Peter Heller. Kook: What Surfing Taught Me about Love, Life, and Catching the Perfect Wave. New York: Free Press, 2010. Print.
Kook is memoir covering approximately two years of a man’s midlife crisis. But please, do not be turned off. Our 45-year-old author, a nature and adventure writer and resident of Colorado (not exactly known for its oceans), decides to join a friend and embark on a new adventure, learning to surf. Like so many other esoteric skills, the younger the person who learns to surf is, the better he or she will be at it. Forty-five is late to learn such a skill. Oh, it has been done—Heller describes a sixty-year-old taking his first lessons—but the abilities will be limited. Such a person will always be a kook, a rank beginner.
Parts of Kook are fun to read. We are introduced to many interesting characters along the Pacific coasts of California and Mexico. Many of these people are known to surfers but to few others outside the sport. The focus of the narrative, though, is on the progress Mr. Heller makes.
Heller naïvely believes at first that the surfing community is characterized by the aloha spirit—the welcoming spirit of love and friendship. After all, surfing originated in easygoing tropical paradises like Tahiti and Hawaii. He learns differently.
A kook is a beginning surfer, and the word is not a compliment. Heller and his buddy endure a lot of scorn though he is able to find various teachers and mentors along the way who do help him develop his surfing technique. By the end of the book, after about two years by my calculation, he can navigate about half of the famous Mexican Pipeline. No, he is no pro, but he is no longer a kook, either.
Much of Kook reminds me of Twain’s Life on the Mississippi (which is still my favorite Twain book). Heller becomes more and more aware of the world around him, especially the ocean shores. Just as apprentice riverboat pilot Twain was relentlessly quizzed by his trainers to understand the environment and its significance for navigating, so the strongest parts of Kook are those where Heller is being quizzed or quizzing himself about what is going on in the sea around him.
For Heller, it is not just about the sea as it relates to surfing. He notes the wildlife, the decline of the health of the sea, and once even a grim grey tide. He takes a break in his surfing travels at one point to help an activist acquaintance of his film the deliberate slaughter of hundreds of porpoises and whales trapped by nets in a Japanese bay. (See the film, The Cove.)
As he says:
I began to see the surf trip more about loving the ocean than anything else. It was a way to know her better. It certainly wasn’t Endless Summer. [N.B. One of the greatest documentaries ever filmed.] One couldn’t do that any more, the sheer lark, not in 2008. The joy and the rush were still all there, surfing was still surfing, but one couldn’t do it without a simultaneous commitment to taking some responsibility. (192)
The second half of Kook reminds the reader of Kerouac’s On the Road. Much of that part focuses on two surfing trips that Heller takes into Mexico, first on the Baja California Peninsula, the second on the main Pacific coast south of Oaxaca. Now Heller admits that he is addicted to surfing, not drugs or alcohol, so his experiences are different from those of Sal Paradise, but he encounters some of the same kinds of people and night birds. The countryside is similar, if not identical. One part of the coastline is more protected and less developed because the local drug cartel has decided to keep it that way.
Heller’s buddy stays with him for a while, but his girlfriend sticks with him even when he goes to Mexico. Heller begins to admire how she puts up with his adventures.
Ultimately, the book that Kook reminded me most of was not a memoir at all (whether nonfiction like Twain or fictionalized like Kerouac). It brought to mind a famous sociological study. I complained in a recent review about foul language making characters unsympathetic. Kook starts that way, but as the story progresses, it seems as though Heller’s language mellows out except when quoting others.
What makes Heller’s adventure remarkable and distinctly different from either Twain’s or Kerouac’s is that his girlfriend comes with him. She learns to surf but does not get into it the way Heller does. About halfway through the book, they marry. And Heller, unlike Dean Moriarty, begins to change. Yes, his language changes, but it is more than that. As the subtitle suggests, his outlook on love and life changes, too.
His bride Kim comes to mean more to him than even surfing. He admits that he has been a jerk most of his life. Marriage civilizes him. The story is not so much that he becomes a strong surfer, but that he becomes a responsible adult man. Heller’s memoir is living proof that George Gilder’s thesis in his book Men and Marriage is on solid ground. Mr. Heller, may God grant you and your loving, patient wife many happy years.