Though most surfers live in cities, we are a wilderness society, hunting for waves and playing for pleasure in the world’s greatest living wilderness, the sea. We are united as a society by our regular immersion in this wilderness. We long for it, seek it, live in it, enjoy it, are enthralled by it. 200 years ago and forever before the whole earth was wilderness. We are creatures of this earth, wilderness creatures. Wilderness speaks directly to our being. We miss it. We need wilderness and the ocean satisfies this longing, even more for city dwellers starved of nature’s wildness.
If humans can’t find wilder-ness, we create it ourselves, turning the streets and alleys and decaying infrastructure of cities and suburbs into faux-wildernesses – where gangs and addicts, pimps and prostitutes, cops and robbers hold sway, prancing in the slimelight.
Surfers are the natural guardians of a healthy ocean wilderness. We spend more time in the ocean than any other group of people. Surfers are the first to know whether the sand came back this summer, what fish and other animals live at our break or used to live there, whether the rocks at a river mouth are being replenished, whether lagoon entrances are clean or dirty. We know about currents and the fluctuation of water temperature and when the surface-smoothing kelp dies off. It is surfers who suffer the ear infections and hepatitis, cholera and e-coli from a polluted ocean. We see the trash on the beach and in the water.
Surfers and swimmers have become ocean’s uncompromising protectors because we want nothing from the sea but that it be clean, healthy and full of fish, surf spots and waves we can get to. We love the ocean and shoreline like any native loves his homeland. The ocean is our special wilderness.
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