From 1992: In a sport open only to the absurdly dedicated, the big-wave surfer Mark Renneker is the fanatics’ fanatic.
Wise Surfboards, the only surf shop in San Francisco, is a bright, high-ceilinged place flanked by a Mexican restaurant and a Christian day-care center out in the far reaches of a sleepy working-class seaside suburb known as the Sunset District. Bob Wise, the shop’s proprietor, was talking to a small group of local surfers one winter afternoon when I stopped in. “So Doc, who can see the surf from his window, calls me up and says, ‘Come on, let’s go out,’ ” Wise said.
I knew how Bodkin felt. Mark’s joy in surfing adversity had often appalled me. Earlier that winter, he and I had been out together in big surf at Ocean Beach. We paddled out easily—conditions were immaculate, the channels easy to read—but we misjudged the size of the surf and took up a position that was too close to shore. Before we caught our first waves, a huge set caught us inside.
Everyone who surfs has a limit to the size of the waves he will venture among. The surfers in an area come, over time, to know one another’s limits. In San Francisco, this mutual knowledge creates a dense little community, nervous and drawling, in the beach parking lots on big winter days—men pacing back and forth, fists plunged in pockets, discussing the matter with dry mouths, laughing too loudly, while, out at sea, frightening waves rear and collapse.
Mark looks, at a glance, and especially when he wears a coat, like some Russian Orthodox monk who has wandered off the taiga—a sunburned young Solzhenitsyn. He has an unkempt brown beard, a large, narrow, sun-reddened nose, hair that falls a good five inches below his shoulders, and small, dolefully down-sloping blue eyes. He even makes a habit of wearing sandals. He seldom wears a coat, though; his wardrobe tends toward T-shirts or aloha shirts or no shirt, even in winter.
Mark’s parents were divorced when he was thirteen. He lived with his mother, a former fashion model, but he and his father, a psychiatrist, remained close. Even when Mark was a teen-ager, he and his father were always together: golfing, fishing, hiking, camping, travelling up and down the coast. The news that his father might have cancer—news that came while Mark was in pre-medical studies at the University of California at Santa Cruz—had a profound effect on Mark.
“Making a place yours—that’s a lot of what surfing is about,” Mark says. As a teen-ager, he remembers, he used his surf travels as a mental-relaxation technique. “I would run my mind up the coast, surf spot by surf spot. I’d start somewhere down in Mexico, and then try to remember one moment, one wave, one detail of every place I had surfed, working my way north. By the time I was in college, I’d surfed hundreds of places. Still, I’d sometimes get all the way to Santa Cruz.
This was not what the Calvinist missionaries who began arriving in Hawaii in 1820 had in mind for the islanders as a way of life. Hiram Bingham, who led the first missionary party, which found itself in a crowd of surfers before it had even landed, wrote, “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.
Twenty years into the short-board era, Mark Renneker and I leaf through surf magazines—there are at least a dozen now—in Wise’s shop, shaking our heads. The photographs in the magazines depict sawed-off thicks in pink wetsuits flying through the air on garishly colored, skateboard-size boards. Often there is no wave in sight—just a splash of spray in the lower half of the picture to indicate that this “rad aerial” did begin on a wave. Mark and I are nonplussed.
Although every block constitutes, for local surfers, a distinct “spot,” with a distinct character, Ocean Beach is what surfers call a beach break, meaning that it has no point of land—no reef or river mouth or pier—to define it, and the shape of the waves therefore depends largely on the configuration of the offshore sandbars. That configuration changes constantly—with the tide, the swell, the season, the wind, and an infinite number of other factors, too subtle, too local, to have names.
On the inside sandbar, as we continue our progress toward Judah, we find short, thick waves breaking with surprising power. I like the quick, steep drops, and catch three straight high-adrenaline rights before stroking into a head-high mistake. My board sticks for a moment in the wave’s lip, and then I am launched into space. I try to get away from my board, but dare not dive straight down —the inside bar is shallow.
We decide to hitchhike back to Sloat rather than walk. As we climb the embankment to the highway, Mark suddenly turns and says triumphantly, “Feel that? Here come the onshores.” He is right. A sharp, dark wind line is already moving into the surf on the outside bars, tearing off the tops of the waves. “Those other guys blew it,” Mark crows.
The garage was so full of surfboards that five more boards were standing on their tails in the stairwell. Two were museum pieces: enormous round-nosed designs from before the revolution in shaping, in the late nineteen-sixties. Mark had almost never ridden them. Then, there was a wooden board.
