A spiritual and scientific surf quest

After spending two years in bed with Lyme disease, Steven Kotler had lost everything: his health, his job, his girl, and, he was beginning to suspect, his mind. Kotler, not a religious man, suddenly found himself drawn to the sport of surfing as if it were the cornerstone of a new faith. Why, he wondered, when there was nothing left to believe in, could he begin to believe in something as unlikely as surfing. What was belief anyway? How did it work in the body, the brain, our culture, and human history?
 
Into this mix came a strange story. In 2003, on a surf trip through Mexico, Kotler heard of "the conductor," a mythical surfer who could control the weather. He’d heard this same tale eight years earlier, in Indonesia, but this time something clicked. With the help of everyone from rebel surfers to rocket scientists, Kotler undertakes a three year globetrotting quest for the origins of this legend. The results are a startling mix of big waves and bigger ideas: a surfer’s journey into the biological underpinnings of belief itself.

Read on for the first two chapters. To buy the book click here.

PART ONE

This is the real world Muchachos, and we are all in it.
—Charles Bowden

1.

In The White Album, Joan Didion wrote,“We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” and then proceeded to tell a story about a time in her life when the stories she told herself began to fail. Which may be how things go for many of us, and it certainly was for me. In the fall of 2003, at a time when I was making my living as a journalist; at a time when the president of the United States comfortably dismissed the idea of Darwinian evolution in favor of a more economic, sixday approach; at a time when certain members of Congress were trying to remake democracy in their own image; at a time when I was recovering from a long and nagging illness; when many of the people around me began getting married, having children, moving away, or on, or staying exactly where they were, without me; at a time a pair of hurricanes were heavy on the neck of Central America, I went to Mexico to surf. I went because of these things. I went because the stories I told myself had begun to fail.

Owing to the long illness, it had been too long since I’d been someplace tropical. In the years prior, I had spent chunks of my life in far-flung places. When friends asked why I went, I ticked off a long list of mildly verifiable purposes. The truth of the matter was I went to such places because most people didn’t. On a map and in reality, such places are hard to get to and far away. I wanted to be the kind of person who went places hard to get to and far away. I was interested in places that are far away on maps, just as I was interested in places that are far away in reality. I didn’t know then, not like I know now, that such places do not always coincide.

I was afraid of such journeys and took them anyway. Mexico was almost this kind of quest. Not that my trip there was arduous by anyone’s measure. A three-hour flight followed by an hour car ride. The ride was bumpy, but that doesn’t count. I was going to a place called Costa Azul, which does not mean, as I was disappointed to find out, “the Blue Cost.”

The bitch of it was my suitcase. For starters my suitcase was eight feet long. I take pride in traveling light, so finding myself dragging eight feet of dead weight was embarrassing in a privately psychological way. Plus, owing to the long illness, my time away from the tropics and a seeming predisposition toward exertion, I packed wrong. It was almost a hundred degrees in Mexico. I packed three T-shirts, two pairs of shorts, two sweatshirts, one jacket, two wetsuits, three sweaters and two surfboards. I promised myself that I would do no work in Mexico and then brought fifty magazines, mostly back issues of the Economist and the New Scientist, and a handful of books, including David Quammen’s wonderful Monsters of God, about “man-eating predators” and these, their final years on Earth. I took these things because I cared about things like economists, new scientists, tigers. I cared about what happened when the very things humans built myths around began to fail. My bag weighed a fucking ton. I went to Mexico because I had spent the summer working as hard as I can remember working while realizing that my life had somehow developed a heavy glass ceiling that I was constantly slamming my head against. I was thirty-six years old, a citizen or at least a taxpayer, in need of a new couch, fully capable of making green beans in the Szechuan style, single, not especially lonely, plagued by junk mail, attached to the words of Ernest Hemingway:

“The world breaks everyone and afterwards many are stronger at the broken places.” I was a little amazed that life was nothing more than an accumulation of days. I was suffering that same disjointed feeling that many my age seem to suffer: life was not going to be anything other than what I made it. If I chose to stay home and watch television, I was choosing not to do something else. I once drove a car with a kill your television bumper sticker on it. It felt like lifetimes ago, many lifetimes ago. Now I lived in Hollywood and had developed an unnatural attachment to The West Wing. One of the things I learned watching The West Wing is that if you combine the populations of Great Britain, France,Germany, Japan, Switzerland, Sweden, Denmark and Australia, you’ll get a population roughly the size of the United States, where, last year, there were 32,000 gun deaths. Those other countries, which all have a form of gun control, had a total of 112.

