The kelp fields are enormous, stretching hundreds of meters off shore in several directions. Eventually descending into the steel blue depths of the cold Pacific, their bulbous heads bow low before each approaching wave as if Neptune himself were passing by, each genuflecting with a respectful nod beneath the steaming green thunder that attends the passage of a God in his seaborne chariot.

The Pacific waters along the California North Coast have an oily, mottled appearance as the glints of morning sun catch the wavetops on each breaker just before it crests. As each line of advancing water rushes higher upon the back of the spent and retreating flood, a deeper brownish hue becomes apparent, reflecting the thick kelp that lies just below the surface. How different this is from the deep waters off the Molokai North Coast, where the white cresting caps of the waves seem to be borne on the shoulders of some immensely powerful giant of shocking cobalt blue, who lives in the unimaginable abyss below the sea cliffs.

Here and there among the buoyant kelp bulbs a sea otter rises, his identity betrayed by a quicksilver flitting motion that dives beneath the approaching wall of dark gray water. There are a number of these playful creatures rolling among the waves, perhaps an indication of the presence of plentiful food. Given several centuries of widespread human depredations along this coast, it is little short of miraculous to me that colonies of sea otter thrive as well as they seem to in this area. Once hunted to near-extinction, they have rebounded with determination to reclaim their ancestral feasting grounds.

Watching the sea is an endless joy. Nature’s supremely archetypal inspiration for the television set, with never the same program showing and a cast of uniquely original characters that no screenwriter could ever improve upon, I could sit and watch the sea for hours. That great seething gray mass of fluid energy that is the ocean courses, constantly changing, never exactly the same, and always in motion. At such moments, snug here in my protected perch above the breaking waves, I am reminded again of the total insignificance of mankind’s impertinent behavior upon it, viewed against the vastness of its hidden depths. Two seagulls wheel in echelon above the crest of a particularly perfect breaker, flying through its frothing banner of mist with disdain: it’s hard to improve upon such a brilliantly natural set of interactions and yet we pathetic little beings constantly try, in our fragile and impermanent manner.

In particular, I am reminded of my own laughable efforts to ride those waves on a surfboard, something I have never been good at despite decades of idealistic, wishful desire to be good at the sport. There’s something almost sacrilegious about trying to ride those perfect waves on a plank that never fails to trip up on my sense of the absurd, as I watch the rollers steam in like so many waves of swarming assault craft, poised to take a beach. Invariably, when I reflect on my own lack of coordination, my awareness rolls inexorably on to those who are adept at sliding on the crests of those waves, for they command the respect of a student for the learned master.

When I was young, I was caught up in the adolescent fancy of the ‘Endless Summer’, Bruce Brown’s memorable quest by Robert August and his mate for the perfect wave. Of course, at that time the irony of this phrase failed to register on me, since ALL waves are engendered perfect by nature and it is simply more human impertinence to ascribe degrees of perfection to these already perfectly constructed manifestations of inertial mass and stored energy. Despite this fact, the glorious possibilities of the moment, more a projection of my imagination than any figment of inherent reality, exerted their maximal hold on my own dreams of youthful immortality. The dreamy ideal of being one of those bronze gods of the surf, the object of desire to all those bikinied females that adorned the beaches, was at once intoxicating and immeasurably energizing. It seemed the ultimate fulfillment of a teenaged male fantasy to be one of those surfers, each embodied with an exotic mix of graceful strength, alluring desire, and each powerfully sexual in their relationship to the ocean.

In those days we young men dwelt exclusively within the narrow bounds of our own feverishly focused and highly artificial excitements. Surfing was (so we unquestioningly felt, at the time) the exclusive object of that subjective male artifice. Women, when we thought about them at all (which was all the time, of course), were relegated to a safely compartmentalized peripheral area of hormonal construct that not only bore no association with reality other than pure gratification of the physical impulse, but that narrow role they were objectified to a rarefied extreme. They were there to serve us as objects of lust, love, visual excitement, and titillation with about as much individual uniqueness and personal reality as hollow ornaments on a Christmas tree.  It never dawned on us in our most remote mindfulness that a ‘mere female’ could also relate to the ocean in such a highly charged psychosexual manner.

For many of us, the ocean itself was a woman; that elusive object of our feverish obsessions that a psychologist could doubtless write whole volumes of field notes about. At the time I recall most clearly, the mid to late 60s, it was particularly fashionable to be fancied a solitary, misunderstood outcast standing on the periphery of human social convention. This unspoken but universally felt status found expression in that famous song by Jack Nitzsche titled ‘The Lonely Surfer’. There was something so uniquely exclusive, so inexpressibly solitary in being a surfer that the cachet of exclusivity could almost be worn palpably like a wetsuit. This sense of being so unique and so solitary that no one could possibly share this feeling that had a cathartic allure to it that mostly appealed to those of us who were able to reflect abstractly on the surfing experience. We were doubtless alone in that fantasy...

