"A surf break can be a Walden Pond," writes Daniel Duane, "a material synecdoche of all one finds mysterious and delightful about the world." Unfortunately, there is little of the mysterious or delightful in Duane's chronicle of Northern California surf culture. Finding himself 27 and unemployed, the author takes a year off to go surfing. He orders a custom board, finds an out-of-the-way break he can call his own and paddles out. Caught Inside begins with promising descriptions of the insiderish nature of surfing, including this dead-accurate reading of surf magazine photo captions: "Where climbing, skiing. . . and hite-water magazines identify every place in every photograph, with detailed travel and camping information, surfing magazines do their level best to disguise them: Delighted you bought the mag, but please, don't ever come here." The author leavens his seasonal diary with interesting histories of surfing, shark attacks and odd characters like Mickey "Da Cat" Dora, an early Malibu surf icon.
Too soon, however, the book bogs down in Duane's overwritten descriptions of surf spots, and by the end the reader feels trapped in a home slide show in which the host insists on describing every otter, bird, kelp bed and sunset he encountered atop his fiberglass float. Duane's enchantment with the sport is obvious, but his narrative doesn't so much celebrate surfing as inadvertently expose it. "Da Cat" turns out to be an ugly character, the world's first surf Nazi. Duane's friend Vince is so scared of getting assaulted by locals that he's afraid to speak above a whisper. A supposedly cool surf buddy spits on the windshield of two visiting surf enthusiasts because he thinks they're posers. Other friends cheat the same visitors out of a $1500 van. By the time the book ends, the surfing life seems more distasteful than romantic. Sometimes a surf break's a synecdoche, and sometimes it's just a holding pond for a jerkwater navy. -- Salon
Duane (Lighting Out, 1994) is a surf hound, doubtless, but he explores a whole lot more than great green rooms of tubular water in this testament to an obsession.
The narrative starts with Duane drowning, nearly, pounded by the waters of the Point, his chosen venue, a slice of the Pacific Ocean off Monterey Bay. Neither new to surfing nor a veteran, Duane wanted to spend an intimate year with the waves, to feel their soothing, healing effects and astounding violence, to live the surfer's life. But sliding down the water's face is only part of the process; he wanted the whole zeitgeist, and he delivers it with easy precision. The technicalities are handled with aplomb: how to craft a board, from the old 18-foot Hawaiian prototypes to today's 7-foot shredding marvels; how to interpret the color of the water, the vectors of wind and swell. He conveys a physicist's appreciation of wave forms—frequencies and amplitudes and periods, energy as measured by joules per second. He is an appreciative audience for the natural world during walks to the beach, seeing and describing mustard and hemlock, cougar and bird. On the water, he explains traffic rules and pecking orders (more than once falling foul of the strictures); up and running he dips a "finger in the water just to believe it's happening, and feel the light joy of effortless, combustion-free speed"; surrounded by a pipe of water, he "physically penetrates the heart of the ocean's energy," then gets slammed onto the deck once again. Duane willingly takes his knocks. Utterly intriguing are the psycho-probings he assays with his surfing friends into the fanaticism of surfers, how it reflects their past, brackets their love lives, defines their expectations.
Duane wrestles poetry from the surf's chaos—wild and vital, supple and elegant.
