensation of the tide or the effect of passing boats; and this was despite the fact that the vast tankers that pass equidistantly between each island create enough swell to make waves on the beaches one mile either side of them. I was surprised. Frankly, I had been expecting a bit of a fight in this watery outback. But conflict only happens where water meets obstacles and I was no obstacle. I was now a mere particle of the sea itself, subsumed. It was a wonderful feeling. Warm and silky, the water was so buoyant that progress was laughably easy. It was the most perfect swim of my life, body and spirit held in suspension, thoroughly alive yet completely disengaged.

  I engaged pretty swiftly when I looked up to see a large tanker bearing down on me.

  ‘Keep going,’ called Angelo, ‘it’s half a mile from you.’

  He was right, although for some time after it passed the waves were high enough that I couldn’t see the dinghy at all. Briefly, I was alone, enclosed in barracking high waters. My sense of security grew precarious, contingent entirely upon the restoration of the view.

  The last half-mile was the oddest because the land, while growing closer, seemed always to be moving out of reach, assuming the impossibility of a rainbow. And then my triangular rock, which was not my rock at all but another like it, began to rise from the water. As the rock grew larger, and the seabed reappeared in opalescent gold and turquoise, ground rising from below and towering above, I felt the land closing its jaws. I reached the rock, slapped it hard and turned back towards the boat. Just as my exhilaration was assured my self-satisfaction was rightly subdued. For I realised as I surveyed the gorgeous aquatic desert behind me that I could never claim any kind of conquest over this environment, that even the mastery of my own body was dependent upon the shifting vicissitudes of the water. If I had achieved anything it was a glorious but accidental freedom: the liberation of belonging for an hour and twenty minutes in a world that does not belong to you.

  KYLE

  GERVASE PHINN

  KYLE ARRIVED AT miss dunn’s classroom with the young head teacher two weeks into the new school term. He was small for his ten years, with a mane of dusty blonde hair tied back in a ponytail, a brown, healthy-looking face and eyes as bright and as blue as a summer sky. He was dressed in a bizarre mixture of clothes: baggy red T-shirt, denim jacket embroidered with birds and animals, grey cotton shorts (the sort you grow into), no socks and sturdy sandals.

  ‘Ah, Miss Dunn,’ the young head teacher said with his usual forced joviality and silly smile, ‘there you are.’

  Where else would I be, thought the teacher looking up from her desk without replying. Each morning, regular as the clock on her wall, she would be in her classroom marking the children’s work and preparing for the day ahead. She had done it every day for all of the thirty-five years she had been in the teaching profession. She wasn’t likely to change the habit of a lifetime.

  The young head teacher, still holding the smile, directed the boy through the door with a gentle push.

  ‘We have a new addition to our school,’ he told Miss Dunn, patting the child on the shoulder. ‘This is Kyle and he will be joining your class.’

  The teacher smiled at the strange little individual who stood before her. He stared around the room with wide inquisitive eyes. Surprisingly, for a child about to start a new school, he didn’t look in the least nervous.

  ‘Hello, Kyle,’ she said pleasantly.

  ‘Say hello to your new teacher, Kyle,’ prompted the young head teacher before the boy could respond.

  ‘Hello,’ replied the boy cheerfully. ‘How are you?’

  ‘I’m very well, thank you,’ replied the teacher, ‘and how are you?’

  ‘Well, I’m not too bad,’ he replied, with what one might interpret as a cheeky smile. Miss Dunn wondered if he was being deliberately impertinent.

  ‘I’ll have a word with you at morning break, Miss Dunn, if I may,’ said the young head teacher in more of a hushed voice. He gave her a knowing look – a look that said there were things about this child she needed to know. ‘I’m now going to take young Kyle to my room and explain how we do things here at St Mary’s. How we all behave ourselves, follow the rules, do our very best, how we all pull together and get along as one big happy family. We also have a school uniform here, Kyle, so—’

  ‘My father’s not into uniforms,’ interrupted the boy.

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�Well, I perhaps need to have a word with your father,’ said the young head teacher with a slight edge to his voice. Then, turning to Miss Dunn, he told her, ‘I’ll bring him back at the start of the lesson.’

  Miss Dunn did not return to the books she had been marking. She stared at the rain-soaked fields beyond the classroom window and sighed. Another child to add to an already unwieldy class, she thought despondently. And probably a little handful as well, by the sound and the look of him.

  At college, all those years ago, Miss Dunn’s tutor, the portly Dr Walsh, red-cheeked, barrel-bodied, fingers fat as sausages, had told the would-be teachers the keys to educational success: high self-esteem, great expectations and, of course, reading – the fundamental tool of learning. For him, he had said, books ‘are the architecture of a civilised society, the window on the world’. Miss Dunn continued to stare at the rain-soaked fields beyond the classroom window and she sighed again.

  On hearing Dr Walsh’s words all those years ago, Miss Dunn had thought of her own parents: gentle, loving, ever supportive. Hers had been a joyous childhood. She had come from a home full of rich language and frequent laughter, acceptable behaviour and family friends. A home where there were positive attitudes to other people, and books – lots and lots of books – and stories told and poems recited. She had swum in an ocean of words: the Psalms of David, the Parables of Jesus, ‘The Flowers of St Francis’, the poetry of Blake and Byron, Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, Tolstoy’s fables and fairy tales, Gulliver’s Travels, Treasure Island, The Pilgrim’s Progress, stories of the Brothers Grimm. Each night she would snuggle up to her father in his great green leather chair and he would read to her in his soft and captivating voice. He had died the previous year, a sad, shivering old man, confused, struggling for memories, entangled by words. At the end he had not recognised her.