For most male surfers, surfing was simply the most fun, the most excitingly physical thing you could do without a woman around to complicate matters with questions of love. Surfing was pure emotion, but emotion without the constant need to articulate that sexual attraction to the water that finds a target and yields so much excitement around real women. For those of us who had far more brains than we should have been equipped with (usually in inverse proportion to our handsomely rugged, masculine good looks), this fantasy of being the waves’ exclusive lover served to ameliorate our disappointment in not drawing swarms of more physically substantial admiring females at the beach, each time we unloaded our surf boards.

Thus, the lonely male surfer was frequently at the crest of his self-fulfilling fantasy of exclusivity: too sexy and too romantic to be burdened by mere mortal liaisons of the inter-gender variety and too serenely complex to be understood by an ‘ordinary’ woman (a subjective determination that somewhat enabled one to rise above the bothersome questions attendant to an otherwise empty bed at the end of the day, of course).

The simple fact that one was either a handsome hunk who didn’t have to do anything to attract woman, or not, probably didn’t even enter into the equation, since most of us belonged to the second category and not the first. Therefore, the entirely artificial construct of the lonely surfer served several needs. For one, it helped provide an explanation of why not all of us were endowed with a natural Brad Pitt sort of physical affect. For another, it conveniently sublimated the eternally frustrating search for sex within an ego-soothing framework of complicated inexplicability, burying the matrix of our narcissistic sense of sexual anxiety at such a convenient depth of mindfulness that they might as well not exist.

As a man, I cannot even begin to pretend to understand with any exactitude categorical similarities that this process might conceivably share with a female’s awareness, but I can imagine that there were substantial tie-ins, despite any possible variance in awareness of them in the given individual.

If anything, a woman’s range of possible reflections on this subject would have to be far more complex, vastly more subtle in terms of a range of reflective emotions bearing on the relationship one might have with the ocean. This, by virtue of the fact that woman are generally more empathetic with respect for their affective understanding of experiential interactions on all levels, than the average male.

While testosterone surges forth towards one great overall objective of sexual mating and planting of the seed of active life, estrogen acts in a supportive, complementary mode, providing the protected environment within which that active growth may safely take shape and flourish. Thus, for a man, the essential fulfillment of surfing may be a physical ‘Yang/Yin’ battle with the waves to establish subjective control, I can imagine that from a woman’s viewpoint it is less a battle against than a cooperative effort carried out as a coequal with the waves.

Since men have traditionally been of the opinion that the ‘natural’ roles are for men to dominate and women to nourish, few men can hardly be given credit for understanding that whereas a man’s ride on the waves is likely to be expressed as a demonstration of mastery and fancied control over physical elements, a woman’s ride is likely to be more of a dance with the waves—a far more harmonious and complementary interaction that implicitly presupposes inherent understanding of the physics of life at a very deep, almost cellular level: action and reaction, mass and inertia, balance and equilibrium. At least on a reflectively intuitive level, at any rate, since woman vary just as much as men in their mental/physical make-up.

If one accepts that premise, it induces further complex speculation into the process if a woman is regarded as beautiful or not, since although the same transference process a sexually unsuccessful male might invest in the surfing experience can also apply to a less beautiful female, the experience of a sexually alluring woman surfing may have an altogether different associative sensory value. But given that physical beauty is a shallow veneer, how much greater is the impact of physical symmetry admixed with character, inner fire and substance?

However that may or may not be, there is no surf music written about the ‘lonely (female) surfer’, nor has there ever been written any (to the best of my knowledge). The image of a ‘solitary woman surfer’ almost strikes one as nonsensical, although I have little doubt that there are a few women surfers who may see themselves through that particular filtered lens.

One thing that is becoming increasingly clearer, as decades of research and field investigations continue, is that there are no distinct shades of black and white when it comes to categorising male and female personalities. It is a sad and frustratingly inconvenient fact that unlike nature, where distinct physical categorization is more readily accommodated, within the minefield that comprises the infinitely broad range of male and female sexuality, there are no set standard guides to help typify one individual from another. The same frustrating status quo that makes the monogamous mating process a perilous undertaking fraught with impossible complexities acts equally to assure that uncertain second-guesses such as this are also doomed to frustrating uncertainty (you will notice that THAT fact seemingly has never deterred me, of course, from a lifelong habit of treading on unstable ground and dancing about on frightfully thin ice!).

