The Closest Thing To Being Born

"Still, any board is a crutch," said Egan the other day. "If you're talking about total involvement, we're already there. I don't know about you, but if I had two good legs I'd want to walk on them. I wouldn't use crutches."

"A rotten parallel, sir," said Bob Bell, another board rider who was formerly a cook at Th' Dorymen Fish 'n Chips in Newport. "An example that means nothing. The difference in body surfing and belly boarding is one of class and style. It is like a Porsche vs. a Volkswagen. If you want to go slow you drive a Volks, fast, a Porsche. A board is fast."

"Are you saying belly boarding is more bitchin' than body surfing?" said Egan.

"I'm not," said Sinner. "I'm saying it's different, faster."

"I am," said Bell. "I'm saying it's more bitchin'."

"Our sport is like the Greeks," said Chris Klinke, another body man. "No artifacts do we need. Just man and nature. You miss the experience with the board. You miss the naturalism, the bare, basic humanity of the body alone against the water. That—my God—is no Volkswagen."

"Klinke, you're full of it," said Sinner.

Almost every Wedge regular, be he body man or short-board aficionado, desires only one thing beyond catching the perfect wave and riding it into the jaws of eternity. And that is taking a picture of it. Photography is the chief avocation of Wedge men, and if, as some people have it, they are masochistic in nature, wishing to be whipped around and crushed on the sea floor, they are, by the same token, no less megalomaniac because they love to watch themselves doing it or being done in by it.

"It's an ego thing, certainly," says Nick Hudson. "But it's also something to do when you're not in the water. You can't be out there in the Wedge all the time. And when you're onshore and you see a big one you just want to die. So you do the next best thing—photograph it and the guys on it. It eases the pain. It's bitchin'."

"We want to express ourselves in our photography," says Bell. "It's probably an obsession, but it's neat. Look at this equipment I have. Is it bitchin'? Look at these pictures. Can you see the expressions on the face? You can just count the hairs on the man's face, that's all."