Riding Midlife Wave of Discovery Reveals Unexpected Truth

IN SEARCH OF CAPTAIN ZERO:

A Surfer’s Road Trip Beyond the End of the Road

By Allan C. Weisbecker

Tarcher/Putnam

$24.95, 328 pages

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We still read “On the Road” because Jack Kerouac told us enough of the truth. We don’t read it because of the truth--the undertow of disillusionment that follows each of his narrator’s cross-country dashes in search of the hip and the sublime, as a wave withdraws after the boom and spray of its breaking. We don’t want to dwell on how Kerouac never stopped running home to his mother. We read him to ride the wave, the illusion. But the truth is there, if we bother to check it out.

Allan C. Weisbecker, surfer, photojournalist and author of the 1986 cult novel “Cosmic Banditos,” is a similar case. “In Search of Captain Zero” is a memoir with the feel of a road novel, a celebration of wave-riding as a way of life, an exercise in self-mythologizing in which the truth--a chill of regret and loneliness--steals in like the first fall breeze after a summer that, after all, has ended.

In 1996, Weisbecker sold his home in Montauk, L.I. He packed his dog, Shiner, and his surfboards into a truck-camper rig he dubbed Casa Viajera--the house that travels. Armed with serviceable Spanish, jalapeno pepper spray and a billy club, he drove to Baja California and spent the next several months working his way down the Pacific Coast, from one surf camp to the next, hunting his lifelong friend Christopher, whose last postcard from Central America, years back, had been signed, enigmatically, “Capitan Cero”--Captain Zero.

Nearing 50, though still in good shape, Weisbecker finds himself wondering if Christopher is the reason for his journey or simply an excuse. Could he be indulging in something as cliched as a midlife crisis? Surely not. He was a hard-core surfer, a former marijuana smuggler, an adventurer, an artist. One of the elite, in short--his self-esteem nourished on Oahu’s North Shore in the 1960s, when he and other pioneers were conquering some of the planet’s biggest waves.

“Surfing,” Weisbecker says, “can not only change everything, it can change everything about everything. . . . You might not only find yourself in some strange and exotic place searching for waves to ride, but because of your unique view of the world, situations may suddenly arise to dramatically test your mettle and expand your horizons in various ways.”

Christopher, he tells us, was just as special, his unpromising life as a foster child and wounded Vietnam veteran transformed by surfing. Together, they aspired to the Hemingway ideal of “grace under pressure,” an attitude of cheerful insouciance regardless of circumstance--tons of wipeout-threatening water overhead or a ship loaded with 50 tons of Colombian pot sinking underfoot in an Atlantic storm.

Weisbecker relives those mettle-testing moments as he travels south. They have become epic tales, honed by retelling at many a beach bonfire, in many a surf-side saloon. Weisbecker, a gifted, if sometimes over-the-top, prose stylist, tells them well. He makes his case for surfing as an activity so pure that it justifies his avoiding permanent relationships with women, family entanglements, steady jobs.

It isn’t just the reader he’s trying to convince, it turns out, but himself. He finds Christopher in a scruffy Costa Rican backwater, so drug-addicted that he has sold his surfboards to buy crack. Weisbecker is appalled and furious. Christopher has betrayed their ideal. But who is he to judge, Weisbecker reflects--a man who has attracted women with his intelligence and charm, then cast them aside as inconvenient; a man who has left his ailing parents to fend for themselves?

“Abandonment,” he concludes. “It’s what I do best.” The book doesn’t end this way. Like Kerouac’s, it leaves us with an image of rapturous freedom, a 500-yard nose-ride on a once-in-a-lifetime wave--one of many bravura descriptions that affirm Weisbecker’s commitment to the unfettered life. But the truth is there, for any who care to see.