FLOW STATE - CONSIDERING OUR HOLLOWS OF CONSEQUENCE.

It’s odd that, historically speaking, the tube remained uninhabited territory for so long. The conventional line is that it was the board’s fault, that those big, heavy balsas and longboards were too crude, too ungainly to fit into that hollow space between the lip and the face. I’m of the opinion that it wasn’t a failure of the board, but of the imagination. Case in point: two examples of what would someday become the modern tube ride, filmed in the early 1960s and featured in Bruce Brown’s The Endless Summer, the most successful surfing documentary of all time. In the film’s Waikiki sequence, surfer Wayne Miyata is shown doing what Brown describes as “the ultimate thing,” wheeling his big board in from behind the peak at a hollow little wave called “Garbage Hole,” pulling in under the lip, completely disappearing from view, then exiting the curl cleanly; Miyata even gives us the first modern claim. Why Town surfers didn’t start riding Kaisers Bowl in the same manner for another five or so years is the real mystery.



Of course, Miyata’s waist-high tube would literally be dwarfed in the film’s climactic Pipeline sequence, in which Windansea brawler Butch Van Artsdalen, also riding a big, heavy longboard, drops in late into a clean Banzai barrel, pulls up mid-face, and locks himself into the curl behind the curtain, only to emerge into the sunlight with his own arrogant version of the claim: sitting down and clapping his hands. Viewed today, you’re seeing a performance that, though apparently unrepeated for almost a decade, actually presented the template that would be applied to the world’s most famous wave by every Pipeline master right up until the first appearance of Michael Ho’s “Pig Dog’ in 1982. My point: it wasn’t the surfboards; it was the head space. We had been shown how the tube could be ridden in big waves and small, we just couldn’t see ourselves in there. The tube was still a mysterious place.

The late 1960s “Shortboard Revolution” supercharged this mystique. No doubt about it, the shorter boards made it easier to fit into the tube and, more than any other innovation since the invention of the fin, riding in the tube was a revelation. Though why no one thought to ask Miyata or Van Artsdalen what went on behind the curtain is beyond me.



Oh, cameras had been taken into the tube before. Efforts by futurists like Greenough, Steve Wilkings, and Warren Bolster producing spectacular results. As far back as 1972, the surf film Red Hot Blue featured Pipe Prince Rory Russell riding deep in mid-sized barrels while wearing a clumsy camera helmet. Yet these were only single frames or glimpses, still leaving much to the viewer’s imagination. GoPro POVs, on the other hand, and eventually in the mouth, graphically usurped our collective imagination, exposing every moment, every nuance, every water drop, and every aspect of the space once thought rare. Serving it up, in both realtime and epic slow motion, for minutely detailed examination. Amazing to see, especially for the vast majority of surfers who’ll never get to ride a 50-second Skeleton Bay barrel themselves, but I’ll assert, with a nod to Shaun Tomson, that with the advent of the GoPro tube ride, time in there might slow down, but at the same time something was definitely lost, the mystery was gone.

So how do the two examples of remarkable tube riding referenced at the beginning of this story connect with this theory of mine? It’s in what has replaced the mystery I’ve been referring to. Surfers today are riding such intense waves, and riding them so intensely, that their tube rides are no longer experiences, but achievements; they’re not shaping the tubes with their minds, they’re surfing out of their minds. Still, even with this shift in consciousness, does it make what these incredibly talented men and women are doing in them any less “the ultimate thing?”



Gratefully, no. Scroll to the end of that Maps to nowhere video where little Caity Simmers re-defined female tube riding in Cape Verde. Simmers exits the water after a tube ride so long it has a plot. A dramatic first, second, and third act, finishing with a traditional Hollywood happy ending. Then she gets a camera stuck in her face, asked how she feels, and you can see how she’s struggling to put it together. Finally, with a look of glazed amazement, she can only giggle, saying, “It was the wave of my life. I was freaking out.”

Making it clear that while she may not have been genuflecting in the crystal cathedral, or striving toward the mystic eye, but riding that tube in her modern fashion, going full anaerobic, sprinting through a cylindrical obstacle course as if running from a burning building…consider that, and it becomes obvious that any trip through the interior of any wave is still, well, a real trip.

By Sam George
Photography by Manu Miguelez