When I dream of Hawaii, the waves are warm, turquoise, and reassuringly strong — nothing like the ‘small, dark-faced, windblown’ waves described by William Finnegan.
Go ahead and trust him over my fantasies.
I dream.
He was there.
His autobiography Barbarian Days begins with a boyhood on the islands. Then it moves like a swell through five decades of hard living, during which Finnegan weathers into a surfer and writer.
Finnegan is a a journalist, so he can both give himself a brief and stick to it. The book is mostly about riding surfboards. But that constraint isn’t limiting.
To Finnegan, surfing proved a path to understanding everything else. Plenty gets explored — perfection… performance… aging… While he paddles into a riotous ocean, his mind fills with thoughts:
… the same half-nonsensical questions: Is perseverance rewarded? Is it even recorded?
As oceanographers will tell you, a lot happens beneath the surface. And Finnegan felt a kinship with those scholars:
This zone where waves give up their energy and where systematic water motions give way to violent turbulence is the surf. It is the most exciting part of the ocean.
Barbarian Days is dappled with moments of scientific clarity. (Want to know where a wave is born, or how to predict where it will break? Curious minds, enquire within.) But the book’s natural state is a roving, raffish travelogue.
Finnegan transported me to places I couldn’t hope to visit on my own. And I don’t just mean Guam, Fiji and Samoa… or tourist-free Madeira… I mean inside of a barrel, inside a wave:
… looking out from behind a silver curtain towards the morning…
In 500 pages, I shared ‘glimpses of eternity’ that left Finnegan’s brain aflame.
But back to chapter one.
William Finnegan’s parents were producers on Hawaii Five-O and rented a cottage on Honolulu. The place was so tiny William had to sleep on a sofa in the living room. But he wasn’t complaining (not even about the geckos).
The garden ended in a ‘patch of damp sand’, then coral, then ocean. And that lagoon became his playground, theatre, wrestling ring, and schoolroom.
Finnegan learnt to see like a surfer. He attuned to:
… swell size, swell direction, wind speed, wind direction, tide, season, and sandbar configuration; the way the water seems to be moving across the bottom; the surface texture and the water colour…
Alongside war-reporting, waves became his specialist subject. And in his book, he relays the experience of riding particular waves with precise and vivid language — again and again.
I was refreshed by his colours. A single wave stretched from ‘bottle-green’ to ‘feathering whiteness’.
I was juddered by his sounds: ‘freight trains colliding’, ‘bowling balls rumbling down a lane’.
I was enriched by his adjectives — ‘sweet’ and ‘swift’ for a wave that visited like a blessing; ‘mutated’ and ‘hideous’ for another that blasted like a curse.
The technical language of surfing gave Finnegan a way to describe the mechanics: how this wave breaks; how that one peels. But early on, the writer clarified the limits of his work:
Nearly all of what happens in the water is ineffable — language is no help.
Still, in the attempt to trace the sublime, his prose drops into poetry, like conscious thoughts transmuted into prayer because of adrenalin and speed.
Finally, through imagery, I met Finnegan’s waves:
… a cushion of air…
… great stretched canvases…
… chandeliers falling and throwing…
… thick, pouring, silver-beaded curtain…
… flawless as a nautilus shell…
… one of God’s jazz solos…
… long German words…
So please. If you’re a writer with a specialist subject, do us — the general and generally ignorant public — a favour: share it. Try to find words that make us begin to comprehend.
Aidan Clifford writes for Pinstripe Poets – artists who love their day jobs. This post is part of a series called ‘Write like the Greats’. See the rest here.
