Surf's Up!

Thanks to the UK lifestyle blog Love a Happy Ending for letting me guest post this week over there about surfing and my love of the sea!  Since I wrote that post for them, I won't put the whole thing here but I'll past the first part below in case anyone wants to take a peek: 

              I was born in Cleveland, Ohio, more than 500 miles from the nearest ocean.  I sometimes wonder what my life might have been like if my family had stayed there.  Instead, my family relocated to the warmer climes of Southern California when I was the precocious young age of three.  It would be the beginning of a lifelong love affair with the sea.

               Of course, when I was very small the ocean waves terrified me.  My parents bought a trailer home at the beach where we would spend every summer while I was growing up.  I remember my father carrying me out into the waves when I was still just a little tyke.  He was only waist deep, but I was sure he would drop me into that torpid water swirling around my feet.  Somehow I grew more comfortable, and braver, as I grew older.

            By the time I was nine or ten, it was a matter of pride and honor among all of the children in the area to go out into the sea and prove ourselves, paddling out over the waves on our body boards.  A green flag on the lifeguard tower meant small surf.  Yellow flag meant medium size.  Red flag meant that the surf was big and potentially dangerous.

            Body boarding under red flag conditions was a source of major bragging rights.  I’ll never forget the first time I did it and survived.  I also remember the next time I tried, getting caught out all alone in a set of pounding waves twice as tall as I was, and subsequently rescued by the lifeguard.  I learned something about my boundaries that day.  I also learned that I could get in over my head and survive.  Even without the lifeguard’s help, I knew I would have found a way to make it back to the beach on my own.

So thanks again to Love a Happy Ending, and if anyone wants to read the rest of this post you can find it over there!

The Meaning of Life, or, Why I Write

I suppose it was one simple question that actually started it all.  I was a student at the University of California at San Diego when I signed up for a class in creative writing.  It counted toward my general education requirements and sounded like easy credit.  We would make up stories, type them out, and then sit around in class and discuss them.  What could be easier than that?  I did end up enjoying the class but didn’t think too much of it in broader terms until the end when I stopped by my instructor’s office to pick up my final project and find out my grade.

“Are you going to make a career out of fiction writing?” my instructor asked.

“What?” the question caught me completely off guard.

“Will you continue writing as a career, or is this it for you?”

Looking back now, I can see how that one question completely changed my life.  Maybe it would have been better for me if he’d simply never asked.  But he did, and it got me to thinking.  If this person, this creative writing instructor, thought that I had what it took to make it as a writer, then why shouldn’t I think so too?  It was a revelation.  I never ended up taking another creative writing course in my life, but from this one innocent comment the wheels in my head were set in motion.

Writing seemed to offer everything I wanted in a career.  There was independence from the normal dictates of society.  No nine-to-five, clock punching.  As a writer I would work on my own terms, when and where I wanted.  There was the respect afforded to successful writers.  After all, writers were among the people I’d always admired the most myself.  There was the potential to earn a good living.  Perhaps most importantly, there was the prospect of having an intellectual life, and thus the chance to wrest some greater meaning from my existence.

            The way that I saw it, certain professions really did allow one to change the world.  Good teachers could do so, by broadening the world view of their students one at a time.  Scientists could expand upon our understanding of the universe.  Journalists could expose corruption and strive toward keeping our political system honest.  Most jobs did not afford this opportunity to work toward the greater good in this larger sense.  The vast majority of people had jobs in which they could help their fellow man on a micro level, but their actions wouldn’t change anything much on a grander scale.  A dentist, for instance, might be very good at filling a tooth.  This ability would pay the bills quite well and afford respectability in society.  It would be of great service to the client, whose tooth needed filling, but it wouldn’t contribute anything at all toward the greater good.  It wouldn’t change society in any way.  The same could be said for shopkeepers, restaurateurs, bankers and plumbers.  Accountants, pilots and policemen.  All provided useful, necessary services.  None of them were likely to change the world.  But could a writer?  Few writers do, that much I would freely acknowledge, but the answer to the question of whether or not they can is a definite yes, they certainly can.

