This is Santiago.

As I’ll be moving to Chile next year, I’m fascinated to learn that some believe surfing got its official start just north, in Peru, despite the sport’s long-held Polynesian origins. As Michael Scott Moore writes in Sweetness and Blood, “Evidence of Peruvian surf boats now called caballitos goes back some three thousand years” (237). These reed canoes were shaped with an upward sloping front end, just like the nose of a surfboard, in order to clear the onslaught of a coming wave. Peruvian fisherman could even stand up on these and use an oar to steer, much like SUPing today. The defining difference seems to lie between whether or not the caballitos were used recreationally or just commercially for fishing or transporting goods in the anchovy and sardine-rich waters off an otherwise sparse, hostile coastline (Warshaw 19). Hawaii, it seems, has the monopoly on the sport’s recreational roots. The revision does not necessarily diminish the significance of the sport’s influence by and evolution alongside Hawaiian culture, for it was in Hawaii that it become “a universal recreation practiced by men as well as women, peasants as well as kings” (Moore 5).

In The History of Surfing, Matt Warshaw shares an anecdote from his days at Surfer in the late ’80s and early ’90s, over two decades before Moore wrote on the subject. A contributing writer from Lima, Felipe Pomar, came into the office to tell the editors all about the caballito and propose to revise the history of the sport with an exposé on wave-riders in ancient Peru. In April 1988, “Surfing in 1,000 B.C.” hit the stands and receded without, well, making many waves of its own. Warshaw credits the subdued reception to a protective reflex on the part of the surfing community. He asserts: “Good luck trying to sell the idea that reed-boat-straddling Peruvians trolling for anchovy off the grim brown coast of Peru were the real first wave-riders. ‘Ours has always been a culture of storytellers, not historians,’ a surf journalist wrote in 2005. In other words, surfers themselves prefer to shape, design, and choose their collective past. And when it comes down to Hawaii or Peru, the tropics or the desert, the Sport of Kings or the Sport of Fisherman—well, that’s hardly a choice at all” (22).

The last century alone is arguably the most influential of the sport’s history, with its spread across nations and genders. For instance, Moore makes off-beat observations of surfing in Indonesia, Germany, Morocco, the United Kingdom, Israel and the Gaza Strip, Cuba, and Japan. For Latin America alone, Moore notes that the gospel, as it were, took over Argentina in 1963, Brazil in 1939, and in the ’60s in Chile. (Interesting, this is one of few references to Chile I’ve come across in my reading.) Warshaw surfed there 15 years ago, but told me “the better experience is to be had farther south—incredible left-hand sand-bottom breaks, no crowds, no flat spells. Possibly the most consistent wave-region in the world. I’ve also surfed Peru and Brazil; Peru is much better, but nothing I’d go back for.” And Peru was recently in the news, taking top honors on its hometown waves by winning the Billabong ISA World Surfing Games.

Certainly, Surfline covers the region, and Woodshed Films’ 180° South focuses on Chilean and Argentinean Patagonia. In the film, surfer (and Danville, CA native) Jeff Johnson retraces the journey of his idols: Yvon Choinard, the founder of Patagonia Clothing, and Doug Tompkins, the founder of The North Face, respectively two of the most successful sport outfitting operations in the world. Long before, they were blacksmiths from Ventura, California who fashioned their own climbing gear and stopped to surf whenever the conditions called. They documented their drive across a dirt highway through Mexico to Chile, where they scaled Mount Fitz Roy in Patagonia, Argentina. For his own journey toward the same goal, Johnson sets out on a 54-foot cutter, captained by a friend from Patagonia, who will be sailing the ship from Seattle back to its native harbor.

As any good journey can, Johnson gets waylaid in Rapa Nui (Easter Island) after the mast of the boat snaps. As it happens, he meets the island’s first female surfer out in the waves 2,300 miles from Chile, making Rapa Nui the most remote body of land in the world. By the time Johnson arrives in Patagonia to meet up with Yvon and Doug (who has spent nearly two decades buying up some two million acres of land to preserve as the future Patagonia National Park and give back to Chile), the snow has melted, making the climbing conditions more treacherous. But this becomes another lesson of the journey, as do conversations with Ramon Navarro, a Chilean world-class surfer whose father has made his living off of and by respecting the sea. Over the years, commercialized fishing has drastically depleted the quantity of fish, while pulp mills along the Chilean coast have contaminated the country’s waterways and the dams of Spanish energy companies have depleted those waterways altogether.

The direct message of the film is certainly about the importance of conservation, but the implicit takeaway has to do with the significance of the quest and the resulting potential for self-transformation. “Every time I travel, I learn something new and get to be a better person,” Choinard says at one point. “The best journeys answer questions that in the beginning you didn’t even think to ask.”

This surf project is a concentrated part of a journey I aim for this blog to continue to document. By learning more about my coastline here in California, I hope to transfer that knowledge to any stretch of ocean I have the chance to observe in the future. Reading the ocean becomes a way to know better where I may stand in relation to it, a way to ground myself on the wet margins of a foreign land. In linking surfing with travel, Warshaw puts things in terms of places he’d be willing to go back for; mostly, he is content for his adventures “to be small—just a couple of hours, at my local break.”

All the while, I’m conscious of the act of writing as my third point of connection. After all, I’m choosing to put down words in a medium that by nature can shift and change, that can be inherently “surfed.” Krista Comer uses this metaphor not only for a user’s relationship to the Internet, but also for larger statements about global design. She writes, “to ‘surf’ the Web or the new world order is to be in the midst of an argument, an ideological project, about the ethics, gender, and regional Hawaiian and Californian borderlands style of globalization” (Surfer Girls 12-13). For Warshaw, the majority of his career has seen his writing and surfing routines “joined at the hip. That is, I’d surf whenever it was worth surfing, and write the rest of the time. With breaks for meals and sleeping. Very simple.”

Perhaps this project stems from an overall effort to simplify, to breakdown yet link the experiences I translate into language. So, I will continue to draw connections between traveling, writing, and a pursuit like surfing that requires a fluency, currency, and camaraderie of its own…more on that next time.