The person I could be.
We decided to stage an intervention. We couldn’t have left Paul at the bar, where he was living a miserable existence, as if doing time. His uncle was an alcoholic and the bar was, at best, rustic. It had an earth floor, inches of dust on the bar top, ancient horsehair mattresses in the rooms above and a horrifying, traditional squat toilet. The patrons arrived in tiny unlicenced French cars, bumping into the wall when they arrived and almost crashing into traffic as they left.
The open road was a breath of fresh air when the four of us left Brittany. It led us south through Vannes and Nantes, over the Loire and down to Royan at the mouth of La Gironde, the river that joins Bordeaux to the Atlantic. A small car ferry took us across the estuary to Landes, where the smell of salt and hot pine welcomed us. After a few hours driving on dead straight roads through the forest we ended up at a campsite in Maubuisson, a small lakeside resort a couple of kilometres away from Carcans Plage, a surf and beach town that lies a little to the north of the bigger resort of Lacanau-Ocean. Carcans is one of just a few beach towns in Landes de Gascoine, an area of pine forest and dunes that stretches from Soulac in the north to Bayonne in the south. The forest covers an area of around 10,000 square kilometres and is the largest man-made forest in Europe. Before being forested after the French Revolution it was a sparsely inhabited, sandy swamp, where people moved about on stilts. Beach resorts — like Lacanau-Ocean — were created in the early 20th century with grand villas in the style of the French ‘architecture balneaire’ along the seafront.
By 1985 Lacanau had had a surf club for just 17 years. Its annual competition, the first professional surfing contest in France, was just 6 years old and already bringing professional surfers from Hawaii, Australia and California to Europe for the first time, as part of the world tour. The winner of the 1986 event would be American hero Tom Curren, a three time world champion who made France his home after marrying a French surfer in 1983. He mastered the waves here, which break over shallow sandbanks and can be hollow and powerful, peaking up from deep water to form the kinds of dreamy, cylindrical shapes surfer wannabes like me would doodle yet be unable to ride.
We surfed by day, going out in all kinds of conditions. At times the surf was dangerous and the rips dragged us out to sea and along the beach. We didn’t know any better and it was a miracle we weren’t rescued by the lifeguards. I managed to stand up on my surfboard a few times but mostly ended up on my back, or on my hands and knees, in the shallows, my shorts full of sand, washed in among topless bathers by the powerful white water. It was humiliating and demoralising, but the few moments of brilliance, when I stood tall and rode waves to the shore like a god — or so I thought — were enough. We drove back to the campsite in the evenings, transitioning slowly from school kids to cool kids, being dragged along behind the car on skateboards, t-shirts off, gliding along the smooth, straight roads through the forest.
By night we partied in Maubuisson, ventured into Lacanau, or hung about at the campsite, glowing with sunburn and pissed on flagons of cheap red wine. We played guitar as the cicadas sang in the pines and the waves crashed in the distance, booming like heavy traffic.
This introduction to the Way of the Waves was intoxicating. We smoked Gauloise, laughed like drains and got beaten up by the waves for day after glorious day. It was hot, hedonistic and, for the first time in my life, felt truly free. When I managed to stand and ride a wave I felt the same kind of elation I felt in Bantham when I exchanged my ice cream allowance and found the rush of swell-borne happiness.
Home, thankfully, was very far away. I had escaped from my bickering, selfish family and the suffocating days at grammar school were over. In September I would go to college, because that was what I was supposed to do, but that seemed like months away, even though it was only a matter of weeks. For the time being I was young and free, freckled and strong, and I felt as if I could do anything. We surfed and sang and drank and forged lifelong friendships among the pines.
When I realised that the person I was there was the person I could be, I felt a rising tide of hope. Our first steps on The Way of the Waves were delivering a dazzling promise: you could have a lifetime of sunsets and sundowners, sand and surf, if only you had the nerve.
Why would you want anything else?
After a few weeks our money began to run out. On our final day I dropped my breakfast, the last boiled egg, in the sand as I was peeling it. It was all there was left so I tried to wipe the dirt off the remains. It was hopeless and I went hungry. We pooled our resources and realised we had just enough money to get back to Roscoff, so reluctantly packed up and left. On the way we stole artichokes out of the fields and begged bread and wine from the bar when we returned Paul to his uncle in Fouesnant.
It was a sad moment when we boarded the ferry and headed out onto the rear deck as it departed for home. We looked back at the granite coast and islands of Brittany. Paul headed for Paris where he worked as a bus boy at the Georges V hotel. Guy took a year out to work in a pub. I went to college to study art. Andy worked, albeit for a very short time, at a bank.
The three of us stood on deck looking back at France as we saw our summer dissolve into the sea mist.
I vowed to return.