As the novelist Scott Turow pointed out in a New York Times op-ed, writing is one of the few professions singled out in the United States Constitution for special protection.  Copyright laws are so important, Turow wrote, because “a diverse literary culture, created by authors whose livelihoods, and thus independence, can’t be threatened, is essential to democracy.”

This idea that literature is essential to democracy matches my view that potential abuses of power can be held in check by a population that is cognizant and aware of those abuses.  It is why tyrannical governments work so hard to censor the press, oppress writers and manipulate artists.  Russia has one of the greatest literary traditions in history, with the likes of Tolstoy, Chekov and Dostoevsky among their literary giants.  These writers were all political to one degree or another, yet when I was growing up no novelists in the U.S.S.R. would dare to challenge the state.  If they tried, their works would never see the light of day and the writers themselves would be risking prison or worse.  The same held for the artists, who were relegated to producing re-creations of Lenin statues or paintings in the style of “Soviet-Realism,” glorifying the ideals of the working class.  When Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote about his days as a political prisoner in The Gulag Archipelago, he lived under constant fear of re-arrest.  The book itself was eventually smuggled to the West on a micro-film, where it was published in 1974.  It wasn’t legally available in Russia until the U.S.S.R. was on the brink of collapse fifteen years later.  This was the kind of writer I admired the most.  This was a writer slaying dragons with his pen and proving the maxim that it was indeed mightier than the sword.  

Of course most literary writing is so overtly political.  Many literary writers are concerned with more intimate issues, involving a closer look at human nature and our interactions with one another.  These writers are not examining the world on a macro level, but are looking at what makes us tick as individuals, our relationships, and the commonalties that we share as human beings.  One might consider James Joyce in this category, or perhaps William Faulkner or Virginia Woolf.  These writers find themselves concerned with the themes of alienation and familial tension.

When I compare a writer like Orwell with a writer like Joyce, I sometimes use an analogy relating to how different people are interested in different types of news.  The way I see it, there are really three types of hard news.  There is local news, national news and world news.  Some people are primarily interested in local news.  They can relate to it because it concerns issues in their daily lives that affect them directly.  Maybe the story has to do with the school where they send their children, or the mayor who they met at an event a few months earlier.  Other people are more interested in national news.  They pay close attention to national politics and the issues that connect and divide us as a nation.  Still others don’t care as much about local or national news, but are drawn to world news.  These are people who take a step further back and look at the bigger picture of what connects us all as humans.  These people tend to consider themselves citizens of the world more than just citizens of a nation or of a community.  I see Orwell as one of these types of writers.  It is why I relate to him.  I also consider myself a big picture kind of person.

By this analogy, Joyce, for all of his brilliance, was a local news kind of guy.  That doesn’t mean he wasn’t describing the greater human experience, because he certainly was, only from a much closer view.  Perhaps a better analogy is that of a simple watch.  Joyce has the watch open and is closely examining the gears and how they interact with each other.  Orwell is looking at the watch as a whole, and maybe even considering the concept of time itself.

One thing that connects these differing perspectives is that all novels must be personal at their core.  Orwell’s 1984 is not just about an authoritarian government run by a nameless entity.  It is about Winston Smith, a naïve everyman caught up in the government’s web of lies, deceit, and ultimately torture.  Orwell uses this prism to extrapolate larger social truths from the experiences of one man.  All literary writers do this in one way or another, using their characters to make broader points about humanity.  Unlike popular novelists, who are primarily trying to entertain, literary novelists have what they consider to be important insights to share.  It is sharing these insights that gives their lives meaning.

At the time that I started down this path myself, I only had a vague notion of the concept of finding meaning in life.  I knew that I wanted it, and I thought that writing might provide it, though my flirtations with the idea were mostly on a subconscious level.  What I did suspect was that most people find little or no meaning in their jobs at all.  Or at least I wouldn’t find meaning in the jobs that most people had.  I needed that prospect, however slight, of making some difference in the grand scheme of things.  The way I saw it, few jobs provided that opportunity.  An airline pilot might be able to find some personal meaning in safely transporting passengers from one location to another, but they were not likely to change the world.  I needed at least that sliver of a possibility that my work actually might.

