In December 1987, I was flying back from the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe, where I'd spent the week covering a World Cup windsurfing competition for Sailboard News. My seatmates on the Air France flight were both lifelong surfers, one the editor of a California windsurfing magazine and the other a freelance photographer. Charting a course northwest, their eyes seldom left the window as they scanned the chain of islands far below for notable wave breaks.
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| Agatha Christie, 1922 (photo: British Museum of Surfing) | |
I thought of those guys recently after reading about an Agatha Christie photo exhibition in London marking the 125th anniversary of her birth. According to the Guardian, among the show's attractions were "photographs of her surfing on to an idyllic Muizenberg beach in South Africa."
Tell me the truth. When you think of surfing, who comes to mind first: the Beach Boys or Agatha Christie? And yet, Christie "was something of a pioneering and diehard wave-rider," as the Guardian noted a few years ago. Miss Marple's creator and her first husband "may been among the first Britons to learn how to surf standing up."
As a reader at least, surfing has been on my radar ever since I worked for that windsurfing magazine. In recent years, I've read several fascinating books about the sport and lifestyle, including William Finnegan's Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life; Chas Smith's Welcome to Paradise, Now Go to Hell; and The Wave: In Pursuit of the Rogues, Freaks and Giants of the Ocean by Susan Casey. Tim Winton's Breath is my favorite surfing novel.
In her autobiography, Christie writes that while staying in Hawaii she "learned to become expert--or at any rate expert from the European point of view--the moment of complete triumph on the day that I kept my balance and came right into shore standing upright on my board!"
I'm not a surfer, but I understand the learning curve. And I'll never forget that image of my colleagues gazing out a jet window, reading the waves. --Robert Gray, contributing editor