Southern Wahine

credit: Andy Anderson

I should probably tell you up front that I’m not a surfer. I grew up in a small furniture town two-hundred miles inland from the humble swells at Wrightsville Beach, North Carolina. Except for the occasional Gidget movie, I never even saw a surfer. When my garage band performed Dick Dale’s "Pipeline," I thought he meant an actual oil pipeline, not the Banzai pipeline on Oahu’s North Shore. And when I heard that giggly falsetto kick off the Surfaris’ "Wipeout," I never guessed the dude had been knocked silly by falling off his longboard. I don’t pretend to understand the dynamics of strength, dexterity, and, above all, balance, necessary to pull off a decent ride, and the lingo doesn’t really help to explain it. Drilled, creamed, smashed, worked, hammered, pounded, bombed, beat down, ragdolled, maytagged, and spin cycled — it’s pretty clear what all of that means. Same with stoked, amped, gnarly, and cool. But the more subtle terms, like barrel and spit, while making perfect sense on paper — a wave that curls around you, forming a hollow tunnel, and the spray it emits as it closes — don’t tell me why barrels are scarier than tubes, or how I’d respond if a barrel spit in my eye. I’d have to be out there.

Perhaps the closest I’m likely to come to grasping the physicality of surfing, and the mindset that comes with it, has already come and gone in my life. Two decades ago I spent a winter in Aspen and got heavy into downhill skiing, a sport that provokes a common blend of human fears — velocity, isolation, altitude, and lack of control. The difference, I’m guessing, is how the athlete deals with the medium itself. The frozen medium forces the downhill skier, for all of his moment-to-moment adjustments, into a proactive stance. He chooses his run and off he goes. Surfing, by contrast, is a brief, fluid dance with a one-time partner. The wave comes, the surfer intuits the forces at work, and dances on water to make them visible.

Equipped with these and other naïve notions, I went searching for the Southern wahine (rhymes with bikini) on Folly Beach, eight miles south of Charleston. Wahine is Hawaiian for “woman,” and Cali for “female surfer.” More recently, and especially here in the South, wahine has come to mean not just any surfer, but an accomplished surfer — a real woman with formidable skills. I drove through sporadic downpours across James Island, into Folly and right up to the pier, where a few of the local wahine had agreed to meet with me. But the pier was deserted except for a couple of fishermen who redirected me to the Washout, a surfer habitat just two miles up the coast. I slipped on my shades — the sun had poked through — and drove north, through a bohemian subculture of modest but artsy homes, sheltered by an impossibly dense canopy of live oaks and palmettos, gradually giving way to newer homes, alternating mauves, aquas, and pinks, pretty as after-dinner mints, thinning as the island thinned, until only a long line of parked cars separated me from the beach. By the time I found an empty space it was raining again, and before I got my shoes off, more sun. Back home the farmers would say that the day didn’t know what it wanted to do.