Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life

"For both Finnegan and I, surfing, initially, was an identity when were searching for one, and then we discovered it made us feel better about ourselves. It wasn’t fiction, it was real… and we wrote about that. Surfing is such a kinetic medium, it can be hard to capture in words. Maybe that’s why film and photography seem to be the foremost media for telling surf tales. And yet, Finnegan’s descriptions of waves are stunningly vivid. For every surfer—if they remember, and most do—their first wave touches something deep inside them in a way that is very difficult to put into words. It generally compels them to continue doing it… to find that feeling again, and in the process discover a whole world unlike any other. Like an onion, backwards, the layers are added over that first, pure impression. “For every surfer, their first wave touches something deep inside them in a way that is very difficult to put into words” Surfing is many things; one of the first after one finds that one wants to continue at it is to try to get better doing it, and that in itself becomes all-consuming. I think the first twenty years I surfed was just a test to see if I was really interested—because only then did I begin to see and start to understand that I had learned some deeply profound lessons about life."