The Patron Saint of Surf Lit Gets His Due

No quote from antiquity sums up the metaphysical challenge of being a surfer more aptly than this one, from Marcus Aurelius, the last Emperor of the Pax Romana: “There is a river of creation, and time is a violent stream. As soon as one thing comes into sight, it is swept past and another is carried down: it too will be taken on its way.” Waves, by their nature, do not hold still. “Catching” one, therefore, can be a kind of thought experiment, a quantum paradox. To hitch yourself onto a surge of liquid energy—to soar across its frothing surface—demands both physical and mental suspension of disbelief.

Catching a wave is a tricky business in itself; to do it on the printed page requires yet another level of imagination. Which might explain why so few surf-themed books have tapped into the literary mainline. Notwithstanding the stray bubble-gum-kitsch bestseller (Frederick Kohner’s Gidget) or the outlier Pulitzer Prize–winning memoir (William Finnegan’s Barbarian Days), the canon of “surf literature” is relatively thin. Surfers, on the whole, aren’t a bibliophilic crew, and if the genre has scraped along it has done so mainly in high-gloss magazines, via travelogues, interviews, profiles, and prose-poem captions set alongside lush, chromatic photographs of riders tucked into laminar blue-water barrels.

The most cerebral—and literary—of these surf magazines, The Surfer’s Journal, earned an art-house reputation by appealing to a more urbane surf audience. Described by the New York Times as “a surf-centric cross between National Geographic and Architectural Digest,” the Journal boasts an award-winning roster of wordsmiths, artists, and photographers. Over the past 25 years, the brightest and most consistent star in its constellation has been Scott Hulet. Equal parts T.S. Eliot, Hunter S. Thompson, and Jon Krakauer, Hulet stirs in wit, jazz-improvisational style, and a gift for aphorism (“Shoals are generally discovered by their victims”; “There’s something comforting about seeing a pirate at rest”) that has become manna to the waterman faithful. As both contributor and editor of the Journal, he has done perhaps more than anyone on the planet to elevate the corpus of surf writing.

Hulet’s surf-lit oeuvre could fill out 10 books, but Flow Violento—his 2024 collection of 26 short pieces—focuses in on the culture, history, waves, food, people, and coastal towns of Mexico and Latin America. It’s an interesting geographical choice—given the global scope of 21st-century surfing—which speaks to the author’s traditional Californian mentality. Hulet is a fourth-generation San Diegan, and tales of surf safaris down Mexico way occupy a Homeric place in West Coast surfing lore.

In Hulet’s telling, those first midcentury south-of-the-border quests for empty, tropical waves stemmed from the flood tide of teeny-boppers who smothered and despoiled Malibu beach in the Gidget era. “Postwar population dynamics transformed that cobbled heaven into a Malthusian dystopia by the 1950s,” Hulet writes. For hardcore surfers, “Malibu—indeed, Southern California—became not a destination but a place you left.” So the young “refugees” headed south, “seeking precisely what they’d lost, a wave like [Malibu’s] First Point.”

Surf mythology can claim one advantage over the Greeks: its heroes and demi-gods still walk the earth. And Hulet happens to know them. In “AKA Stoner’s,” he sits down with Greg “the Bull” Noll, the Hercules of big-wave riding himself, and raps about those foundational trips to Mexico, when Noll discovered Matanchén Bay, in Nayarit, an incandescent replica of Malibu’s First Point. Hulet travels down and lays eyes on the wave, imagining those early days: “On a well-foiled period point-tanker, one could stall and dance around the pocket for upward of a mile, milking it until the perfect little crackler committed seppuku somewhere down near the Jalisco border.”

In 1957, Noll filmed the surf footage for his underground classic, Search for Surf. His movie preceded Bruce Brown’s Endless Summer by nine years, and set a new generation of surf-adventurers on their own Mexican odysseys. “The 1300-mile drive south quickly became a rite of passage,” notes Hulet. To the Californian youth of the ‘50s, idyllic wavescapes beckoned through the mists like the Land of the Lotus Eaters, a sun-bleached paradise of rapture and indulgence: “Factor in a local per diem of five bucks a day, including all of the Orendian tequila and liberally seeded sierra sativa one could handle, and San Blas took on a certain ‘Graham Greene on food stamps’ appeal.”