Mark sighs impatiently. He asks if I will be coming to the horror-movie double bill tonight in the Mission District. He is a hardened horror-movie connoisseur, and he has got several other surfers into the habit lately. He calls it the San Francisco Men’s Movie Club. They sit in the front row and cackle at the bad acting. I doubt if I’ll be able to make it. Mark taps at the keyboard of his computer. He shakes his head. “You’re funny,” he says, finally.
And when success comes, if it comes, and you find yourself outside, beyond the breaking waves, lolling in the improbable calm, your arms limp , your sinuses slowly draining, your vision slowly clearing, you try to recall exactly what it was that worked, where it was that you “punched through,” what patterns proved to be real. This being Ocean Beach, the channel may move within minutes, but every addition to the intuition’s map of the Beach’s sandbars and caprices helps.
There was no wind at Sloat, but the largest waves were feathering slightly anyway, from the sheer volume of water they threw forth as they broke. And the explosions of soup that followed were unnaturally white. They looked like small nuclear blasts; watching them made my stomach churn. When Mark phoned me half an hour before, he had said simply, “Sloat. Be there or be square.” But Sloat was out of the question. Mark pulled into the parking lot a few minutes after I did.
They probably had, too. Mark and Edwin had a pact, informal but fierce, having to do with surfing big waves. They had been surfing together since they met, in 1978, in Argentina. After Edwin moved to San Francisco to live with his mother, Mark and Edwin became friends. They surfed together often, and Mark started taking an interest in Edwin’s welfare: counselling him about how to get along in the United States, encouraging him to go to college.
While Edwin started back out to the pier, I noticed a tremendous set breaking on an outside bar perhaps two hundred yards to the north. With people in the water, it was now possible to say that Sloat was indeed twenty feet plus. But the set on the bar near the pier was more than gigantic—it was also phenomenally violent. The waves seemed to be turning themselves inside out as they broke, and when they paused they spat out clouds of mist air that had been trapped inside the truck-size tubes.
I once asked Edwin if he had ever seen Mark scared. Edwin thought awhile, and finally said, “Once. In Argentina. We were on a train, and he seemed like he was scared of the cops, and of the Army. He had good reason to be scared, too. They were incredibly dangerous, and Doc could sense it. He could sense the repression.”
Mark can describe a desperate struggle on the inside bar and its aftermath in metaphors that convince. He knows that a long hold-down underneath a wave automatically produces in the mind “about a thousand different great reasons to go in.” He can even talk from what sounds like experience about what it feels like to panic in big waves: “Strength just drains out of you, like gas out of a hole in a tank.
Of course, no amount of scientific understanding gets you down the face of a big wave. In Mark’s case, a lifetime of practice, physical courage, and simple athletic skill also figure. He benefits, moreover, from a fair share of monkey-see, monkey-do, for he spends a couple of weeks on the North Shore each winter.
That evening, Dr. Renneker sits cross-legged on his bed at home, watching the weather on TV while fielding a steady barrage of phone calls.
It’s decided: the Men’s Movie Club is going to see “Friday the 13th Part V.” Mark can’t believe I’m not interested. How can I not be interested in sitting in the front row of some rank downtown theatre with a bunch of middle-aged guys in aloha shirts and howling as the movie blood splatters? I can’t explain it. I know: I’m funny.
“Set,” somebody growls. All eyes swing to the horizon, where the blazing sheet of the sea is beginning to lift in sickeningly large gray lines. “Those guys areIn the spring and summer, when the surf at Ocean Beach nearly always stinks, Mark heads south, to Big Sur, where his favorite spot is a reef break known as Fuller’s. Fuller’s is on a wild stretch of coast where west and south swells—California’s summer swells—hit with unusual, open-ocean force.
“That board’s too slow,” Mark said, churning past me. I was actually riding the thruster that he had finally persuaded me to get. But Mark had recently started saying that I needed another board—a longer, narrower thruster—for bigger waves. I watched him sprint-paddle toward the peak, hooting down the line at a burly local who was tearing apart a tricky, looping white-water left. Mark was on good terms with the Fuller’s crew.
The rain puddles are like small powder-blue windows scattered on the muddy farm road as I hurry down to the beach at Four Mile. It’s a soft, clear morning, with not a breath of wind, and a north swell looks to have sneaked in overnight. Remarkably, there’s no one around. Four Mile is a reef break in a pristine cove between San Francisco and Santa Cruz.
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