William Finnegan «Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life»

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Автор William Finnegan

Grajagan, Java, 1979

PENGUIN PRESS

An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

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New York, New York 10014

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Photograph credits

Image 1: © Mike Cordesius

Image 2: © joliphotos

Image 3: © Ken Seino

Image 4: © Scott Winer

Other photographs courtesy of the author

ISBN 978-0-698-16374-4

Penguin is committed to publishing works of quality and integrity. In that spirit, we are proud to offer this book to our readers; however, the story, the experiences, and the words are the author’s alone.

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for Mollie

He had become so caught up in building sentences that he had almost forgotten the barbaric days when thinking was like a splash of colour landing on a page.

—EDWARD ST. AUBYN, Mother’s Milk

CONTENTS

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

ONE

OFF DIAMOND HEAD

Honolulu, 1966–67

TWO

SMELL THE OCEAN

California, ca. 1956–65

THREE

THE SHOCK OF THE NEW

California, 1968

FOUR

’SCUSE ME WHILE I KISS THE SKY

Maui, 1971

FIVE

THE SEARCH

The South Pacific, 1978

SIX

THE LUCKY COUNTRY

Australia, 1978–79

SEVEN

CHOOSING ETHIOPIA

Asia, Africa, 1979–81

EIGHT

AGAINST DERELICTION

San Francisco, 1983–86

NINE

BASSO PROFUNDO

Madeira, 1994–2003

TEN

THE MOUNTAINS FALL INTO THE HEART OF THE SEA

New York City, 2002–15

ONE OFF DIAMOND HEAD

Honolulu, 1966–67

I HAD NEVER THOUGHT OF MYSELF AS A SHELTERED CHILD. STILL, Kaimuki Intermediate School was a shock. We had just moved to Honolulu, I was in the eighth grade, and most of my new schoolmates were “drug addicts, glue sniffers, and hoods”—or so I wrote to a friend back in Los Angeles. That wasn’t true. What was true was that haoles (white people; I was one of them) were a tiny and unpopular minority at Kaimuki.

The “natives,” as I called them, seemed to dislike us particularly. This was unnerving because many of the Hawaiians were, for junior-high kids, alarmingly large, and the word was that they liked to fight. Orientals—again, my terminology—were the school’s biggest ethnic group. In those first weeks I didn’t distinguish between Japanese and Chinese and Korean kids—they were all Orientals to me. Nor did I note the existence of other important tribes, such as the Filipinos, the Samoans, or the Portuguese (not considered haole), let alone all the kids of mixed ethnic background. I probably even thought the big guy in wood shop who immediately took a sadistic interest in me was Hawaiian.

He wore shiny black shoes with long sharp toes, tight pants, and bright flowered shirts. His kinky hair was cut in a pompadour, and he looked like he had been shaving since birth. He rarely spoke, and then only in a pidgin unintelligible to me. He was some kind of junior mobster, clearly years behind his original class, just biding his time until he could drop out. His name was Freitas—I never heard a first name—but he didn’t seem to be related to the Freitas clan, a vast family with a number of rambunctious boys at Kaimuki Intermediate. The stiletto-toed Freitas studied me frankly for a few days, making me increasingly nervous, and then began to conduct little assaults on my self-possession, softly bumping my elbow, for example, while I concentrated over a saw cut on my half-built shoe-shine box.