Tapping the Source

The highly-underrated surf chick movie Blue Crush was on tv the other night, and it reminded me that I had a couple of surfing documentaries sitting around that I hadn't watched yet. So last night I put on Riding Giants, by Dogtown and Z Boys director Stacy Peralta. 

Ridings Giants is excellent. It's about the quest to surf ever-bigger waves, from Waimea to Mavericks to isolated atolls in the South Pacific. Like Dogtown, Riding Giants is less about the culture of surfing (or skateboarding, in the case of dogtown) than it is about the intersection of human desire, technology, and spirituality. And so it is the use of jetskis to tow surfers onto huge offshore waves that allowed them to ride waves that simply couldn't be caught by the old methods. 

 The closing stanza of the film is about Laird Hamilton's epic ride at Teahupo'o Reef of a wave that many consider the most dangerous wave ever ridden. It really has to be seen to be believed (the pic above, insane as it is, doesn't do the wave's power justice). 

Peralta has done a better job than any surfing movie I've ever seen of capturing the spiritual essence of surfing, of explaining just why -- as Peralta puts it -- "people choose to devote their entire lives to the pursuit of riding waves". By the end of the film, you're left convinced that, if you haven't spent your life as a surf bum, you've wasted it.

Or as Hamilton puts it, in an interview during the closing credits:

If you applied the same amount of devotion to a religious pursuit, do you think anyone would call you a “religious bum”? Probably not. When you consider that surfing is really more than anything a faith, and that devotion to that faith becomes paramount in your life, there’s no such thing as a surf bum.