WAVECRUSHERS, a surfer story

If you can surf a sick swell, you can surf anything.

The following are notes and concept fragments for the upcoming novel and film entitled WAVECRUSHERS, an engrossing epic saga about surfers, beaches, community, fellowship, philosophy, and life.

Surfers are upset that a fellow surfer won’t share the waves, is sort of a wavehog. Sort of a sneaky surf snake. He surfs while wearing a mask, so none know his identity.

“Sweet fuckin swell, bro. You took that sickass wave with a gnarly ass swoop. Saw you tailslide that barrel all the way down the line. Hands in the air.”

Steamer “Joe” Blossom blows on his post-surf coffee to watch the ripples made by his breath, which resemble waves, much like the sick swell he surfs upon most of the day. He dreams of grinding and spraying a bitching killer wave or many smaller consecutive waves like those made by a wave machine or a boat or a relentless tsunami. This day and every other day is Steamer’s day. Sun in the sky and adrenaline in the sand. The social lives of surfers are interesting. Elaborate.

Most surfers are of course best friends or arch rivals. But our hero, presently unnamed but not untanned, surprises most of the city, or at least most of the surfing community in his beachfront village that calls itself a city, by befriending a boy who is not a very good surfer at all, named Ink. Ink is an awful surfer. He takes surfing classes at the local shop and can’t learn how to describe waves with equations, or it might be he cannot perform well on a board (chalk board or surf board). One of these is his problem, both are serious. Miserable child boy, but the hero surfer befriends him and skies are sunny.

Surf stories are of course closer than anything else to medieval Icelandic heroic sagas. Unending and universal. Mythic legendary sagas are the backbone of surfing lore, and most characters one meets in a swarf (surf club) will resemble a hero or a king or an adventurer or most commonly a god. Tales told of the waves are comparable to all Olde Tales. Two swarfbabes, babes of the swarf, named Gel and Myriad, are the glue that holds the surf club together.

It is impossible to achieve what I have achieved. Soaring with the eagles is child's play in the shadow of my reign. 

A man named either Dane the Snake or Jack the Snake or Stuart the Snake has arrived in town. Sun is high and waves crash loud on the shore. A normal day. Boys are splashing around in the water, it is likely they are either surfing or up to no good. It is not clear, not relevant. Dane/Jack/Stuart appears to be the wavehog, the sneaky surf snake we encountered at the beginning of the story. Unmasked, he strikes the town folk as handsome if a bit rude and egotistical.

A devilish child known only as Corduroy, because of his love for corduroy waves, is asking a group of people to watch his surf board for him. He is not part of the surf club (swarf), so he has no guarantee of board watch. The boy is known for losing his boards and stealing boards from others. He is a great surfer, but is not liked by many. He is also a homeless orphan who, as a character, is a very sour portrayal of the parentless and the homeless.

Poor Ink, the bad child surfer we met earlier, has to do a PowerPoint presentation about wavetypes for his surfing class. Beach break, point break, reef break waves, he has real trouble understanding the differences. Will the hero be able to help him? Probably.

Loner girl teachers herself to surf while others go on with their lives around her. Mostly a background character, becomes masterful. Challenges hero? Maybe.

A reality show about surfing and surfers and beach life, tentatively titled From Whence The Salt Came, has just finished shooting locally. The town watches the crew and cast pack up and leave, and now what? No matter, the town will always have their surfers and their rich surfer culture. This place was built on principles invaluable to surfer life.

I was not prepared for the chaos. Never before had acceptance felt so arbitrary. This is the sea. It does not accept anything without violence. 

There are times the winds are nothing and there are no surfable waves for miles, for as far as the eye can see. A single poet in the town writes often on this topic. His poems decorate the walls of the hippest joints in town, which is a remarkable feat, considering the high caliber hipness of the town in general.

One of the politest surfers in town is inexperienced because he is so polite he lets other surfers take his waves, even surfers half his size and half his age. His name is Ward. One day he will get a wave. We follow his life only for a few pages, and a few minutes of screen time, before nearly forgetting him.

It is important that authentic surfer slang is used heavily in the story to appeal to and gain the trust of serious surfers. This tale is for them.

A local man who starred in the reality show From Whence the Salt Came has become the focus of a new documentary about surfing and surf culture, and he gives us, the readers and the viewers, a lay of the land, a tour of everything. He is named Kyndryk “Sandstorm” Watersunn. It is through his eyes that we will see much of the beautiful coastal town and experience its rich sunculture, for he is a musician and a lover and a follower of life’s pleasures.

A group of French of Hawaiian or Australian wave physicists in collaboration with geophysicists have determined a massive wave is on its way to decimate the town. What will happen? Who will earn the most respect taking that wave?

All habitats were engulfed by the ocean's tongue. 

There is a crew of kiteboarders who have appeared on the waves lately, taking up the sea with their boats and loud engines and invasive sport. Surfers hate them, naturally. There is excessive strife.

Kiteboarders represent the wrong things, live for the wrong things, the wrong values. They call that a sport, more like a joke on waves. One wet joke. Rivalry for the waves between kiteboarders and surfers is tremendous, swelling much like the big bad swelling waves that crash against the shore. Loyalties are put to the test. Skills are put through the gauntlet. Ultimate sacrifices will bee made. Surfs up, dude.

As if bad blood between surfers and kiteboarders is not bad enough, a gang of windsurfers have shown up and thrown things into utter chaos, total war, absolute fucking mayhem. It seems the reality show has made this town a bit of a hot spot, in sharp contrast to its once under-the-radar status. Windsurfers have an even more intolerable philosophy than kiteboarders, as the surfers soon discover. Things cannot get any worse.