Philosophers have long considered the concept of meaning in life and whether it is really even possible to achieve.  The general consensus among them is that, no, meaning is not really possible to achieve.  There is no meaning in life.  The conflict between man’s innate desire to find meaning and the impossibility of actually finding any is known as absurdism.  This school of thought posits that the universe itself is meaningless, thus there can be no way to find meaning on a human level.  This ideology hasn’t stopped mankind from constantly striving to find it.

Looking around at my fellow inhabitants of planet earth, I do wonder how many people actually search for meaning actively.  I suspect that the answer to this question is, relatively few.  I don’t think it is something most people consciously think about at all.  This isn’t to suggest that they aren’t still searching, though I suspect it is more often on a subconscious plane.  Most people, it seems to me, search for meaning through personal relationships, providing for their families, religion, acquiring material wealth, or in a host of other personal ways large and small.

For me, the moment I decided that I wanted to be a writer signified the beginning of my own lifelong search for meaning.  This, even though I tend to agree with the philosophers who claim that the universe is without it.  Whether it truly exists or not, we still must live our lives in the world in which we find ourselves, and a world without meaning is a cold, dark prospect indeed.

Some absurdist philosophers recognize the incompatibility of searching for meaning in a universe that has none, yet advocate that search nonetheless.  Albert Camus, for instance, claimed that the only way to approach this conundrum was to first fully embrace the concept of the absurd.  In other words, one must acknowledge that finding meaning is impossible.  Once this acknowledgement has been made, the person should continue in the search for meaning, though never losing sight of the fact that it is impossible to really find.  If this sounds a bit absurd, well, I suppose that is why the term itself is used to describe the problem.  Camus argues that once one has confronted the concept directly and rejected the prospect of objective meaning, a person can still create subjective meaning in their own life, which in turn can make their life worth living.

When I decided that I wanted to be a writer, I was a long way from confronting the concepts of absurdism.  All I knew was that I wanted a career that would provide some meaning, subjective or otherwise, and I thought that writing might be it.  If I could make my own small difference in the evolution of social understanding, then perhaps my life might be worthwhile.  I knew it was a tall order, but it seemed one worth aspiring to nonetheless.  I suspect that this is a goal shared by all literary novelists throughout the ages, whether they are more of the big picture, political type writers that I aspired to be or the more tightly focused authors like Woolf and Joyce.  A contemporary literary novelist that I would consider to be in this latter category, Jonathan Franzen, was asked by the New York Times what he considered to be the best thing about writing a book.  His answer?  “The meaning it temporarily lends to my existence.”

Perhaps that meaning really is only subjective, but it is undeniable that an author’s work can change the way people see themselves and alter their understanding of society at large.  In a universe devoid of meaning, maybe this doesn’t matter in the end, but that concept is unlikely to keep novelists from sharing whatever insights they may have.  Novelists with literary aspirations are ultimately trying to changing the world.  Anything less would leave them feeling as though their time on this planet was wasted.  It is through the pursuit of this goal that the novelist finds meaning.  I figure that at the very least this puts me in good company.

Budapest Critical Mass

Ah, the weather has finally warmed up here in Budapest, just in time for the very last Critical Mass!  This is an event designed to promote bicycles as a viable and enjoyable mode of transportation in the city, and for city leaders and the general public to value the creation of bike lanes and generally sharing the road.

The start at Jaszai Mari ter, looking north.

Back in 2009 I was a witness to the event, but this year I was able to take part!  The course wound south along the river, past the parliament, across the Petofi bridge and back up the other side before crossing back over the Chain bridge and ending in the city park (Varosliget).

The start, looking south.

Official estimates had it that there were 100,000 participants this year!  Apparently this was the last one to be held here in Budapest, so I'm glad I was able to participate.

Yours truly exiting the tunnel under Buda castle hill.

At the end, all of the cyclists gather to celebrate and lift their bikes up over their heads.

The finish.

Spring fever...

