Andy Irons died today. The three-time world champion was only 32, had a baby on the way, and it’s being reported that he passed away from Dengue Fever, although that’s not yet definitive and a toxicology report awaits. He was exposed in Puerto Rico and was too sick to compete at the Rip Curl Pro Search Puerto Rico currently underway. He passed in a Texas hotel room on his way home to Kauai. The Association of Surfing Professionals (ASP) CEO Brodie Carr said: “The surfers today lost a brother. We all lost one of our fellow tribesmen and one of our family we’ve been traveling with for many years, we lost a world champion; we lost a friend.” There is no consolation in a situation like this; no lesson one wants to learn.

During this project, I have been thinking about the connection between surfing and travel. Today, a professional surfer has sponsored access to some of the most beautiful coastlines in the world: Hawaii, South Africa, Australia, California, Mexico. The list goes on and on. But the connection between surf and exploration goes back hundreds of years. When Daniel Duane ran a search for “surfing” at UC Santa Cruz’s library, he didn’t come up with much. But once he meandered into the “travel/exploration” section, he was “delighted to discover that Captain James Cook…sensed in the eighteenth century something of surfing’s mystery. At anchor in Tahiti, his crew resting ashore, Cook made an entry in his diary one day and gave wave riding its first inscription in a European tongue. Noticing, as he put it, that Tahitians weren’t ‘strangers to the soothing effects produced by particular sorts of motion’—meaning surfing—‘which in some cases seem to allay any perturbation of mind with as much success as music’ (Duane, Caught Inside 17). Surfers are explorers too, traveling the world in pursuit of the perfect wave they inherently can never surf twice.

Travel terminology is often incorporated into discussions of the sport’s spread around the world. Riding Giants documents Californian “migrations” to Hawaii, first in 1953 to Micaha, Oahu, which became known as the first access point to big-wave surfing, and five years later with the discovery of the heavy swell of the island’s Waimea Bay. Matt Warshaw, in his introduction to The History of Surfing, acts at once as surfer/historian/explorer when “tracing and understanding the jagged fault line between surf culture and culture at large… The nonsurfing world has shaped and formed the sport more deeply than surfers care to admit. Surf culture, in turn, has traveled and settled over mountains, plans, and cities, from coast to coast, nation to nation. Watching these two forces react to each other, for me, never gets dull: the circling and grinding and ignoring and ridiculing—and, these days, more often than not, collaborating” (11).

In Surfer Girls, Krista Comer discusses “surfaris,” as well as the “diasporic public culture” (12) of surfing both geographically and for its contribution to globalization, as the sport has “set people, money, goods, and ideas into motion in ways that created new forms of identity, sociality, commerce, and politics” (13). She also discusses how surf culture has given way to the idea of the “translocal,” who moves through, links, and popularizes surf breaks the world over. Comer synthesizes these ideas when she hypothetically asks: “Are surfers expatriates, nomads, tourist, venture capitalists or global citizens?” (24). Where my women’s travel writing class has been discussing the tourist vs. traveler dichotomy, I can’t help but appreciate how truly varied the surfer’s global/local identity can be. Comer distills her observation and further articulates the language of discovery when she writes: “But most often surfers travel the world today as subcultural workers according to a logic resembling global citizenship. Surfing gives citizenship geographical dimension (“homelands” are surf breaks), political coherence (global green politics as a shared philosophy), and a ready-made group of generally like-minded citizen-friends” (25).

As with any global transit, surfing as travel brings its own vulnerabilities to bear, from exposure to infectious disease to the risk of being held under too long by a relentless set of waves to literally inserting oneself into the marine food chain with every paddle out. (There was a fatal shark attack in Santa Barbara just last week.) Perhaps surfing stills the mind because the risks are inherent to being able to access the freedom, the play, the present. It’s balanced in that way.

But balance is little comfort. My heart goes out to Andy Irons’ family and his fellow surfers.