We’re all someone else’s hipster

Siding with the bearded and bow-tied

Last week I saw a couple of surfers collide.

No big deal, no-one got hurt, but the situation was ugly. Conditions have been messy for weeks now, so as soon as there was something surfable, everyone showed up. The ocean seemed full of black bowling pins, bobbing all the way out to the horizon.

It was the kid’s fault. He dropped in, and even after the first impact he still didn’t seem to realise what he’d done. Once he saw the size of the red-faced, shaven-headed rock ape he’d smashed into, though, reality set in pretty quickly.

“Sorry”.
“You dropped in on me. Fuck!”
“I’m sorry”.
“Fuck. Have a fucking look. Your board smashed me in the fucking mouth”. [That was untrue. I saw the whole thing. Nothing went near his mouth.]
“Sorry”.
“Fuckin’ hell. Watch what you’re doing. That’s the only wave I’ve had all day”. [That, too, was untrue. He’d caught at least three or four that I’d seen before that.]
“Fuckin’ little dickhead”.

At this point, I could see the kid, who couldn’t have been more than sixteen, was pretty scared. The big rock ape hadn’t yet paddled away and I was a bit worried that he might decide a punch in the head would teach the kid a lesson.

“Alright, mate. He said he was sorry”.

There was a lot more I would have liked to say, but the rock ape looked like he could lift me out of the water and throw me back to shore. He didn’t, thankfully, but he took a long look at me, looked down at the Purple Sage (my old Crozier single fin) and sneered at me.

“Piss off, hipster”.

Then he paddled back out.

And that was that.

Had it been a couple of weeks earlier, his comment probably would have annoyed me enough to make me say something that would have earned me a black eye or a fat lip, if not a broken jaw. But happily, I’d read Sean Doherty’s piece, De-evolution, about hipsters in surfing, and I’d been thinking about the way different people approach the same thing. If you haven’t read it, you should.

I’ll be honest, I’ve hung shit on the hipsters in the past and will again in the future. They’re annoying in lots of ways, not the least their need to conflate “doing something” and “art”. Within a few short years they’ve rendered the word “artisanal” meaningless. (I swear it’s only a matter of days before I walk past an artisanal butcher, artisanal baker and artisanal candlestick maker all in a row). Approaching a task with care and attention does not necessarily make you an artist or an artisan. It used to be called concentration, and it was pretty common before we all started carrying entertainment systems in our pockets.

But the flip side is that hipsters seem to try a little harder to find some meaning in what they do. They may have stumbled onto it clumsily, bearded and bow-tied, but nonetheless, they’ve recognised that there’s a reward in craft for craft’s sake, and discovered the corresponding appreciation for experimentation and diversity. In surfing, that seems to have manifested in the “ride everything, it’s all surfing” mentality, and that’s something you don’t have to be a hipster to share.

In his article, Doherty says that probably the most defining feature of the surfing hipster is “just how goddamn nauseatingly happy they seem to be”.

“Cruising along a wave, their mind free and unburdened by the pressing need to turn, simply soaking it all in, these guys wouldn’t be anywhere else on Earth.”

As soon as I read that line, and I’ve read back over it a few times now, I knew it to be me. I don’t know if it’s because I’ve come back to surfing late, with a slender but persistent regret for the years I missed, but every time I’m in the water – even driving there and driving home – I’m elated, brimming with a serene and honest gratitude. The line-up’s pretty empty when I’m the most talented surfer in the water, but it’s pretty rare that I’m not the most stoked.

So, I was fine when the rock ape called me a hipster. Sitting on my beat up old single fin, grinning like an idiot and pleading for calm, I’m sure I looked like a hipster to him. In the end, we’re all someone else’s hipster. And if I have to choose between the kooks riding anything that will float just for the joy of it, and the serious guys on performance shortboards who’ve come to “carve”, “rip” and “shred”, I’ll side with joy every time.