“Windansea,” A New Book by Chris Ahrens
By Stuart Grauer

“Nobody needed anything. A surfboard and a pair of trunks. Heaven.”

Around 30+ years ago, Chris Ahrens and I decided to go on a surf trip up the coast. When I picked him up, after strapping the boards on top of my station wagon, he started loading boxes in the back. Books. It was a paperback collection of his surf stories called “Good Things Love Water,” and we set out from The Grauer School, heading north.

It was easy to find places to surf, because he’d surfed them all for years, and every great surf break had a great surf shop nearby. We picked our way up the coast, surfing the famed San Onofre, where people knew Chris, camping in Malibu Creek, getting up early to hit the classic Malibu where people knew Chris, then up the coast to the nearest cheap hotel near Secos, that sketchy big-rock take-off north of LA. Each surf session was the next scene in the story, all knit together by the storied Coast Highway, its misty dawn patrol sessions and fresh, salty air. After each sesh, we headed for the nearby surf shop and this is where I learned an important thing about Chris: we penetrated deep into surf country, and behind every surf shop counter there were longtime friends. We’d hand them a pile of books to sell. This was his whole business model.

From San Diego all the way up to Santa Cruz, where we surfed with Wingnut and stayed on couches in the home of legendary surfboard maker Bob Pearson, then north to Crescent City and the Oregon border where we actually hung out with Greg Noll, Da Bull himself, and I filmed him shaping koa wood surfboards in his barn, everyone knew Chris. This was pre-Google maps, and we never needed a map of any kind, as though every great surf spot on the coast, and a few gnarly roadside blackberry patches, are embedded in Chris’s reptilian brainstem.

No one has a surf network like Chris. He has announced many of the great surf events around California, officiated the weddings of top pro surfers, written for every major surf publication, and befriended and worked with almost every major surf photographer and filmmaker, all while teaching and contracting at The Grauer School as a side hustle we’ve loved. Chris has continued to craft surf-related books and columns for all those thirty-plus years since then, and has spun together a vast surf network, which has become a book, and a big one.

Ringo Starr sings, “You gotta pay your dues if you wanna sing the blues.” Chris has done this and now he has achieved his magnum opus: “Windansea: Life, Death, Resurrection.”

“Windansea” presents as a coffee table book at first glance: a wide, glossy, visual treasure filled with classic photos and, if you are looking for a coffee table book, this one is on par with Kramer’s on Seinfeld. (Talk to me about this reference.) All of that on the surface and, like the ocean swells on a California day, and you can’t take your eyes off it. But if you care to, you can go deep like the ocean in these pages. “Windansea” conjures up the life of the early California surfers and their separate world: driving a car into the surf to form a new reef, partying all night under the legendary Windansea palm frond palapa (“the shack”), finding solace in mentoring a lost boy to the pro surf tour, and, mainly, finding solace and kinship among a group of outcasts creating a life based upon the rhythms of the ocean.

“Windansea,” Chris writes, “was an escape into a natural water park that beckoned the lost, the lonely, and those yearning for adventure." (p. 106) It could  mean pure flow on a sunny, subtropical day. What it also could mean is getting thrust down deep below a billion tons of whitewater, knowing that if you get back to the surface and another wave or two like it crashes down, 50-50 you will die, and then doing that again. I knew some of these stories coming into the book and I now know them in their full richness from first-hand storytellers Chris has counted as friends for decades: The day Woody Brown lost his best friend, Dickie Cross, to surf that grew cruel as it pulled them under; Pat Curren’s redemptive refuge at Waimea, living out of his ’28 Chevy; and Butch Van Artsdalen’s astonishing first tube ride at Pipeline reminding us that God was there before we showed up with boards. Beyond the coffee table, Chris’s stories plumb deeper: surfers of world-class style and grace living adrift in a society that brings pain if you stay put.

“Windansea” covers the lives of preternaturally gifted and underappreciated characters finding their stories in marginal, sometimes forbidding and wild places: often broken lives forming a tribe that has left a legacy at the raw edges of earth’s landforms, now captured in the pages.

The insistent task of our time is to clear away the mental and emotional clutter that clouds our minds and turns political and social life into collective and personal dysfunction. Before I met Chris, I thought of surfers much like I thought of that dysfunction—untethered, maybe a little chaotic, and disconnected—though I knew, deep down, an essential part of me was drawn to that way of being. What I brought home from our surf trips with Chris—and what we are left with once we turn the last page of “Windansea”—is that surfers, amidst it all and at all costs, are those who turn to the sometimes-dark simplicity of the ocean life to seek clarity, balance, and a return to what is pure and real and apart.

There are always people who step outside the usual rules of society, who can’t rely on the acceptance or even grasping of those rules, who are drawn to risk without seeing it as risk, and who live an untethered existence on the edge. If they are surfers, they might have storied nicknames like Buzzy or Hot Curl or Tiny Brain. Preacher or Chicky. Here in “Windansea,” a great book, lies the chance of a lifetime to get to know the legends. Even if they are a bit of you.

( To purchase Windansea: Life, Death, Resurrection, email perelandrapub@gmail.com.)

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