Читать книгу Surfing Hawaii - Leonard Lueras - Страница 7

INTRODUCTION

The Hawaiian Islands

Surfing's Birthplace

Surf Season

Access

Sea Bottom

Special Gear

Hazards

Medical

Highlights

During modern times, the sheer spectacle of surfing in Hawaii— and the associated glamour of being an accomplished surfer in Hawaii—has captured the collective fancy of sports enthusiasts, fashion trendsetters, marketing moguls and even intellectuals throughout the world in many special ways. All have been fascinated by what to them are otherworldly visions of brave young men (and sometimes even women) who regularly go to Hawaii to paddle out into the warm but fickle seas and attempt, almost irrationally and obsessively, to catch and ride what are perhaps the most challenging and dangerous ocean waves ever created by the forces of Nature.

Indeed, what adventurous person on Earth worth his or her guts wouldn't like to experience what all good surfers do when they dramatically take off and drop into a perfect Hawaiian wave vector? Who wouldn't want to be swept along so quickly by such a pure form of natural energy?

One can experience this phenomenon vicariously—by watching it on film, or even by traveling to Hawaii and studying it at beach-side through the lenses of a high-powered camera or a pair of binoculars—but, well, that's kind of cheating. It's like enjoying sex by only watching it. It's not quite the same, dude, unless you get to actually—and indeed very personally—do it all yourself.

Former Hawaiian surf champion Paul Strauch once confided to an interviewer that, to him, surfing in Hawaii—or surfing anywhere, for that matter—was as pleasurable— and sometimes even better— than sex. "Surfing," he mused during an interview about his surfing career in Hawaii, "is very much like making love. It always feels good, no matter how many times you've done it."

Strauch's words may seem farfetched to a non-surfer, but if you ask serious surfers whether they would rather have a day of perfect Hawaiian waves or a day of sex with someone gorgeous, they will invariably choose the former. After all, beautiful men and women will always be around, but perfect waves, well, they don't make their magical appearance very often.

Irrational Dedication

Strauch's ancient Hawaiian ancestors also had very similar feelings about their favorite oceanic sport, and they even used to chant poems about surfing's sublime pleasures. Though most modern-day surfers are probably unaware of its history, the aquatic pastime of stand-up boardsurfing has been enjoyed in Hawaii since perhaps as early as the Middle Ages, though it wasn't until the late 1770s that any haole (or outsider) had the opportunity to witness this uniquely Hawaiian watersport live. By this time, native Hawaiians had already organized themselves into serious surfing huis (or clubs) that were sponsored by royalty, and were meeting regularly to compete in what may well have been among the world's first athletic events. Indeed, long, long, long before anyone had even dreamed of the high-tech foam and fiberglass waveriding craft of today, the people of Polynesia—and particularly the Hawaiians—had been gathering at their favorite surfing beaches to have fun in the sun and to demonstrate their waveriding prowess. Meanwhile, the enthusiastic spectators onshore would cheer, have a feast and place bets on their favorite surfing heroes.

Even the typical 21st-century surfer's seemingly irrational and obsessive dedication to the sport is nothing new. Hawaiian chants recall fine surfing days when Hawaiian waveriders would drop whatever they were doing—work, family, everything—in order to ride good waves. When the surf was up and pumping, wrote the prominent Hawaiian scholar Kepelino Keauokalani (1830-1878), all responsibilities were put on hold: "All thought of work was at an end, only that of sport was left . . . all day there was nothing but surfing, Many [surfers] went out surfing as early as four in the morning."

A Magical Surfboard

If distant storms didn't generate suitable waves, anxious Hawaiian surfers would often enlist the aid of a kahuna, a sorcerer or shaman, to literally pray for good surf conditions. The kahuna would chant loudly to the sea gods and lash beach vines, "unitedly upon the water until the desired undulating waves were obtained." According to one chant, in some parts of Ha-wii, people would even build grand stone heiaus (or temples) at which they prayed and left offerings.

In the archives of Hawaii's Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum, the world's leading repository of Polynesian history, there is a 1919 archeological study written by John Francis Gray Stokes (1876—1960) that describes an ancient seaside heiau at Kahaluu Bay on the Kona coast of the Big Island of Hawaii. This temple was identified by Kona Hawaiians as a "heiau for surfriders, where they could pray for good sport." Stokes doesn't write a great deal about this temple, which was known as Kuemanu, except to say that within its confines was a bleachers-like terrace, where spectators could sit and watch surfing, as well as a brackish stone pool where surfers could relax and bathe after a day of riding the waves.