When Hulet loads up his own surfboards and tears down the beaten road into modern-day Sinaloa, as in“Tranquila la Plaza,” there’s a sharper edge to the expedition, a veiled menace absent during Noll’s time. Stories of bloodshed and violence inflicted on tourists by the narcocultura have been widely reported of late. This past April, three surfers—two Australian brothers and an American—were murdered by highway bandits, ostensibly for the tires on their truck, and their bodies dumped down a well in a hillside near Ensenada. “As a US citizen, our government makes it abundantly clear,” Hulet cautions. “Do not go to Sinaloa. Travel Advisory Level 4. Same as Syria, Yemen, Somalia.” But he is on assignment, and knows how to embed, incognito, with local surfers. He exercises “situational awareness,” and carves that fine line between peril and pleasure. The reward comes in the form of “overhead, glassy, unabated” barrels.

Later, in “En Baja,” Hulet immerses in Baja Sur with oil painter John Comer. Roaming the rocky scarps above the seaside, he dials into the plangent tones of the California diaspora:

If you’ve walked the arroyos—boots crunching over the alluvia, smelling the herbal gobernadora and jojoba—[Comer’s] work might awaken in you a sort of homing instinct. The vultures in the dawn light, warming their joints on the arm of a cardon. The laced interplay of sizzling foam and clear water in the wake of a wave, conjuring Spanish master Sorolla.

I’ve heard some surfers complain about Hulet’s style being too highbrow for them, that his references keep flying over their heads. Sorolla, Neruda, and Salter aren’t your standard taco stand or beach bonfire fare. It’s understandable that a young shredder might be unsettled by “the Proustian scent of the place, the burning of damp coconut husks used to ward off the Transylvanian jejenes.” What are jejenes? And who’s Proust? But Hulet doesn’t shy from the bon mot, surf patois, or the dicho mexicano. A sensible approach for neophytes or “devotees of the foam” might be to read him like Joyce—simply allow the unknown phrase to course over you. Channel the speed section.

As editor of The Surfer’s Journal, one of Hulet’s credos was to keep the magazine unpredictable, to continually offer the readership the very thing they didn’t know they wanted. Perhaps the biggest surprise in Flow Violento is the virtuosity of the non-surf writing, particularly his pieces written for the Bight, a journal for saltwater anglers. In these minimalist, fishing-inspired vignettes, we find some of Hulet’s most colorful, muscular prose. His mangroves become the “pregnant belly of the organism,” and a stark lyricism emerges from the act of a fisherman bridling a bait: “He runs a needle through the eye sockets, ending with a sanitary double-loop of thread. It looks cleaner than a trussed quail in some Michelin-starred bistro.”

If you are looking for a bespoke tour guide of afición and Epicurean savvy, someone who can lead you to clandestine coves and prime tequila joints, you could ask for no one better than Scott Hulet. In “Café Racer,” for instance, he takes you on a gastronomic tour of Peru’s criollo cuisine: “like Spanish food if it went to saucier school in Lyon, grabbed a minor in Sinaloan shellfish, and finished with a Kanazawa sushi seminar.” Rest assured, there will be waves tomorrow. For now, stroll with him through Miraflores, “prowl the 3 a.m. side streets and listen, smell. Check the Martinez Tailor Shop, where you can get chalked up for a custom suit, find a hidden panel door, and tumble into a speakeasy crowded with Peruanas leaving lipstick on their Negronis.”

My favorite piece in this collection, and Hulet’s most recent offering, “Tentative in Manabí,” tracks him down to Ecuador in search of a hat. His journalistic docket, he explains, is “slammed with joints more Kipling than Ed Abbey. Monsoonal, Aguirre, the Wrath of God waypoints. Tampico. Holguín. Las Terrenas. The call was for something durable but not out of place in the zócalo… something with a modest brim, yet wide enough for torrential night ops. Foldable and crushable.” Only a superfino will suffice. So Hulet flies down to Montecristi, intent on buying the ultra-lux Panama hat on the cheap, then regrouping with his crew to shoot the waves up and down the coast.

Hulet arrives in Guayaquil the day after an earthquake, as the city is being pummeled by an El Niño storm. The Rio Guayas is rancid and flooded with “all manner of king-size flotsam—some of it recently deceased.” He sets up a base of operations at an old-school hotel bar in the heart of the ravaged city, locates a barber, a driver, and a local fixer, and witnesses a casual stabbing. By the time he rides out to Manta to find his hat, the story is almost over. Hulet ends up sipping a drink in the shade of a cabana and discussing the incoming swell with a group of beautiful young surfers.Chasing surf around the world might seem a childish pursuit, a fatuous way to spend one’s days, but it takes a certain stoic grace to wait calmly in the turbulence, to accept that “as soon as one thing comes into sight, it is swept past and another is carried down.” And if there is less surf writing in Flow Violento than one might expect from the premier surf journalist of our time, it’s a conscious decision. Hulet wants us to understand that it’s the spaces between the waves that matter the most.

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