In the course of my life I’ve had four handguns waved in my face, been caught in automatic weapon’s crossfire on three other occasions and was once muzzle slammed with an AK-47 by an Indonesian soldier in a Balinese nightclub after a deejay decided to play punk rock and we decided to slam dance—apparently a crime in that country. I’ve also known more than my fair share of people who have been on both sides of a firearm. Two come to mind. The first was a professional skier who took a random sniper’s bullet through his windshield and then his lung while driving through the Sierra Nevada. The second was an enforcer for the Hell’s Angels. He was a small guy, a fact I found surprising since being an enforcer for the Hell’s Angels seemed to be a job that would require some mass. He once told me that he was good at his job because he was willing to do more damage than anyone thought possible. The last I heard he had rolled his van while crossing the Arizona desert. When the cops came to extract him from the wreckage, they found enough firepower to start a small war in a small country.

I can say that at the time I went to Mexico I was thirty-six years old and the things I was choosing not to do were starting to add up into a whole other life I was choosing not to live.

2.

In September of 2000, I was living with my girlfriend in an apartment in Los Angeles. The apartment and the girlfriend were both beautiful. I wanted, desperately, for them to be both my dream apartment and my dream girl, but in both cases—as it turned out—the rent was too steep. When people asked me exactly where in Los Angeles my apartment was, I would say Beachwood Canyon, and when they inevitably asked where Beachwood Canyon was, I would tell them that when an earthquake finally shook free those bold letters of the hollywood sign, the H would crush my living room. That was not the truth. Beachwood Canyon runs for miles, and the hollywood sign looms like a gargoyle at the top. I lived near the bottom. I never thought of this line as a lie; I just thought of it as a way to make things simpler. It was a complicated couple of years, and simpler seemed a reasonable choice considering everything else there was to consider.

I had found out, in this apartment, with this girlfriend, in early April, that I had Lyme disease. By late September, after six months on strongm edicine, I was still wakingup each morning too exhausted to get out of bed; or I could get out of bed but actually making it to the kitchen for coffee was an impossible task, so I would lie down on the floor, at about the place I realized such things, because I didn’t have the strength to do anything else.We had louver windows in that apartment, and there’s a lot of dust in Los Angeles, and much of that dust blew in our windows and ended up on our floor. I spent a lot of time on that floor, and much of that time was spent with the T. S. Eliot line “I’ll show you fear in a handful of dust” stuck in my head.

There were also days when I could make it out of bed and to the kitchen to make coffee, but my brain—owing to the neurological assault that distinguishes Lyme—would forget how to make coffee and I would stand with the pot in one hand and the tap running, not sure of what to do next; or I would remember and start making coffee, but owing to the effect the disease had on my vision, I would suddenly find myself unable to see the coffeepot, the running water, the floor I stood upon, and would have to grope around and go slow or risk pouring water into another toaster.

That year, I was hell on appliances. During this time I kept a notebook beside my computer that contained some simple instructions.

1.To turn on the computer, push the smaller of the two round buttons.
2.You have DSL. If the computer is already on, you are already connected to the Net; if not, go to the folder under the Apple menu and click connect.
3.Wear socks—there’s a chill in the room.
4. Socks are those long cloth things with a hole in one end and no hole at the other. They’re in the second drawer from the top, in the dresser, in the bedroom.
5.Remember to feed the dog; remember the dog is that furry thing sitting near your feet.
6.Remember that you’ve forgotten how to spell and, for the most part, your grammar now sucks.
7.Remember that you’ve most likely forgotten that you’ve forgotten how to write as well, so the difficulty you’ve been having is perfectly normal and preferably should not result in violence, again.
8.Try not to panic, complain or daydream.
9.Keep passing the open windows.

A number of these entries were absolutely necessary for daily living. A number were there to help me stay in a good mood. The last two were the most critical. Panic was a near constant that year, but owing to the fact that Lyme has a built-in stress trigger— meaning the more stressed out I became, the sicker I felt, and the sicker I felt, the more stressed I became—it was the exact kind of surrealistic hilarity that was best avoided. Trying not to complain was almost as hard, but I was committed to being ill with some grace and I was attempting to hold my relationships together with hat pins and twine—and failing miserably on both counts. Trying
not to daydream was important because I would often emerge from my daydreams to realize that my life had little to offer by way of comparison, which might be the way of such things, but it didn’t make it any easier. The final line was from John Irving’s The Hotel New Hampshire. The reason you wanted to keep passing the open windows was to keep from eventually jumping out of one.

It was on a day in September that I realized my list was not at all different from the list employed by characters suffering through the plague of amnesia that infects the town of Macondo in Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. The plague eventually becomes so bad that townsfolk begin leaving notes pinned to various and important items to remind everyone of their purpose: "This is the cow. She must be milked every morning." It is an interesting experience to find yourself living inside one of your favorite scenes from one of your favorite books, more so when the scene in question is often held up as one of the examples of why the book is considered magical realism. This is especially interesting when you consider that they call it magical realism because of its supposed impossible and fantastic nature.

© Steven Kotler