In one chant that has been dated to the 12th century, Hawaiians celebrated the surfing prowess of a great chieftain, and in another mythic poem, poignant stanzas relate the story of a serpent-sorceress who fell in love with a handsome young surfer. To keep him as her lover, she gifted him with her long and passionate tongue, which she transformed into a magical surfboard.

Because early Hawaiian traditions were passed down orally in the form of a series of memorized chants, there are no early written accounts about surfing. However, archeologists and art historians have discovered ancient Hawaiian petroglyphs (or pictures incised into volcanic stone) that depict cartoon-like surfers on surfboards. These petroglyphic surfers may or not predate the arrival of the white man (or haole) in Hawaii during the late 18th century. Ancient surfing scenes (as recounted in recorded chant sequences) were apparently fun, bitchy, fanciful, and sometimes even violent. Woe betide the weaker of two surfers in one chant who became entangled in a love triangle involving a powerful woman chief. Even worse was the plight of an enthusiastic surfer of lower caste who dared to ride waves that were kapu-e d (declared off-limits or taboo) by an avid surfing alii (high-caste chief).

This earnest-looking Hawaiian man poses with his family alongside a grass shack in what may well be the first known photo portrait of a surfer and his surfboard. This superb study was taken by a photographer named Theodo P. Severin around 1890. It is now in the archives of Honolulu's Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum.

It was the legendary beach-boys of Waikiki who re-popularized and saved Hawaii's cultural heritage of surfing early this century, after it had endured years of discouragement and neglect. This early Hawaiian surfer was photographed by the Honolulu photographer Frank Davey at popular Waikiki Beach below the brow of Diamond Head around the 1900s. He is wearing a stylish loincloth and holding a short alaia surfboard that was the waveriding vogue in Old Hawaii.

A collection of these Hawaiian surfing stories—along with similar Polynesian lore from Samoa, Tahiti and New Zealand—would fill a medium-sized book. Such an anthology would firmly establish that surfing was indeed a very important part of day-to-day life in the middle and south Pacific islands inhabited by the seafaring Polynesians. Such accounts would also fuel speculation about the origin of surfing, since, despite the recorded oral history, nobody can quite pin down just where this maritime dance form was born. Who on this planet first meditated on the recreational use of gravity and moving-wave vectors? And who shaped the first surfboard, paddled into that first rideable wave, then actually stood up on that surfboard and rode it towards shore?

The First Surf Reporters

The great British explorer and navigator, Captain James Cook, wrote in his journal in 1777 about a curious Tahitian water sport called "choroee", in which Tahitians in small outrigger canoes paddled into and rode ocean waves. However, it wasn't until Cook visited Hawaii a year later that he saw actual stand-up boardsurfing.

Unfortunately, Cook did not get to write about this sighting because he was killed in 1779 by a group of angry Hawaiian natives who attacked him and four of his marines in the shallows of Kealakekua Bay on Hawaii's Kona coast. However, Cook's second-in-command, Lieutenant James King, took quill in hand and charmingly described the spectacle that was surfing in "Stone Age" Hawaii. In Volume III of the British Admiralty's report on A Voyage to the Pacific Ocean, King noted that in Hawaii, "Swimming is not only a necessary art, in which men and women are more expert than any people we had hitherto seen, but a favourite diversion among them."

Photo: Joe Carini

Photo: Art Brewer

Photo: Erik Aeder

Waves, waves and more waves is what surfing in Hawaii is all about, and the spectacularly beautiful islands are home to some of the finest and most challenging waves in the world. In this particular surfing triptych, we pause to contemplate the beauty of three entirely different Hawaiian wave moods as captured by three photographers on three different islands.

About surfing, an "exercise" which "appeared to us most perilous and extraordinary," King wrote: "The boldness and address with which we saw them perform these difficult and dangerous manoeuvres was altogether astonishing and scarcely to be credited." An accompanying engraving by a ship's artist includes a detail of a Hawaiian native paddling on a surfboard towards the ships that Cook had brought on his historic expedition. Even though this paddler is not actually surfing, he is part of the first artistic study ever done of a surfer and his surfboard.

