Caught Inside: A Surfer's Year on the California Coast

by Daniel Duane

Overview

A wondrous, uproarious, and surprisingly informative account of a year spend surfing, Caught Inside marks the arrival of an exuberant new voice of the outdoors.

This remarkable narrative of Daniel Duane's life on the water is enhanced by good-humored explanations of the physics of wave dynamics, the intricate art of surfboard design, and lyrical, sharp-eyed descriptions of the flora and fauna of the Pacific wilderness. From Captain Cook and Mark Twain to Robinson Jeffers and Jack London, from portraits of famous (and infamous) surfers to an analysis of Gidget's perverse significance, Duane expertly uncovers the myths and symbols bound up in one of our most vibrant and recognizably American subjects.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780865475090
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	04/10/1997
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Daniel Duane was born in 1967 and is the author of Looking for Mo and Lighting Out: A Vision of California and the Mountains. He lives and surfs in Santa Cruz, California.

Editorial Reviews

Wonderful . . . [Duane is] an ontologist of dudedom, Henry David Thoreau doing aerials on a fiberglass board.” —Will Blythe, Esquire

“Enthralling. Duane has an honest take on surf culture, seeing both the romance and the irony . . . Best of all are his evocative, compelling observations about nature: fresh and thrilling descriptions of scenery and life on the coast.” —David Sheff, Los Angeles Times

From the Publisher

"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

Bruce Barcott