I thought winter was over already!  Apparently not.  Here in Budapest, we're in the midst of some late season snow.  Well, at least it is pretty, and it's good writing weather to boot...

Here are a few pics I took walking around today:

And a video from last night:

I know that spring really is just around the corner, so I'm trying to enjoy the snow while it lasts!  If only I had my snowboard with me...

Memoir Monday: Tahitian Blue

I'm still hard at work on my memoir, and making lots of revisions, but I figured I'd post another little snippet this week.  Today I'll take a look back at some time I spent surfing and writing on small, sparsely populated island in the middle of the Pacific:

            From the sea, Huahine was an emerald jewel rising abruptly from brilliant blue turquoise.  I arrived on the island by ferry, past a break in the barrier reef three-quarters of a mile off shore, where surfers caught giant barrels peeling perfectly over shallow coral.  The boat glided into a sheltered lagoon past sailboats at anchor and another small group of surfers paddling across the clear flat water.  Ahead of us lush foliage covered the island’s rounded peaks, said to resemble a woman lying on her back.  Thus the island’s name, which means “woman” in Tahitian.

            After a week at Club Med on Bora Bora, the rest of my family was headed home.  I was on my own.  There are a lot of things about being an itinerant writer that are difficult.  I’m always scraping by financially.  I’ve got no security.  My future is entirely uncertain.  But one of the great things is that if I’m given the opportunity to go to a place like Tahiti, I can just stay there if I want to.  As long as I can afford a hostel bed and dried pasta, with maybe a baguette or two.  I don’t have to schedule my one week off from some unfulfilling job and rush back home when it’s over.  In fact, staying in a place like this is exactly what I need, to experience the most I can from life.  These experiences are where art comes from.  I’d also heard from a friend back home what great surf could be found on this remote island in the middle of the Pacific.  That first sight of perfectly peeling barrels was encouraging indeed.

            The ferry docked at Fare, the largest town on the island, which wasn’t saying much.  A few houses, some cheap hotels and a market stretched along the quiet waterfront.  Where Bora Bora drew the upscale tourist hotels, Huahine seemed like the quiet Tahiti of old.  In fact, there was only one upscale resort on the whole island, and it was hidden away by itself on the other side.

            Coming down the gangplank, I shouldered my duffel and my surfboard bag and walked a few doors past the wharf to Chez Guynette, one of two hostels in the town.  It was a white house with red trim and a small patio, just across the street from the water.  I spoke with Guynette herself, who led me to a large room in back filled with bunks.  Half of the bunks were empty, but surfboards were scattered around the room.  Obviously this was surfer central.  I chose a bed, dropped off my bag and headed out with my board.  It was late afternoon by this point so I chose a smaller break, closer to shore, and paddled out on my own.  Two-foot waves peeled over a shallow reef with warm water and moist, balmy air.  Billowing white clouds rose above the island peeks.  This was paradise indeed.

            It wasn’t until the following morning that I decided to try the main break.  This was the one I’d seen from the ferry the previous day.  I took my board and walked a mile around the bay until I came to the closest point I could get to the reef.  From here it was so far away I could barely even see the white water.  It was impossible to tell how big the surf was, or if anybody else was even out.  I stretched my arms and legs and waded on into the tranquil lagoon to start the long paddle.

            I’d been told by now that the lagoon was the crater of an underwater volcano.  One person I’d spoken with claimed that the center was nearly 2000 feet deep.  As I paddled along I noticed that the water went from a turquoise-blue color in the shallows, to a darker blue in the depths, and finally almost black as the seafloor dropped off below me.  The paddle was so far that I would go for ten minute stretches and then stop to sit up on my board and rest my weary arms.  During the second of these breaks I twisted my body back and forth, rotating my arms one way and then the other.  After twenty minutes of paddling I was only half way there, one small speck, alone in the middle of this giant lagoon.  I took some deep breaths and then looked beneath me.  There, way down deep and directly below, I made out the familiar shape of a large shark, its tail casually pulsing back and forth.  It didn’t seem to be paying me any heed, but still it made me nervous.  Without knowing its depth I couldn’t properly gauge its size, but this appeared to be a fairly big shark indeed.  I quickly looked back up and scanned the surface.  I could paddle to shore or continue out to the reef.  I had a decision to make.  Twenty minutes either way.  If the shark was going to get me, there was nothing I could do about it.  I opted to keep on toward the surf, but that was the last of my rest breaks.

