The rush hour

RIDING a wave is an elusive experience, and writing about the feeling for nonsurfers is, to borrow a phrase, like dancing about architecture. Trying to convey it to fellow surfers might be even worse, like yammering on about the dream you had last night. The problem is that the essence of surfing is also its blind spot. The wave just caught instantly becomes the proverbial “one that got away.”

Surfers spend most of their time looking for waves, not riding them. As a result, surf writing tends to revolve around aspects and permutations of the quest -- the quest for surf and the quest for new experiences. Between waves, spots are discovered, swells are missed, boards are shaped and pranks are pulled. Lives are carved out or destroyed.

The best surf stories retain the vitality and rough edges of tales told around the fire while also contributing to the great and loose canon of surfing lore. They belong to an oral tradition, one passed from surfer to surfer on flat days or after epic sessions. The Hawaiians call it “talking story,” and surfers around the world have picked up on the practice. How else do those of us who surf in L.A. know that the surf spot County Line isn’t on the county line (that’s a place called Heavens), or that Zeroes isn’t the one with all the zeroes in the address (that’s called Staircase)? We know because someone told us. And if we got it wrong, they’d calls us “kooks” until we got it right.

In the introduction to “Surfing’s Greatest Misadventures,” editors Paul Diamond and Tyler McMahon declare their intention of creating “a book of surf stories for the people by the people.” The stories, culled from surf journalists, filmmakers, watermen and everyday surfers, are a vivid and thrilling portrait of surfing and surf culture.

Diamond and McMahon have done well to focus on misadventures. There’s something special about stories in which people find themselves in over their heads. It’s a feeling familiar to any surfer, a reminder to be humble in the face of the awesome power of the ocean.

And in this collection, there’s plenty of humility to go around. Terry Gibson loses a fellow surf traveler to a shark in South Africa’s Transkei. Regular-guy surfer Joe Doggett finds himself in trouble while surfing Oahu’s North Shore with friend and big-wave charger Ken Bradshaw. Shawn Alladio, one of the world’s most experienced personal-watercraft drivers, rescues surfer Ian Armstrong after a massive wipeout at Dungeons in South Africa.

A surprising number of these stories go beyond a thrills-and-spills approach, penetrating deeper into the culture. Matt George’s “Three Portraits of Sumatra” celebrates the surfing prowess of a new generation while also questioning whether today’s traveling surfer exploits more than he explores. Ben Marcus’ account of Miki Dora’s antics and Steve Pezman’s memories of sparring with Marines from Camp Pendleton at Trestles beach (now part of San Onofre State Beach) summon nostalgia for the old days of surfing, when the sport was the domain of beach bums and ne’er-do-wells.

“Surfing’s Greatest Misadventures” makes for gripping reading -- as one would expect from a book with sections labeled “Sharks” and “Big Water, Big Trouble.” But in the end, what’s remarkable is how moving the stories can be. They stick in the memory. Just the other day, while walking back to my house after a surf session, I caught myself repeating one of the stories to a friend as if it were something I’d heard from another surfer. “By the people, for the people” indeed.

Steven Kotler’s “West of Jesus: Surfing, Science, and the Origins of Belief” is the ideal book for any readers who have ever asked themselves, “How did surfing take over my life?” Kotler brings us closer to the answers via a wild, globe-trotting journey in search of surfing’s much-referenced but rarely discussed spiritual side.

Having been out of commission for two years while struggling with Lyme disease, Kotler is ill, depressed and on the brink of suicide when a friend offers to take him surfing. Despite the fact that he hasn’t been in the water for six years, he decides to go. After only one wave, he’s hooked again, and he begins surfing as regularly as his health will allow.

Before long, he starts to feel better, and he marvels at surfing’s salutary effects: “Since a typical wave lasts about five seconds, a typical session produced about twenty-five seconds of actual wave-riding time. In the time during which surfing was saving my life, I totaled a little over an hour of actual surfing.”

An hour’s worth of wave riding -- spread out over 18 months -- is enough to pull him out of the physical and spiritual hole he’s found himself in.

Then, in 2003, after a heavy wipeout in Mexico, he is consoled by a fellow surfer who tells him the story of “the Conductor,” a mythical surfer who can control the weather with a baton made of bone. The story sounds familiar to Kotler, who realizes he’s heard it before -- seven years prior, in Indonesia, after a similarly bad wipeout. The coincidence piques his interest, and he decides to track down the story’s roots, hoping that through an understanding of the story, he might also gain insight into how surfing effected such a powerful change in his life.

It’s a conceit, and it wears thin at times, particularly when Kotler takes a multi-chapter detour to try to establish a date for the genesis of the Conductor story. Here he approaches his subject with the enthusiasm and flexibility of a conspiracy theorist, drawing from “General Hospital,” military weather modification programs, the 1965 passage of the Immigration and Naturalization Act and the release of the film “The Endless Summer” in 1966. Just when it seems as though Kotler is on the verge of, in his words, “following an idea right off the edge of the world,” he brings the book back to earth with a surf trip to New Zealand. He doesn’t make much progress on the Conductor story, but he does find fellow surf travelers, treacherous waves and places to stay.

As the central mystery and object of his quest -- the white whale of the book -- the Conductor story pales in comparison to Kotler’s on-the-ground portrait of the surfari lifestyle. From California and Mexico to Bali, New Zealand and Hawaii, Kotler depicts the rituals, stories and traditions of surfing with a keen eye for detail and a wide-ranging curiosity. He’s also got a knack for explaining the basics of surfing and waves without interrupting the flow -- thereby making the book accessible to experienced surfers and neophytes alike.

Kotler’s quest for the roots of the Conductor story eventually provides a vehicle, however rickety, for him to take us through some wildly varied territories and experiences, including bungee jumping, mystical visions and so-called near-death experiences. In the end, he delivers a plausible theory about why surfing appears to generate more transcendent states than other sports do -- something about how a good ride in real surf brings together danger, novelty and pinpoint concentration, which can also trigger, apparently, mystical states.

Perhaps the lesson here is that you can’t eff the ineffable. You can only paddle out and catch some waves for yourself. As for the quest, the heart of it might be best summed up in Kotler’s impressions the day he first saw the Pacific Ocean, in Malibu, and noticed a pack of surfers bobbing in the lineup. “They seemed to have learned something the rest of us had missed -- what that was I did not know, but I remember wanting to find out.”