Due to this same uncertainty factor, there is no such single and distinctly delineated thing as the archetypal male or female surfing experience. Every human attempt (such as this one) is doomed to utter failure in the attempt to explain, definitively analyse, or inalterably set forth the precise nature of what remains perhaps one of the most highly subjective processes imaginable: the definition of what constitutes individual experience. Especially such a set of aesthetic preconditions that obtain on a surfboard.

The best any of us may hope for is a sort of highly subjective attempt to explain our own experiences, hoping consequently that a few of those highly personal feelings, sensations, understandings, awarenesses, and/or perceptions may strike a familiar note or resonate meaningfully within those of another individual. This process, at once immensely frustrating yet potentially fulfilling, is as good as the process of comparing notes on ANY human experience with another individual may ever aspire to.

Whether you have guessed it or not, all of this ruminative philosophical meandering leads directly (even if by a somewhat highly circumlocuitous path) back to my original reflection on the variations possible in the male and female surfing experience. Do men in fact view surfing as a dominating process wherein they may demonstrate their mastery over the elements? Do women in fact view their surfing experience as a Yang/Yin-like dance with those same elements? Is such a black or white dissection even categorically possible or feasible? Although I suspect I have shown that it is not, the highly romantic nature of such speculating exerts its own fascination and manifests its own inertia in any consideration of such an impossibly complicated and complexly fraught analysis.

There is at least no doubt that any human interaction with a fluid medium is inherently sensual by nature, since the sensory aspects of water are at once immediate and obvious. Aside from Freud’s figurative associations of water with the formation of sexual human sexual imagery, the direct sensory component of interacting with water is clear and obvious to anyone who cares to observe and reflect on simple cause-effect formulas.

Human beings are created and sustained in their pre-birth state suspended in an aqueous environment; there is therefore an immediate association with water among human beings that goes directly back to the human female womb. If one takes this associative process back several hundreds of millions of years, we eventually stumble across our amphibian ancestors who lived within the oceans and breathed under water before they evolved into land-based, air-breathing forms of life. With such clear physical ties linking us to water on so many levels, it is easier to understand the less tangible and perhaps more figurative associations modern humanity, despite its many psychological and philosophical tangents, may develop with the lifegiving and sustaining ocean.

Back in the 60s, as I stated earlier, men dominated the sport of surfing, having forgotten (or perhaps never realized) that in the most ancient Hawaiian tradition of surfing men and woman shared the waves equally. Surfing was being newly rediscovered, after being transplanted on the California coast in the post-war period. This was thanks largely to seeds planted and germinated by Hawaiian watermen from the turn of the century that took root on foreign shores, inspiring others (non-Hawaiians) to take up the sport, although under the constraints of white American mores and Christian moral codes. There was regrettably very little ‘Western’ interest in or awareness of the Hawaiian cultural context that produced the sport and it seemed just another venue in which men could demonstrate the virtues of their manly prowess.

Whereas traditional (ancient) Hawaiian morality would be regarded by western Christians as more ‘amoral’ than moral, the simple fact is that in ancient Hawaii both men and women equally enjoyed surfing. There was no inherent bias implied or assumed against women sliding over the waves on boards, and although wave sliding was more of a royal sport than one the commoners enjoyed, all levels of Hawaiian society surfed. Surfing was most often done, in that ancient manner, entirely unclothed in the warm Hawai’ian currents. This contrasted utterly and completely with the excessively conservative modesty of western Christians, who had been instructed by their faith (read: the Christian Holy Bible) that women were inherently weak and emotionally delicate creatures who could no more gain understanding true ‘adventure’ than they could keep from fainting away at the slightest provocation. This conflicted directly with the fact that surfing contests in ancient Hawai’i more often than not ended in sensual trysts on the beach...more evidence of a traditional association between human procreative urges and the embrace of Mother Kai (ocean).

To be sure, there were a few females among the new coastal generation of California surfers who refused to accept the extant social constraints that encouraged male dominance in surfing, but they were marginalized so completely and effectively that today their names are almost completely forgotten by most who follow the sport. It is nevertheless interesting to speculate what exactly constituted the nature of their especially intimate relationship with the sea.

There is the notable example of one well-regarded and accomplished local woman surfer from Oahu (Rell Sunn) whose regard for the ocean of her ‘aina’ (native land) can only be described as transcendently passionate. In fact, for her the ocean was an incomparable and singular life-giving source of energy renewal, such was the extent of her regard for the ocean from which her ancient culture arose. For most women I would venture to speculate that their relationship was considerably simpler than that.

