Evening Republican, Volume 15, Number 201, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 25 August 1911 — SURF RIDING IS FINE [ARTICLE]

SURF RIDING IS FINE

Kanaka stands amidst the SWIFT RUNNING WAVES. Jack London’s Vivid Description of “”-TfiTS~Sbuth Sea Amusement as Practiced at Waikiki Beach. Much has been written the native sport of surfriding in the South seas, but the following description from London’s “Cruise of the Snark,” is novel and very vivid. The locality referred to is Waikiki beach, near Honolulu: The trees ,grow right down to th© Salty edges of things, and one sits in their shade and looks seaward at a majestic surf thundering in on the beach to one’s very feet. Half a mile out, where is the reef, the white heading combers thrust suddenly skyward out of the placid turquoise blue and come rolling in to shore. And suddenly, out there where a big smoker lifts skyward, rising like a seagod from out of the weltef of spume and churning white, on the ’giddy, toppling, overhanging- . and downfalling, precarious crest appears the dark head .of a man. Swiftly he rises through the rushing white. His black shoulders, Ms chest, his loins, his limbs—all is abruptly projected on one’s vision. Where but the moment before was only the wide desolation and invincible roar, is now a man, erect, full statured, not struggling frantically in that wild movement, not buried and crushed and buffeted by those mighty monsters, but standing above them all, calm and superb, poised on the giddy summit, his feet burled in the churning foam, the salt smoke rising to his knees, and all the rest of him in the free air and flashing sunlight, and he is flying through the air, flying forward, flying fast as the surge on which he stands. He is a Mercury—a Mown Mercury. His heels are winged, and in them is the swiftness of the sea. In truth, from out of the sea he has leaped upon the back of the sea, and he is riding the sea that roars and bellows and cannot shake him from its back; But no frantic outreachin* and balancing is his. He is impassive, motionless as a statue carved suddenly by some miracle out of the sea’s depths from which he rose. And straight on toward shbre he flies on his winged heels and the white crest of the breaker.. There is a wild burst of-foam, a long multitudinous rushing sound as the breaker falls futile and spent at your feet; and there, at your feet steps calmly ashore a Kanaka.