No Filter Book Club: Barbarian Days by William Finnegan
“I chased waves instinctively. Got appropriately stoked when it was good, got thoroughly immersed in working out the puzzle of a new spot. Still, peak moments were, by definition, few and far between. Most sessions were unremarkable. What was consistent was a certain serenity that followed a session. It was physical, this post-surf mood, but it had a distinct emotionality to it. Sometimes it was mild elation. Often it was a pleasant melancholy. After particularly intense tubes or wipeouts I felt a charged and wild inclination to weep that could last for hours.”
William Finnegan hid the fact that he surfed for most of his life. As a war reporter for the New Yorker, he felt that his colleagues might stop taking him seriously if they found out he rode gnarly breaks in his spare time, so it was only with the publication of his memoir that he truly came out as a surfer.
Finnegan surfed long before Blue Crush hit the cinemas, back in the ’60s when being pro was respected but rare and you earned your social ranking by being out in the water before dawn, riding 10 foot tubes and coming out dry. Celebrating wasn’t cool, neither was speaking too much, and being sponsored by corporations definitely didn’t reflect their ideals.
“The surfing social document is a delicate contract,” Finnegan writes. “It gets redrafted every time you paddle out. At crowded breaks, while jockeying for waves with a mob of strangers, talent, aggression, local knowledge and local reputation help establish a rough pecking order.”
Finnegan began surfing as a child in LA but got truly into the spirit of things when his producer dad got a job in Hawaii. Barbarian Days is a ‘coming out’, if you will, of Finnegan as someone who isn’t just passionate about surfing but lives, breathes and dreams it. Throughout his reporting on Apartheid and on missions to Madagascar, Finnegan would find the time to hit a coastline and experience the full spectrum of human emotions – euphoria, despair, self-loathing and elation – in just one session.
Barbarian Days is more than a memoir. It’s a love letter, albeit an anguished one, to surf. Finnegan wrote journals throughout his life, which means he’s able to document the intricacies of almost every significant wave he rode, managing, somehow, to describe each experience on the water in a unique and totally gripping way. Tangled up in those waves are his relationships with women, with friends and with himself.
Finnegan divides his memoir into chapters within which he surfed. His childhood in Hawaii, his round-the-world trip in his early 20s chasing the perfect wave (before forecasts and surf-cams were available.) He documents his time big wave surfing on Ocean Beach San Francisco and his home away from home in a fishing village in Portugal. The memoir ends in New York, where he teaches his daughter how to surf and expresses relief when she doesn’t seem to fall in love with it. For Finnegan, the hobby is so all-encompassing it’s almost an affliction.
Barbarian Days takes us away from the glitz and glamour and cool points of surfing and reveals the rawness beneath. We learn that surfing isn’t a sport, but a path – one laced with pain and nostalgia alongside glory and triumph. Finnegan makes it easy to pine for a surfer’s life but he crushes that reader’s dream early on. He says if you haven’t started in childhood, then “it’s too late to be any good.” The Wall Street Journal, No Filter’s main competitor, sums it up: “We all need Mr Finnegan as a role model for a life fully, thrillingly lived.”
Buy the book here.
