For surfing journalist, a life of thrills and spills

For a surfer, divining the behavior of waves can be like a lifetime lab project, one whose notes and observations are inscribed in the sinews.

In his vivid and propulsive memoir “Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life,” William Finnegan notes how that kind of hard-earned intuition about the ocean’s rhythms is based in part on “innumerable subcortical perceptions too subtle and fleeting to express.”

But it’s also based on less esoteric factors, and any surfer who’s been at it awhile will recognize Finnegan’s description of one of them:

“You watch someone paddle over the top of a swell and you try to assess, in the last instant before he disappears, what he sees outside.”

(And if his jaw drops and his muscles tense as if he’s just been tased, it’s probably time to start paddling like hell.)... [Read More]