            When I finally made it to the reef, nearly exhausted, I found that there were five other local Tahitians already out.  As I approached the pack, they nodded to me and came over one at a time to shake my hand; a local tradition.  I’d worried about localism and how the natives might treat visitors.  Surfers the world over can be brutal to outsiders.  These guys seemed nice enough.  I paddled into deeper water to watch the lineup for a while and figure out how it worked.

            For the first few minutes, no sizable waves came through.  I rested my tired arms and waited.  Then I heard the locals start to hoot.  I looked outside and saw what looked like a one-foot wave coming in.  No big deal.  It was headed straight for me.  It was so small that I wouldn’t even have bothered to paddle for it, but the local boys spurred me on, hooting and hollering.  As the wave approached it started to grow and when it reached me it was two-feet high.  Ok, a little better, I thought.  Rideable at least.  As I paddled in it was four feet.  By the time I hopped to my feet, the wave had grown beneath me and I was standing inside a perfect head-high barrel looking out.  I was so shocked I stood up straight and the lip of the wave hit the top of my head, knocking me right off of my board.

            I was beginning to learn this break, the hard way.  What I quickly realized was that the outside of this reef dropped off straight into 200+ feet of water.  Any wave that was coming from the open sea hit this impediment and immediately jacked up into a perfect tube.  Over the next few days the surf increased in size to the point that my heart was in throat the whole time I was in the water.  It was terrifying to sit there, waiting for a huge set that might rear up at any moment and toss me backwards across the jagged reef.  Being caught inside here meant almost certain pain, yet the waves themselves were glorious.  The reef had a bend in it and as the waves broke they wrapped around it like an elbow.  You’d be inside a tube looking out at a wall of water straight in front of you, certain it would mean certain death, but then instead of closing out, the wave would wrap around this elbow and the tube would simply jack up over you, even bigger than before.  Put your foot on the gas pedal and you’d go shooting out the wide open end.  Once you’d popped out, you could drag your fingers in the wave to slot yourself back inside and then come shooting out all over again.  A terrifying wave on the one hand, but the most perfect surf I’ve ever had.

Memoir Monday: Swimming with the Fishes

It's that time of the week again!  Instead of continuing with chapters from my forthcoming memoir chronologically, I've decided this week to just throw up a little anecdote from time I spent living on a friend's sailboat on the island of Oahu in Hawaii.  So without further ado, here we go!

Bill was reserved and stoic on the outside.  His wacky, goofball sense of humor only came out once you knew him. Bill worked as a submarine captain for a company that took tourists diving to artificial reefs off the coast.  The subs were about forty feet long and held 60 tourists, who peered out of giant bubble portholes at sunken airplanes and shipwrecks strategically arranged on the seafloor.

“You should come out and dive the main wreck one day and I’ll cruise by in the sub,” Bill told me.  “You can wave to all of the tourists and make their day.”

“Right,” I said.  “That wreck is what, a mile out to sea and 100 feet deep?”

“You can do it,” said Bill.  “You can borrow my gear and go out in my zodiac.”

“By myself?” I said.

“Sure,” answered Bill.

Now I had been diving for a long time.  One of the first things they teach you in an open water certification class is that you should always dive with a buddy.  Diving by yourself is dangerous.  Diving by yourself over mile out to sea in 100 feet of water is foolhardy.  It was especially foolhardy to do it in a place I had never been.  Let alone that I had never even dove that deep before in my life.

“It’s easy,” Bill continued.  “We attach a buoy to the main wreck.  Just tie up the dinghy to the buoy and follow the line down.”

“How do I find the buoy?” I asked.

“You’ll see our support boat out there nearby.  The buoy will be about 100 yards away.”

