Surfers are hardly unique. The allure of the ocean is enormous, mythic, virtually universal. Seeing it for the first time can have the force of a secular revelation. To swim or wade in it, or merely stand on shore and gaze, is entrancing, soothing, renewing. There is something enchanting about both the view of the vastness and the water itself, its texture and colors, the magic of its chemistry. The pulse of its life force is palpable and there is always a sense, however faint, of putting oneself invigoratingly at risk on entering it, of being tested, evaluated, scanned. Hence the costly annual pilgrimages of vacationers and dense clustering of populations along coastlines despite the exorbitant price of beach real estate and the rapidly increasing instability brought on by global warming.
But note that itâs not out at sea, aboard a boat or a ship, that most people want to beâitâs by and in it. The meeting of land and sea forms an elemental threshold with deep, primal resonance and magnetism. The land is like the awake rational mind of the present, the ocean the unconscious, irrational, archaic. The ocean shore is the geographic equivalent of dawn or dusk, of the transitional mode of consciousness between waking and sleep, an intermundial state in which the spirit is quietly loosened from its moorings and set adrift. Edges blur, identities become uncertain, shifting, subject to flux and transformation. New thoughts well up, changes of life direction are contemplated.
The term for interstitial places and states of consciousness is âliminalâ (from Latin, limen, threshold), coined by early-twentieth-century folklorist Arnold van Gennep. The focus of van Gennepâs hugely influential book is reflected in the title, The Rites of Passage, but he begins with a discussion of ancient borderlands between tribal territories. Often natural barriers such as marshes or forests, these zones are the original thresholds, their âmagico-religiousâ properties arising in part from being neither here nor there, neither ours nor theirs. To enter a frontier or borderland is to pass into a new world, where oneâs status is uncertain and provisional. Though van Gennep doesnât mention the treacherous, ever-changing surf zone separating shore from open ocean, it, too, functions as a borderland and was until recently regarded as a realm of evil spirits, spiritual peril, and uncertainty in a variety of culturesâIndonesia, Africa, the Caribbean, even parts of Polynesia. Comparable beliefs also pervaded European coastal communities. The West rid the ocean of sea monsters beginning roughly with the Enlightenment, but even Westerners became aquatic en masse only within the past century or so.
Like entering a borderland, rites of passage and initiations strip away and suspend identities. Many such rituals, van Gennep noted, involve crossing an actual or symbolic threshold, hence the term âliminal.â He divided these rites into three phases: the pre-liminal, in which individuals are separated from the group; the liminal or transitional itself; and the post-liminal or reincorporative, in which a girl, for example, having ritually become a woman, reenters the social group under the sign of this new identity and stature. Van Gennep extended the concept of liminality to include transitional states of place, situation, or time: moving from one house to another, or to a new city; starting college or a job, or graduating; New Year and birthday celebrations.
Addiction is liminal, too, an interstitial realm divided from workaday reality by an unseen veil. I think of the opioid addict lying, eyes closed in a nod, on flattened cardboard as rush-hour foot traffic troops past inches away. Even the functional addict, the executive or day laborer, lives in a dimension to one side of her nonaddict coworkers, isolated by preoccupation and dependence. Addictsâand surfers, tooâare what Victor Turner, elaborating on van Gennep, calls âliminal personae,â or threshold people, who exist on the margins of society in a state of social invisibility and lowliness.
Liminality crops up in neurobiological accounts of addiction: the reward system of the brain, which governs motivation and drive, is reshaped by sustained drug misuse, raising the âreward thresholdâ so that natural pleasures such as food and sex lose their interest and appeal. Only the drug of misuse stimulates the production of the levels of dopamine and other neurotransmitters enough to reach and crest the threshold, producing a high. The Tantalus-like tragedy of addiction is that the reward threshold grows ever higher until finally little to no effect aside from a feeling of relief from anxiety, discomfort, or misery is achievable. Compulsive attempts to reach and cross the threshold end in overdoses, sometimes fatal, especially for opioid addicts.
Whatever causes addiction, whether trauma, genetic predisposition, social despair, sheer exposure and consumption, or some combination thereof, people who become addicts all seem to be haunted by an acute sense of lack or dislocation that has a liminal characterâa being on the outside. Yet there is no reliable predictor, and whether this feeling of dislocation is distinct from one of generalized human-condition malaise or yearning remains inconclusive until itâs too late and addiction actually arises.
To apply van Gennepâs schema, the pre-liminal phase occurs with bingeing and intoxication. Once the high becomes preferable to the company of others, the addict disjoins from the initiatory group of casual users, taking a kind of secret vow of loyalty to the drug. With me it happened in the autumn of my second year of graduate school at Yale, where I was restless and poised to drop out. I was twenty-seven. In the background: my parentsâ divorce when I was eight, my stepfatherâs long unhappiness and suicide when I was seventeen, my younger brother Adamâs mental illness that had landed him in Saint Elizabethâs psychiatric hospital and would lead to his suicide a few years later. I had broken up with one girlfriend by falling into bed with a new one. Walking together in the evening, the new girlfriend and I came to a dividing point between our neighborhoods. Did I want to come to her house? No, I was going to go home and write. At my apartment was a gram of cocaine, which I had just discovered was a wonder when it came to poetry and term papers, a guarantor of pure, all-nighter focus. I wanted nothing more than to be alone with this miraculous new muse, who asked nothing of me (yet) while making aesthetic objects of the anguish and confusion I felt about the breakup with my previous girlfriend and the broader predicament I found myself in, wavering on the threshold of the ivory tower.
