Most of us think of waves in fairly simple terms. When they’re small, they roll in. When they’re large, they crash. And when they’re huge, they just might flood the bike path that runs along Lake Shore Drive.
He carefully mines his surfing exploits for broader, hard-won insights on his childhood, his most intense friendships and romances, his political education, his career. He’s always attuned to his surroundings, and his reflections are often tinged with self-effacing wit. Calling his younger self to account for dodging adult responsibility and flirting with death, he’s unsparing but not unforgiving. One day in 1971, a college dropout with a head full of LSD, he paddles out on Maui’s Honolua Bay. “I felt some rapture of the deep,” he writes. “Then the lights went out.”
By William Finnegan
