Strange Times in Babylon

Mike Dwyer Words and Photos by Mike Dwyer 1/1/2021

It’s August 1st, and I’m clawing my way into a 4/3. In San Diego. It’s grouchy and resistant, like a hibernating bear awakened too early, inflexible as I demand it contort its stiff joints into shape months before it should be pulled out of storage. At the time of year when we should be riding squat, extra-floaty grovellers or longboards in board shorts, we’re wearing wetsuits with the kind of rubber you’d need in the dead of winter.

What would be the oddest part of the summer most years was merely a footnote in a litany of catastrophes, chaos, and unexpected items from left field last year. 2020 turned our entire world upside down, and surfers were certainly not exempt from it all. From beach closures, red tide in southern California, and smoky, orange-hued sessions under fire-lit skies, the surf community dealt with last year’s rage in the same chaotic, disjointed, and seemingly hopeless manner as every other unsuspecting community on the planet.

We all looked for some semblance of normal last year, as the continued shitstorm swirled around us. In the water or on the sand, we constantly tried to find out which way is up, to grab our leashes and pull ourselves back to the surface, as if just getting one breath in would have banished everything back to the bottom of the ocean. In the midst of all of this, it’s the stories our community tells that can reach down and pull us back up.

Summer righted itself and got hot in a hurry. We waited expectantly, floating on longboards in small waves, just itching for those crisp, clear, offshore days with combo swell peaks, but they seemed delayed. Instead of the north Pacific waking up to provide groomed A framed peaks, we got continued dribbles of southern hemisphere swell. Without Santa Ana’s blowing, we got fog, thick, choking the coast on more than a few consecutive mornings. On more than a few days, I couldn’t see the shoreline from the parking lot, nor the lineup from the shoreline. After standing indecisively on the shore in south Mission Beach, I paddled out into an empty, gray lineup. Alone in the fog, wondering what was below me, I’m suddenly surrounded by a field of dozens of surfers scattered among the peaks in the mist, completely invisible to anyone still on the shore. Surfers took off down the line and disappeared as they passed others paddling out, separated from each other by the thick gray fog, but bound together by the shitshow year that we all experienced in a different way.

Stories are the bedrock of our ragtag group of stoners, jocks, and weekend warriors, from the “you shoulda been here yesterday”s to the tall tales of wave heights that stretch towards the skies only in our minds. We watch videos and drool over magazines, dreaming of clipping out the pro-surfers riding perfect waves and replacing them with ourselves. We idolize the early, wild days of surfing, gobbling up those tales repeatedly and often, wishing for a world when lineups were emptier and the surf beyond any given coastal curve was undiscovered. There aren’t many surf stories that prepared us for the challenges and scenarios that 2020 threw at us.

It was a broken board kind of year for a lot of people.

Winter arrived, on schedule, as the temperatures dropped and the wave heights stood up and the 4/3 came back out at a more appropriate time of year. But the backdrop of all of this, especially in southern California, was a predictable culmination of world events. Crowded hospitals blanketed the news, and for many of us, staring at grim numbers became as frequent a part of our routine as checking wave heights. After more than nine months of questions, we weren’t really any closer to having answers about where the hell we were headed.

Last year saw the closing of a storytelling fixture in the surf world, as Surfer ceased its operations in the fall, a victim of continued cost-cutting and ever-shrinking margins in print media. But there’s that old adage about closed doors and open windows, and we can look at this as an opportunity for the surf community to decide that it’s time to tell different stories. Something different than the surf industry’s preferred poster-boys-and-girls in perfect waves in far off tropical paradises. Stories of the folks who have to grind out a regular day-to-day life just to get the chance to surf. Stories of the people who have shaped our local surf communities, people we share waves with daily but maybe don’t know as well as we should. Stories of people who have had to fight just for a chance to float in the line-ups next to us.

One wave, two stories: an unknown surfer slides his way into a left-hand barrel while his compatriot inside catches the white water in with a snapped board.

When I started working on Strangely Infectious in 2016, what I wanted to do was build a place to tell better digital surf stories, a website that didn’t look like every other cookie-cutter surf magazine website. There were several false starts and at least one complete rebuild, and it’s still a work in progress. It took the events of last year, but I’ve finally figured out that it’s not just how the stories look that I want to be different. It’s what stories are told, and, hopefully, who’s telling them. And even if it never ends up being more than a glorified journal of my own over-hyped surf adventures and rambling, it hopefully will give other surfers who are looking for something different the idea to tell their own stories the way they want them.