The liminal phase proper is a realm of lost time, hidden excess, obsession, compulsion, shame, despair, physical and mental decline. Cocaine was like a person of enormous charm under whose spell I had fallen. When the honeymoon ended, I saw I had a problem and quit but eventually slipped into using again, always through drinking, which was a problem in its own right. Because itâs never one thing only. I was also depressed, inconsolable in some root way, though there were to my mind so many good reasons to be depressed that it hardly occurred to me that it might be something more serious. When my friends left New Haven for the summer, I stayed behind out of inertia and found a job as a janitor. The white folding chairs being set out on the quad for graduation looked to me like headstones or the teeth of a gear. In August, I took an impulsive leave of absence and moved to the Lower East Side, where in certain bodegas cocaine was as easy to buy as cigarettes.
The post-liminal phase is marked by abstinence or death, in my case also by a return to surfing, at Rockaway Beach, which I now see acted as a rite of purification. Rehab is a kind of liminality preceding reincorporation into society, with 12-step or AA meetings functioning as intraliminal moments after abstinence and the addictâs reentry into the workforce and family life. Yet the orthodoxy within the recovery community is that once an addict, always an addict, like the human who eats the food in the underworld. The liminality of addiction lingers and colors and stretches on into the future. I may attend the wedding yet from the raised glass of champagne I must not sip.
But having managed to quit, to be as cleanly and clearly on the other side as one can be, what then? Simply abstaining is unsustainable, we know. Neurologist David Zald articulates a consensus position among addiction researchers when he says that the key lies in identifying âa stronger alternative reward to overcome the compulsion to seek and engage in the addictive behavior.â Graft onto the wound of liminality another and more salubrious piece of it: some combination of body work and spiritual practice, meditation and the âin the zoneâ trance brought about by intense exercise, ideally in wildernessâsurfing, for instance.
The Hawaiian phrase heâe nalu expresses the essence: wave sliding. Bodysurfing was almost certainly the original form and remains the purest. Among Hawaiians there is an ecumenical tradition of riding all manner of craftârafts, floats, outrigger canoes, stand-up paddleboards, bodyboards. New modes have appeared in recent decades: tow-in, kite, foiling. Another innovation is adaptive surfing, which focuses on designing boards to suit the needs of people with disabilities. Itâs all surfing, itâs all legitimate, it will all work to immerse one in the curative surf-zone liminalityâthough not merely immerse: importantly for the recovering addict, surfing also offers the rush and thrill of catching and riding waves.
Though not a particularly dangerous sport, surfing puts the brain on high alert by dint of being conducted in the ocean, where the risk of death by drowning or injury, while statistically small, is nonetheless real and ever-present. The survival-obsessed brain responds by paying very close attention to everything in its perceptual field, with the result that self-talk and dark preoccupations are pushed to the periphery and quieted. Itâs this natural and irresistible concentration in the present moment that is one of the most powerful things about surfing for the recovering addictâsilence, focus, a kind of chastened vigilance.
The neurochemical dividends are many: the aerobic demands of paddling out, usually through an obstacle course of whitewater, then catching and riding waves, flood the body with serotonin and endorphins, endogenous opioids that produce the famous ârunnerâs high,â along with improving the brainâs ability to process emotions. The looming up of waves activates a fight-or-flight response that elicits adrenaline. The drama, thrills, and risks of wave riding proper call forth spurts of dopamine, the neurotransmitter of drive and wanting that plays a central role in habit formation, learning, and addiction.
All the while, there is the exalting natural beauty and multisensory richness of the ocean wilderness, the arena and medium of wave riding. The least bit of time spent in the wilderness stirs feelings of awe, which has its own neurochemical signature and has been found to countervail the destructive self-centricity of the addict. Awe inspires generosity, openness, and compassion.
Given the range and strength of these benefits, surfing would seem to offer a superb replacement therapy for recovering addicts. So letâs go surfing. âItâs simple,â I overheard an instructor tell a beginner in the lineup. âJust look at the beach and stand up.â But the instructor was doing the hard parts: selecting the waves and pushing the student into them at the right moment. Waves are what make surfing unlike other sports, even close relatives such as snowboarding, skateboarding, windsurfing, and hang gliding. A mountainside or paved surface is stable, after all. Even wind is a relatively continuous force. Shoaling ocean waves, on the other hand, are rapidly moving, morphing bands of liquid energyâlooming like cobra hoods, shifting, lurching, abruptly receding as if stricken with stage fright. Waves have personality-like characteristics and being able to read them is the key to all, from discerning which ones are desirable to catch and catchable, to riding them well. As everyone discovers who gives it a try, surfing is for this reason dauntingly difficult, but its pleasures, which can be tasted from the first, are commensurate with that difficulty.
The classic arc is to begin as a child or teenagerâuntil recently almost exclusively male and, on the mainland United States and in Australia, whiteâand spend many humbling if not humiliating months in a protracted rite of passage and liminality during which basic competency is acquired. Thus the âkookâ becomes a bona fide surfer, able to catch and ride waves without being a danger to self or others and finding a submissive and silent place at the bottom of a local hierarchy composed of elders and betters. All surfers must undergo some version of this initiation, and the universality of the experience is the source of a sense of hard-won membership and recognition.
In recent decades an alternative path has been forged by adultsâmen, women, queer people, people of all racesâwho are introduced to surfing in a class or on vacation or simply in imitation of surfers at their local beach. This is the group most recovering addicts will be a part of. Having fallen in love with surfing, these adult beginners can nonetheless manage to surf onl...
