Circle Rock Ranch

Around the Olympics

A Devotion to Strange Gods

North Shore of Oahu c. 1995

"Deliberately useless, unproductive nature worship, a devotion to strange gods." - William Finnegan, on surfing, author of Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life

Falcon 9 Development Supercut

Beach Life

Letter from Sayulita

In the morning dingo-eared dogs follow men onto porches, still wagging vigorously in the morning cool. Women, maybe not as old as they look, leave for jobs in two-piece uniforms unevenly faded. Doves hang, two and three to a cage, from eaves made from compound vaults of brick and mortar and board-smoothed stucco overhung by florid trees and a little black dog sniffs the ground beneath the birdcage on the deck down the ravine from ours for dropped seed, the same way every morning.

While I surf after breakfast big flocks of smallish gulls dive-bomb the surface of the water, their bodies hitting with tucked wings and the vector of a stone tossed indifferently into the sky and gone ballistic. If fate has it, a gull comes up with one from among the school of sardines that's being chased from beneath by anabolic bonito. The sardines are helplessly pressed into a carnival of fatality leading sometimes to a fleeting satiation of a predator of the air or of the deep, mattering not which.

And while all this is going on, at the surface the only things that are apparent are the occasional innocuous flutter of fin or splash of feathered corpus against the fire-glass ripple of the water. The surf is decent today. A long-period swell that's fading. It's uncrowded at 9 a.m. and there really are wafts of Bob Marley's "Is This Love?" audible from fifty yards out in the lineup, coming from a restaurant on shore, but otherwise it's quiet and a mile distant are the furthest points of the bay, looking mossy with jungle and dabbed with yellow where the angle of the sun is just right, brined in low-hanging salt mist like some primeval fume exhaled from the earth itself.

I could talk about surfing for a long time and why it obsesses me, but it would be tiresome and inadequate anyway. So I'll say only that my favorite part of the day is when I point out a crack in the glassing of the first board I consider at the surf shop in the morning and the shop guy helping me says nothing but simply puts it to his lips, sucks on the crack for a moment and confirms it's taken in seawater and that I'll need to choose a different board today.

Sayulita