Cook and King were the first (but not the last) author-explorers to become entranced by this "astonishing" activity. During the next hundred years and more, dozens of missionaries, adventurers and authors would visit Hawaii and record their impressions of this uniquely Hawaiian sport.

Unfortunately, many of the first and most influential reactions to surfing were penned by overly-zealous Christian missionaries who found many social phenomena associated with the sport to be un-Christian. They frowned upon surfing's semi-nudity and sexual connotations, and they did all they could to make the sport kapu (or taboo). The drinking, gambling and merry-making that usually took place at ancient-style surf contests, as well as the "lascivious" displays of hula-dancing, were all strongly discouraged.

Surfing also suffered along with the general decimation of the Hawaiian population during the years following the coming of the foreigners. When Cook "discovered" Hawaii in 1778, it was estimated that there were around 300,000 native Hawaiians living and thriving on the archipelago's six major islands. Within the first century of exposure to the West, however, thousands of Hawaiians died of both serious and minor diseases. By the 1880s, the Hawaiian population had shrunk to about 40,000 people. This fact alone explains why surfing diminished in Hawaii during the late 19th century.

In a different kind of vintage photograph, this one from the recent 1970s, local Pipeline surf artist Gerry Lopez strikes an authentic Country-style pose, complete with surf dog, chickens, ducks and what was then a newly-shaped, primo and then state-of-the-art Lopez Pipe Model surfing board. Photo: Dana Edmunds

"Destitution, Degradation, and Even Barbarism"

In 1847, Hiram Bingham, the leader of the first party of 14 Calvinist missionaries to arrive in Hawaii from faraway New England, wrote, "The decline and discontinuance of the use of the surfboard as civilization advances may be accounted for by the increase in modesty, industry or religion, without supposing, as some people have affected to believe, that missionaries caused oppressive enactments against it."

This was the same Bingham, however, who, upon arriving in Hawaii, had written from shipside: "The appearance of destitution, degradation, and barbarism, among the chattering, and almost naked savages, whose heads and feet, and much of their sunburnt skins were bare, was appalling." He continues: "Some of our number, with gushing tears, turned away from the spectacle. Others, with firmer nerve, continued their gaze, but were ready to exclaim, 'Can these be human beings?! . . . Can such things be civilized?"'

Hawaiians had to endure difficult and painful times indeed, but despite the terrible decimation of their people and the suppression of their traditions, other, more sophisticated visitors came to Hawaii and were charmed by what they saw on land—and at sea.

In 1825, for example, the British captain George Anson Byron, master of HMS Blonde (and a cousin of the great poet George Gordon, Lord Byron) reported that in Hawaii during the 1820s, a surfboard was a very fashionable part of a young male Hawaiian's estate: "To have a neat floatboard, well-kept, and dried, is to a sandwich islander what a tilbury or cabriolet, or whatever light carriage may be in fashion, is to a young Englishman."

At about the same time, an open-minded missionary named William Ellis witnessed the act of surfing and noted (in marked contrast to many of his clerical colleagues) that for one "to see fifty or a hundred persons riding on an immense billow, half immersed in spray and foam, for a distance of several hundreds yards together, is one of the most novel and interesting sports a foreigner can witness in the islands."

By the 1860s, even the famed American author Mark Twain had visited Hawaii and succumbed to the siren call of the surf. In Roughing It, a humorous collection of newspaper articles published in 1866, Twain described his first and last surfing experience. "I tried surf-bathing once, subsequently, but made a failure of it. I had the board placed right, and at the right moment, too; but missed the connection myself. The board struck the shore in three-quarters of a second, without any cargo, and I struck the bottom about the same time, with a couple of barrels of water in me."

Like most novice surfers, Twain was frustrated in his attempts to ride the waves, so he just watched in awe as a Hawaiian (or "heathen," as Twain called him) came "whizzing by like a bombshell! It did not seem that a lightning express train could shoot along at a more hair-lifting speed," Twain exclaimed.

Heenalu, The "Royal Sport"

During the 1800s, there also emerged a number of prominent Hawaiian scholars who began recording the many fast-fading Hawaiian chants. Among them were Kepelino Keauokalani, Samuel Manaikalani Kamakau (1815-1876), John Papa Ii (1800-1870) and David Malo (1793-1853). From their voluminous accounts and records of Hawaiian events, the subject of surfing —in both a practical and historical context—emerges time and time again. Ii even describes in great detail how and from which indigenous woods various ancient surfboards were made as well as how board designs differed, depending on what kind of wave a person wanted to ride.

