Surfing As Religion

Out of our experience in Puerto Escondido, I have been contemplating surfer culture. The town of PE is full of young people and not-so-young-people, all of whom have put their lives on hold to find the perfect wave. They come from all over the world.

We ate breakfast with an Irish bloke, Patrick (no joke…his name was Patrick) about 31-years-old, who had been surfing for over ten years. When he heard we were from California, he asked me if I knew about San Clemente Beach. I do. When I was a girl, my family spent a week camping at San Clemente every summer for years. He told us that he learned to surf at that beach and that the 5 weeks he spent there were the happiest of his life.

Since then, he has found odd jobs to sustain himself and dipped into his savings a little. He surfed for a year in Brazil, learned Portuguese, hung out with Argentine surfers who, when they got drunk, waxed on and on about Puerto Escondido and Zicatella Beach. Finally, he moved himself to surfer heaven and has been in PE for the past three years. Patrick is no bum...He has a college degree and a savings account and teaches English at the local college in Puerto Escondido. He has a family in Ireland that loves him and a new baby nephew of whom he is the proud godfather. Yet, here he is in Puerto Escondido, surfing.

I think I understand surfing as “religion” for the first time. There is a zen to the sport, being at one with nature, connecting with powerful forces, not conquering, but getting high from the experience, from the ride. Plenty of surfers also get hurt and die in the waters of Puerto Escondido. Patrick had experienced a bad wipe out three months earlier and was just coming around to feel comfortable again on the board.

It’s easy to be jealous or maybe critical of surfers, but I’ve given myself over to the metaphor. I do admire the devotion, the commitment, the costs that are joyfully incurred, the risks that are taken every day…all for the spiritual experience that is surfing. When I look at Patrick in that way, I am humbled in comparison, by my modest spiritual passion.