[Note: I filmed this video above on my Canon PowerShot.]

I just finished reading Caught Inside: A Surfer’s Year on the California Coast, by Daniel Duane. I love this book because it eloquently connects surfing’s physical idiosyncrasies — the experience of catching waves, the behavior of the sea, California’s teeming central shoreline ecosystem, the characters that inhabit the water’s edge — to a deeper metaphysical ideal that seeks something just below the surface.

There is one passage that I want to share. In it Duane aims to capture the surreal experience of riding the perfect wave:

As my black wetsuit heated in the sun I forgot about the profound trauma to my inner wa, I thought how, with the peeling wave as an ideal of perfection, the surfer’s object of passion becomes the very essence of ephemerality — not a thing to be owned or a goal to be attained but rather a fleeting state to inhabit. So much more of my time, after all, passed in the dreaming and searching than in the actual riding of waves; so much more time spent driving the coast and floating between sets. Of a whole year of devotion, probably no more than a day was spent truly on my feet and surfing, so I couldn’t view such a moment as this without an ardent, frustrated desire, a near-religious craving for wholeness. Unlike so many other passions: while one might, I suppose, wish for a bloom to remain a blossom, for a ripening grape to hang always on the vine — yearnings John Keats made his own, for fleeting beauty and youth, the understandably hopeless hope that we might freeze our world’s better moments — the wave’s plenitude is rather in the peeling of the petal, the very motion of the falling fruit.

I can say unequivocally that this passage is on a level with the best of Emerson or Thoreau. First, Duane, so delicately and without conceit, links his surf experiences to more cerebral meditations on physical and emotional communion with the natural world. This is not easy and plenty of writers fall into cliches where Duane otherwise offers sublimely original prose. Next there is his subtle use of aliteration and literary symbolism. Note the cadence between “bloom” and “blossom”; “plenitude” and “peeling”; “falling” and “fruit”. There is the metaphor of a wave “peeling” petal-like from the ocean, and then the more traditional image of the petal that forms the flower that adorns the fruit. All are caught up in Duane’s study of rare moments that occur as briefly in our souls as they do in nature. In such a spiritual passage I think of the religious symbolism of the lotus blossom and the Buddhist belief that humans can achieve pure enlightenment, wherein our individuality is at once enlarged by and dissolved in a profound fraternity with our environment. In such moments of clarity, the spirit revels in the understanding that everything is changing, nothing is permanent, our greatest moments are also our smallest and most transient. Indeed, if we can achieve greatness, it tends to occur when we relinquish our egotistical possessiveness over our surroundings and practice complete self-abnegation, where we submit wholly to the unstable processes unfolding in every corner. In these instances of self-effacement we actually become the greatest versions of ourselves. And the best place to achieve these enlightened moments of heightened impermanence is on a surf board, rushing across the face of a fast-changing wave. I don’t think it’s an accident that Duane uses Buddhist symbols to describe his sport, for he has arrived at a very spiritual understanding of it.