A poignant beachside memorial to the much-admired Hawaiian surfer, Eddie Aikau, who tragically died at sea in 1978 while attempting to secure help for his fellow crewmen who'd been stranded aboard a traditional Hawaiian sailing canoe named the Hokulea.

Photo: Jeff Divine

In these accounts, the Hawaiian word that was most often used to describe surfing was heenalu (or wavesliding), and a surfboard was known as a papa heenalu (or wave-sliding board).

As historians, these four men contributed a great trove of information for surfing historians to draw from, but despite their efforts, it wasn't until the so-called "popular press" and internationally famous authors began to write about this unusual Hawaiian sport that surfing really began to attract the attention of the outside world. Indeed, surfing's greatest publicity coup probably took place in 1907, when the popular American author Jack London wrote a widely circulated story entitled A Royal Sport: Surfing at Waikiki.

London, who had attempted surfing during a holiday in Hawaii that summer, stood up on a moving surfboard, experienced what he described as "ecstatic bliss," and, in response to this waterborne euphoria, began to describe a Waikiki surfer as a "Brown Mercury" who emerged from an "invincible roar . . . not struggling frantically in that wild movement, not buried and crushed and buffeted by those mighty monsters, but standing above them all, calm and superb, poised on the giddy summit, his feet buried in the churning foam, the salt smoke rising to his knees . . ."

Early authors who wrote about surfing used to describe surfers as men who could "walk on water." Nowadays, a cooler thing to do is to "walk on air", as five-time world surfing champion Kelly Slater does here in a recent airsurfing demo on Oahu's famous North Shore. Photo: Jason Childs

London's colorful descriptions are often credited with stimulating an overseas interest in Hawaiian surfing. This new enthusiasm was heartily supported by a new Hawaiian industry—tourism—which began extolling the virtues of exotic Hawaii in propaganda distributed throughout the world. To attract more visitors to the islands, local businessmen and government leaders were promoting the islands' hula-dancing, music and surfing as part of a glamorous, Hawaiian-style vogue.

Walking On Water

As a result of London's popular surfing story Brown Mercury, many individual surfers began to make a name for themselves. An Irish-Hawaiian Waikiki beachboy named George Freeth (1883-1919) was invited to conduct the first ever surfing demonstrations on the US mainland at Southern California's Redondo Beach. Freeth's West Coast promoters introduced him as an "aquatic attraction" and as "the man who can walk on water" In the wake of this publicity. Freeth remained in California for some 10 year. While he was there, he taught numerous people how to ride the waves.

Sadly, Freeth died young "as" the result of exhaustion from strenuous rescue work'' he performed on California's busy beaches. On the plaque beneath the bronze bust erected in his honor the "First Surfer in the United States" and as a person—of Royal Hawaiian and Irish ancestry—who "as a" youngster revived the lost Polynesian art of surfing while standing on a board."

Freeth's pioneering accomplishments on behalf of his people and their favorite sport -were, as Lieutenant King had said more than one hundred years earlier, "astonishing." Rut only five years after Freeth had turned California onto surfing, another young and talented swimmer-surfer suddenly appeared big-time on the international watersports scene. This man was Duke Paoa Kahanamoku, and he carried Hawaiian surfing to even greater heights by popularizing it throughout the world. He surfed before rapt audiences in many parts of America, and, in 1915, achieved a special renown by becoming the first person to demonstrate surfing in now surf-crazy Australia. Much more is written about the legendary Duke later in this book.

—Leonard Lueras

Slater's antics at left are reminiscent, in a balletic way. of the figure in this ancient Hawaiian petroglyph from the island of Lanai.

Yet another surfing triptych, this one about three decidedly different Hawaiian surfing situations. A rude North Shore pause (Top) is followed by what may evolve into an even ruder late Pipeline scratch-over (Center). Both of these precarious waves make way for good fun on a playful little sandbar (Bottom). Top and center photos: Jason Childs; bottom photo: Jeff Divine

Sunset highlights the mood in these two pictures. Top photo: Brett Uprichard: bottom photo: Dana Edmunds

In the islands it's inevitable that sooner or later you're going to get burned. One person's stoke, you see, is sometimes another person's bummer. Photo: Jeff Divine