If you’ve ever seen the Keanu Reeves movie "Point Break," you may recall the scene where Reeves’s character buys his first surfboard.
The salesman is a preternaturally wise adolescent. As Reeves walks out of the shop, the young clerk offers him some vaguely mystical parting advice.
This idea — that surfing is "the source," and that it has the power to change your life, was likely pulled from the book on which "Point Break" is loosely based — "Tapping the Source," by Kem Nunn.
Nunn’s book is a seminal text in a literary subgenre known as "surf noir" — hard-boiled stories of criminal desperation that unfold by the sea. When David M. Olsen first read Kem Nunn, it inspired him to do two things: read as much surf noir as he could possibly get his hands on and start surfing several days a week.
These days, Olsen is a writer and editor, and he’s just released his third curated anthology of surf noir stories, "The Amber Waves of Autumn." The collection features authors ranging from literary legends like Joyce Carol Oates to local favorites like Jeffrey Kronenfeld.
He told The Show that editing surf noir is the culmination of a lifelong fascination.
Full conversation
DAVID M. OLSEN: I was born in Southern California and I grew up on the ocean side, which is kind of a grittier Southern California beach, at least it was back then. And I remember finding, like, hash pipes on the beach and like, seeing like these, you know, edgy kind of like guys that were, you know, like surf bums, you know, that everything in life centers around surf, and they’ll do whatever they can to scrape together, get their, you know, food and lodging needs so they can just surf as much as they possibly can.
SAM DINGMAN: Right, that’s the prime directive.
OLSEN: Yeah, exactly. I always thought that was kind of fascinating, just sort of way to live as a sort of beach bum or surf bum. But, you know, I think that that sort of lifestyle lends itself to some, some noir themes as well depending on what people do to survive and continue to surf.
DINGMAN: What did you find when you actually started surfing? Like did you connect with it differently as an activity once it became something that you yourself were doing?
OLSEN: Yeah, I didn’t start committing crimes to surf, certainly.
DINGMAN: That’s good, that's good.
OLSEN: What I’ve found personally is that I really connect with just being in the water, in the ocean, in that sort of natural element with it sort of all around me. And it allows me to sort of reset, my connection to the ocean is almost spiritual in a way. And I’ve found that, if I don’t get out, at least, you know, three days a week, I start to feel off, you know?
DINGMAN: Yeah, could I ask you to say more about that? Do you have language for what that feeling of reset that the ocean gives you? Is it concrete in any way or is it more just a feeling?
OLSEN: Yeah, I mean, can you find the words for it? No. I can write about it probably for years to come and never quite find it. But, in some areas, especially very popular surf breaks, there can be a lot of people, crowded around one, like, good wave, like it’s breaking in a certain specific place. And so you’ll get, you know, 20 or 30 guys out there and, you know, and it’s sort of inevitable that not everyone’s, you know, obeying the same unwritten rules, which is a whole nother sort of topic that we can talk about, the rules of surfing. And, I prefer not to be in heavy lineups. I’m looking for that inner peace, that connection with nature.
DINGMAN: It’s interesting to me that you brought up this idea of the unwritten rules of this world, because I think of noir stories as people who, you know, usually about people who break the rules, and most basic definition of it.
OLSEN: They break laws like, you know, big social contract laws, but they usually have very specific sets of rules that they’ll follow that make sense to them.
DINGMAN: Right, and oftentimes the main characters in noir stories, whether it’s surfing or otherwise, are people who understand both sets of rules. The official ones and not so official ones. What are some of the unwritten rules of surfing?
OLSEN: I mean, when you’re starting out, if you’re obviously new and kind of floundering around there, they call you a kook. And this is one part of surfing that I generally don’t like is that people who think that they’re like the best surfer out there, or this is their local break, this is a very territorial sport, which is funny, too. They think that they can just take every wave, right?
You know, so there’s certain guys out there like, “I am who I am, you should know who I am, don’t get near me when I'm paddling into a wave, I’ll run you over.” And then there’s like the actual rules, which are, you know, if you paddle out, there’s a rotation and the guys, there’s a certain point at which is the probably the best spot to take off on a wave, and people sort of paddle into that spot in you know, in sort of a line, you know, a line up. And so you take turns getting into position. So, you know, a kook might just kind of like paddle, right past a few guys.
Or there’s the dreaded drop in. So, for those who don’t know what a drop in is, if somebody is standing up on a wave surfing and you’re down the wave a bit and you catch the wave and stand up and sort of block them from moving the direction they’re going on, that’s called a drop in. And so anyway, those are, don’t drop in, you know, respect the rotation and whoever the surf god is at the time, you have to respect them.
DINGMAN: Right. These are all, I have to say, you know, obviously it’s somewhat tinged by nature of the collection of stories we’re talking about. But you could imagine those rules if you take the surfing context away just in the words they would map very neatly onto, say, like a criminal organization.
OLSEN: Totally, right. And I can’t remember the name of the beach. There’s a beach in Southern California. I think it’s Rancho Palos Verdes or something like that, where there was like a surf gang in real life. And in real life is this group of surfers that live there, and they would slash tires and like jump people they didn’t know for trying to surf there. Well, and I just remember reading this article recently like, so the city finally decided to do something about it.
And I was like, oh, interesting. Well, you know, did they hire law enforcement? What do they do? And it was like they put some signs up that said, you know, be respectful of everybody out here or something. Like I was just thinking, wow, they solved it, and that was it. They’re definitely not gonna have any more trouble with an appropriately chill couple of signs, definitely going to deter these people.
DINGMAN: So is this a world that you write in yourself?
OLSEN: Yeah. I’ve been working on a novel for the past two years about a female big wave surfer whose mom was killed eight years ago, and then sort of a body washes ashore. Takes place here in Pebble Beach. There’s a famous surf break here at Pebble Beach that breaks at 40, 50, 60, 70 feet called Ghost Tree. And I developed this character sort of around some of the actual people I’ve met that have surfed the wave. They used to surf there a lot until there was a local legend that drowned out there. His name was Peter Davi, but it’s about a mother-daughter duo that surf that big wave and then the mom sort of goes missing.
DINGMAN: Over the course of our conversation, you have referenced a couple times this idea of the danger inherent in surfing. So much noir storytelling, I find, is about our desire to find safe ways of leaning into our curiosity about death and depravity and what it would be like to live in the underworld and if we could survive it. The ocean is such a concrete representation of the promise and the peril of being alive.
OLSEN: Totally, I mean, I would be lying if I didn’t think about my mortality every time I went out. And specifically here on Monterey Bay, we’re on the red, I think it’s called the red triangle, which is the primary migratory path of the great white shark. So I’ve had close friends, you know, attacked by them. And so that’s, you know, it’s something that you think about.
DINGMAN: But if I’m hearing it right, at least it’s worth it, that spiritual reset that it can deliver.
OLSEN: It is and, you know, I use it as a term of medication. And, you know, I like breath focus so I’m out there, I’m just focusing on the breath and then I’m focusing on being present and just feeling the water on my skin. And it resets me in every special way.
