Which is a drag because most of the surfers I know read a lot-it gives us something to do while waiting for waves instead of scanning weather blogs and buoy reports. I determined to read everything I could get my hands on about surfing and surf culture.īut here’s the problem, when it comes to reading about surfing, there’s not much swell. When I’d first devoured Tapping the Source, I thought, “This is the kind of life I want to live.” Not with the murder and mayhem, of course, but close to the ocean and the apparent magic of surfing. Or maybe surfing a good wave can give you the feeling that life makes sense, at least for those few fleeting seconds. If there’s any order in the universe, maybe it lines up with the passion surfers find paddling out-Kem Nunn is a surfer. Perhaps there are times when the marbles ricochet with purpose. My surf noir literary hero endorsed the novel I wrote after being inspired to surf after reading Tapping the Source. To bring that surfing synchronicity full-circle, Kem Nunn blurbed Pirata. We now live just up the road from Swami’s. Our one criterion for house hunting was that our new digs be close to a serious surf break. When it was time to put our daughter in a US high school, we moved back up from Mexico to Southern California. Surfing determines where we live-and it was a big part of the reason I quit the 24-7 madness of Hollywood. I’m down here on a surf safari with my twelve-year old son. I would not have written a novel about an expat hiding out and surfing South of the Border and I certainly wouldn’t be writing an article about “ surf noir,” from Costa Rica no less.
If it weren’t for Kem Nunn I wouldn’t be a surfer.
Kem Nunn is probably the closest thing “ Surf Noir” literature has to a founding father, and the irony that I’m writing this after surfing the morning session at Playa Negra is not lost on me. Without much rhyme or reason beyond crazy rebounds and the basic physics of cause and effect.īut I have to confess that thirty years ago I had become consumed with surfing and its culture after reading Kem Nunn’s brilliant Tapping the Source-a life-changing novel about a desert town teenager who hitchhikes to Huntington Beach (Surf City, USA) to find his missing sister, only to get caught up in the drug-edgy SoCal surf culture. I think life happens in the way it happens like marbles might spill out of a bag across a cement floor. I’m not much on providence-the idea that there’s some kind of master plan to the cosmos seems optimistic to me.
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