A Life Written in Salt Water
I came to surfing the way most writers come to anything worth writing about — sideways, and far too late to do anything sensible about it. The first morning I paddled out, I understood that the ocean wasn't a backdrop. It was the story itself, and everything else I'd been trying to write was just rehearsal.
That was more than forty years ago. Since then, I've been trying — one page at a time — to put down what it feels like to be a small human in the presence of something that enormous, that indifferent, and that beautiful. The surfing life has taken me from the small-town California shore breaks where I grew up to lineups in Europe, Australia, Central America, and beyond. Every place has its own light and its own rhythm, and every place has given me something new to learn about how to tell its story.
Over the years, I've written more than ten books and contributed to countless magazines, journals, and collections — work that has found its way into editions in Europe, Latin America, and elsewhere, some of it translated into languages I can't read but am still quietly grateful for. I don't say any of that to impress. Writing about surfing isn't exactly storming the literary barricades. But I do think the genre deserves writers who take it seriously, and I've tried to be one of them.
The books range from long-form history and culture to memoir to pure celebration of the ride itself. What they have in common, I hope, is honesty — about the beauty of the water, the community of surfers, the complicated romance of a life built around chasing waves, and the occasional lunacy of all of it.
I still surf. Not as often or as boldly as I once did, but enough to remember why the whole thing matters. And I'm still writing — because the ocean keeps offering new sentences, and I'm not ready to stop listening.