I thought this over.  It was risky and reckless.  It also sounded like a whole lot of fun.  I was in.  On my next day off, Bill was out with the sub already when I woke up.  After breakfast I gathered together his dive gear and loaded the dinghy.  I climbed in and headed out from Waikiki’s Ala Wai Yacht Harbor, passing surfers riding the famous Ala Moana Bowl as I steered through the channel.  I made my way past the breakers and spotted the small outline of the support boat a mile down the coast.  I pointed the dinghy’s nose at the tug and revved up the throttle.

As I bounced over undulating swells, alone on the open sea, a pod of dolphins joined me, skipping along across my bow.  A mother seemed to teach her calf how to ride a wake and I saw the little guy’s tail as he jumped clear out of the water.  I felt like I was living an episode of the old TV show Flipper.

When I got to the tug, I cut back the throttle and the dolphins darted off below me.  I tied up and climbed aboard the support ship, where Bill was the only one aboard.  He and another skipper took turns on the sub, and this was Bill’s turn up top.  They communicated over a sonar intercom.  Sound waves traveled through the water from the sub to a microphone on the tug and came out of speakers in the pilot house.  From below us we heard the squeaks and chirps of the dolphins swimming around underneath the boat.

Bill pointed out the buoy 100 yards away.  From this buoy, a line led down to the bridge of the sunken wreck.  It was now 11 a.m.  Bill would be taking the next group of tourists past the wreck at 11:30. 

Everything seemed fairly straightforward.  According to my dive calculator, at that depth I could only stay down for about 20 minutes, so I had to time it just right.  I also had to take a 2-3 minute decompression stop on the way up.  To err on the side of caution, I knew I shouldn’t stay at depth more than about 15 minutes.

I climbed back into the dinghy and zipped over to the buoy, tied the boat off, and got into my gear.  By the time I flipped over the side and into the water I had a little less than ten minutes until submarine ETA.  I grabbed hold of the buoy line and slowly sank toward the dark outline of the shipwreck beneath me.

The wreck was a small cargo ship, or perhaps fishing vessel, about 100 feet long.  I landed on the flying bridge like an astronaut landing on the moon.  I stood for a moment to survey the ship beneath me, imagining the captain in this spot on better days.  I swam down to the deck and around to the side of the hull.  Large sections were cut out to allow divers access, and I swam through into the interior.  Brightly colored fish darted about in all directions.  I made my way through various cabins, around corroded bulkheads and into a large hold.  I swam out the other side and followed the outline of the ship, constantly keeping an eye on my dive calculator.

By the time 11:30 came around, I had five minutes of dive time left.  Still no sight of the sub.  I ducked back into the wreck for some more exploring.  When I came back out it was 11:35.  Time for me to go back up.  But I had to see the sub.  Where was Bill?  I’d give it a few minutes more.  11:36.  11:37.  I really had to leave.  I looked around 360 degrees and saw no sub.  Just as I was about to head for the surface, I heard the faint hum of electric motors.  I gazed into the depths trying to see where the noise was coming from.  Suddenly, the image of the 40-foot white sub appeared before me, gliding out of the gloom like a scene straight out of a James Bond movie.  The closer it came, the more defined it was. 

By the time the sub was 30 feet away, I could see a big clear Plexiglas bubble on the front.  Inside sat Bill in his captain’s uniform with a joystick in one hand.  He raised his other hand and gave me a wave.  I waved back and watched as he maneuvered the sub straight past me.  Through the rows of over-sized bubble windows, I saw a crowd of excited Japanese tourists pointing, shouting and jumping around.  All of them rushed to the starboard side and waved, pressing themselves against the glass.  Out came the cameras and the flashes started popping.  I stayed where I was, waving the length of the sub, making sure everyone got their money’s worth.  Then I swam back to the bridge, grabbed hold of the buoy line and ascended to a depth of 20 feet.

After a few minutes more I surfaced, climbed back into the dinghy and took off my gear.  It was a beautiful day, with the sea softly rising and falling beneath me.  Up above, stunning white clouds hovered in the sky.  I relaxed for a few moments, exultant to be alive, and then started up the engine and zipped on in toward the island.