Consider for the moment that the oceans are the single source from which all life on Earth arose, the primordial soup that nourished the combination of chemicals and minerals from which not just human life, but in fact ALL life on this planet, descended from. Think therefore of the oceans as the great mother of all biological life. I would like to think that this fact is not lost on many women who have the ability to reflect on higher levels. Women who can detach themselves from the dross of squalid, everyday, common life to span the archetypal gap between the concept of the Great Mother Ocean and the nurturing role of mothers everywhere, from the highest to the lowest forms of life around us.

Again, however, everything hinges on the ability of an individual to ascribe value to objects and/or experience. From the straight forward and uncomplicated basic regard for surfing as a physical activity, all the way through the spectrum of possibilities to the distal extreme (a transcendent experience combining both physical and aesthetic intangibles). When the stimulus for regard stems from BOTH the object of regard AND the subject of it, there is far more potential for complex shades of meaningful interaction on both sides of the process, quite understandably.

Thus, a woman surfer who is not just adept at surfing but who is visually pleasing to the eye complicates the potential in a manifoldly exponential  manner.

Returning to the ancient Hawaiians, it is known that surfing was far more than just physical activity to the ancient culture of the islands, for the waves frequently served as a preferred method of matching up those who were attracted to each other. If a man and woman found each other attractive, they would often dance a complicated ballet with each other on their boards, ending the pas de deux by coming ashore and making love to each other fresh from the waves.

There can be few more powerfully symbolic examples of such a naturalistic expression of profoundly raw sexual attraction, at least to my manner of thought, than this mating of a man and woman freshly emerged from the life-sustaining ocean, that greatest symbolic mother of all biological life on the planet.

The Hawaiians understood this, free from any man-conceived moral constraints and unencumbered by Judeo-Christian codes of behavior. Christian society, on the other hand, was tightly bound by strong ethical ligatures arising from their extremely conservative religious beliefs. It was bad enough (by the Hawaiian missionaries’ notion) that men and women cavorted on the waves in the altogether, and in each other’s company. To cap that activity by rutting nakedly on the sand afterwards was to the missionaries the sheerest of profane acts. Sadly, stripped of all the religious mumbo-jumbo behavioral codifications of the Christians, the natural flow of love-making, first by the Hawaiian individuals with the sea and then with each other, had the most beautifully pure logic behind it. Whatever natural and unforced beauty it presented was, of course, sadly missed completely by the newly arrived Christian arbiters of morality.

Thus the act of loving the sea was fully and perfectly mirrored in the loving of individuals in the ancient Hawaiian culture, since by the reckoning of the ancient ones, there was no distinct border between the two. Nor, for that matter, was there any need for one, unless a kapu (‘taboo’) had been initiated by royalty for their own secular purposes.

None of these insights, feelings, beliefs, attitudes, or outlooks had been bought to the mainland revival of 1950s/60s surfing, along with the vehicle of the surfboard itself. For an apt analogue, think for a moment of a scenario in which an alien culture has landed on Earth at some distant time and left a vehicle that enabled light-speed travel across the cosmos. With no accompanying context to help place its use in the proper cultural perspective, who knows what humankind might end up doing with it. The same analog could be applied to the migration of the concept of sliding across waves on a board: no moral outlooks, no social codes, no cultural or religious baggage would have attended the fact. Especially in a strictly ‘oral culture’, such that of Hawai’I, with no recorded language or etiirn interpretations As a result, none of the ancient Hawaiians’ regard for the integrity of wave riding as a logical act and extension of love would have obtained on the California coast, although there’s no doubt at all that teenaged surfers did not miss the connection between sexual desire and prowess on the waves. Those who excelled at surfing could sometimes have their pick of the few women who were drawn by the new sport.

To understand the mindset of that relatively ‘square’ era is to understand only to a small extent the accepted mores of the men and women who rode the waves that washed California’s coastline. For one thing, America’s traditionally intense phobia of homosexuality was reinforced by the strict moral codes that dominated early 50s American culture. Sensuality and natural sexuality were seen only as sinful social aberrations and not as healthy manifestations of the youthful individual’s exuberant exploration of the joys of life. Following that logic, it is natural that the surfboard acquired a contextually appropriate (Christian American) place in American culture of the 50s and 60s that reflected none of the fully lifestyle-integrated intrinsic values of the culture that gave it to us (Hawaii).

Therefore, as the sport of surfing reestablished itself in the new cultural surroundings (California’s coast), it is safe to say that surfing assumed an almost entirely new social identity in America.

[Fragmented reflections on the Cal North Coast, deep in Winter (1989/2007, revisited in 2026)...]