Or can they? Wait til Steamer “Joe” Blossom and Dane/Jack/Stuart the Snake meet. And Corduroy. And the mysterious hero surfer. What a feud! Madness on the wave.

There are doctors and police and grocery store clerks in this town like in every town, but almost everyone is also a surfer. Remarkably, some of the best surfers are cops and there is a low rate of cop on surfer violence in this community.

In a culture like this there are bound to be fights. Teenage surfers in particular are known for their quick fists and beachy tempers. One group of boys calling themselves the Beach Boys have been picking fights with another group of boys who call themselves the Board Boys. There is bad blood in the sand when the days get hot and the hearts get hotter. The white foam of the sea is sometimes dyed red with blood from the lips and noses of brawling boys tumbling in the surf. Parents beaching often shield their children’s eyes when this happens, or leave the beach altogether. One time, a fight was broken up between these boys, not by the adults, not by the off duty cops catching a wave, but by the enormous corpse of a beached whale that killed fifteen of the twenty boys involved. This occurred during the filming of the above-mentioned surfing documentary, and was caught on tape. When 911 was called, all the paramedics were already surfing, so they were nearby. It didn’t matter. Dead is dead.

When she calls my name, I am nowhere to be found. I am water. 

There are about a hundred ways to surf and a hundred moves to do on a surfboard. Some old man in town is known as the best surfboard maker in the world, so the rumor goes. Zara Shifty Feet wants to put this rumor to the test. But how? She is a surf instructor but also a risk taker. Brown hair tinged blond with lemon juice. Dane/Jack/Stuart the Snake glistens in the sunlight, and Zara Shifty Feet, after obtaining the finest surfboard from the old man board maker and taking to the waves, is blinded by the sunlight coming from The Snake’s oiled chest. She loses control of the board and the wave, and crashes into a windsurfer, immediately elevating hostilities between the conflicting tribes.

Now the surfers and windsurfers are feuding hard, and it seems the kiteboarders will be free to dominate the waves. The documentary film crew has noticed this and is exploiting it for their movie.

A local man makes a lot of money working in his garage making realistic computer simulations of surfing clips, used for instructional videos. Another man is a folk legend responsible for most of the local surfer slang thrown around by the boys and girls. Both of these gentlemen have abandoned their interest in surfing to build sand castles on the beach (their decisions were independent of one another, but simultaneous, and with identical zest, resulting in them competing for sand castle supremacy on the beach front.) The surfing community is up in arms about two of their long time icons abandoning them. As the sun sets, and the men build their sand castles, the beach is overrun by a mob of surfers picketing this behavior. “Beaches are for providing a stable launch point for surfing, nothing more!” the surfers chant in unison. What a mess!

Many surfer dudes and dudettes sit around discovering their spirit animals, and our unnamed hero has discovered he is 100% wolfblood. Through a tasteful montage we see the hero transform into a wolf to teach his young apprentice Ink all about waves and math and surfing. Ink goes on to perform well in his surf class, after self discovery and perseverance.

As kiteboarders seem to be taking over the surf, and surfers and windsurfers feud like rival gangs in prison, a lone masked man takes to the waves. A snake. The Wave Thief hated by all. But it seems he is stealing the waves from the kiteboarders, public enemy number one. At the same time, our young boy Ink has finished his classes and is sent to the ocean to perform his final exam. The unnamed hero watches from a distance, behind the carcass of the beached whale.

Why is dry land hell? Because it does not bend with you, move with you, flow with you. I am a child of the sea, and never will I be a slave to the still earth. 

Various character arcs and story arcs will come to a close around this time, but many will be left open, unfinished. Steamer “Joe” Blossom has learned something tragic about himself that remains mostly a mystery to viewers or readers, but it will prevent him from surfing for the next few weeks. Zara Shifty Feet, deeply injured in her collision with a windsurfer (physically, but also emotionally, after increasing the conflict between tribes and causing her tribe to lose vital wavetime). Corduroy has lost every surfboard he has come in possession of, and mourns his un-parented life. He loses his passion for surfing as he grows to accept of his lot, and he finds work in a child labor camp so he is able to eat.

Ink approaches the ocean. The masked wavehog glides effortlessly over the waves, causing kiteboarders and the boatmen who drive them to quickly alter their courses, often times resulting in boat crashes and even mid-air collisions between kiteboarders. It is chaos, and Ink sees it all. This is what surfing is all about. Ink, this is your final test.

In the distance a great wave is seen. This is The One. The wave the French or Hawaiian or Australian physicists warned us about.

As the wave descends upon the beach, Ward, our over-polite and almost forgotten local, emerges from a nearby surf shop and decides he is finally going to take what belongs to him: a single wave. He approaches the ocean.

The masked surfer who is causing a problem for the kiteboarders has been unmasked by a stray flying piece of propeller from a boat’s motor. He is revealed to of course be Dane/Jack/Stuart the Snake, and no one is surprised. He glistens in the sun.

Ink and Ward arrive at the ocean at the same time. They do not know each other, but both of their times have come. They run into the ocean just as the monstrous tidal wave has reached its critical height. It is only a hundred yards from shore. The kiteboarders have been wiped out, The Snake has disappeared among the waves, and Ink and Ward mount their boards and attack the oncoming disaster. Gaping-jawed onlookers point from the shore, and our nameless hero smirks behind the dead whale.

Ink and Ward climb higher into the wave. Surprising things happen, and emotions are deeply felt. There is an abundance of talent in the ocean right now.

There is nothing to fear in the waves, because nothing is welcome in them. Not even fear. 

Things will draw to a close soon enough.