LITMIR.BIZ

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conditions outside Biarritz”), and several places in the Caribbean.¹⁵ When Troy reached Florida, he was quickly adopted by Miami’s “surfing fraternity”—a term he applied to his fellow surfers worldwide—which showed him around the city and introduced him to the Florida waves.¹⁶ Desperate to make it to California, he found work as a driver, delivering a vehicle across the United States to Los Angeles, from where he immediately boarded a flight to Hawai‘i. He did so, he wrote to his parents, “with visions in my mind of the lei clad Hawaiian girls in costume and the balmy weather of this romantic island group blessed with the best climate of any place in the world and the venue for the International and World surfing Championships at Makaha—my dream of a lifetime almost now in reality—in fact, no turning back even if I wanted to.”¹⁷

      Troy was not able to compete at Makaha; the start of the contest was moved up because of favorable wave conditions, and Troy arrived too late. He did, however, get to surf the warm Hawaiian waters, though a couple of unfortunate wipeouts at Pipeline and Sunset Beach left him with a badly lacerated face and coral abrasions on the shoulder, back, right foot, and elbow.¹⁸ From Hawai‘i he would be going to Peru, but Troy first took a return detour to California—a state whose wealth and technology amazed him. The day the Australian spent viewing the ostentatious lifestyle of Los Angeles’s rich and famous was “one of the most eye[-]opening days I have yet had the fortune to live.”¹⁹ But California was intended as a mere stopover. Traveling through Mexico by automobile and train, Troy departed from Mexico City with a friend for Lima. In the Peruvian capital, he proceeded to the coastal district of Miraflores, the heart of the Peruvian surf community, which had a long history. As far back as 3000 BCE, indigenous fishermen in Peru were riding waves on bundled reeds now called caballitos (little horses). However, the country’s modern surfing history dates only to the 1920s, when a number of Peruvians took to riding homemade boards on the beaches of Barranco, a popular community along the Lima coast. Then, in 1939, Carlos Dogny, a wealthy sugarcane heir, returned from a trip to Hawai‘i, where he had learned to surf, bringing with him a board he was given by Duke Kahanamoku. At Miraflores in 1942, Dogny founded Club Waikiki.²⁰

      Club Waikiki served as the center of the Peruvian surf community. It was here that Troy discovered the contingency of surf culture: what was sometimes considered a disreputable activity in Australia or the United States could be a marker of wealth and privilege in portions of the Third World. The club was invitation only and restricted to two hundred members, each of whom paid a substantial entrance fee (approximately $1,200 in 1964) followed by monthly dues. The beachfront grounds were extravagant. They contained a squash court, two pelota courts, a shuffleboard court, workout facilities, a heated pool, dining facilities with jacket-and bow-tie-clad waiters serving four-course meals, a bar, a marble dance floor, and staff to wax and carry one’s surfboard to and from the water. Troy found this arrangement difficult to take. A “native laborer” would have to work twenty-five hours to earn the cost of his lunch, he wrote, as “per head of population” Peru had, according to Troy, “the second lowest standard of living in the civilized world.” “[T]o eat at the Club Waikiki with a hundred hungry Indians looking down on you” from the hilltop above required “some mental adjustment,” he confessed. Still, “[w]hen in Peru do as the idle, wealthy, aristocratic Peruvians do!” he wrote home.²¹ And he did. His existence was certainly not as ostentatious as that of one member, a thirty-two-year-old bachelor who owned three Jaguars and a helicopter, the latter of which he would use to go surfing during the lunch hour.²² But neither was it modest. In Peru, surfing was an elite sport. Troy did not bat an eye, for instance, when, with the 1965 World Surfing Championships held in Lima, the president of the country received a delegation of visiting competitors at the Government Palace.²³

      If Club Waikiki awoke Troy to the elitism of Peruvian surf culture, Rio de Janeiro introduced him to the frenetic surf energy of Latin America’s largest nation. He arrived in Brazil in late May 1964, just weeks after the Brazilian armed forces overthrew, with American support, the democratically elected government of João Goulart. Troy had come far from his white-collar Australian roots. “[D]ressed in jeans, tattered shirt, locally made riding boots [ . . . ], long blonde [sic] hair, unshaven, suntanned, humping a bed-roll and cloth hammock and food sack, I cut quite a figure,” he wrote his parents from the bush.²⁴ Troy unwittingly became a minor celebrity after riding the waves of Rio’s world-famous coast. He appeared on the front page of Brazilian newspapers, was interviewed for Brazilian television, and was consulted by the Brazilian lifesaving ser vices. Troy undertook his Latin American travels at a time when military rule was becoming firmly ensconced across the continent. Just two years after the Cuban Missile Crisis, Latin America in 1964 was deeply enmeshed in the Cold War. In Brazil, Troy expressed no interest in politics—at least he did not comment on the military regime in his letters home—but in Paraguay, where he traveled briefly after leaving São Paulo, Troy was impressed. The country was then living under the Alfredo Stroessner dictatorship. Stroessner came to power in 1954 following a military coup d’état, and he ruled the corrupt (and, for much of the time, U.S.-backed) Paraguayan state—one of the worst human rights violators in South America—until 1989. Troy recognized that Stroessner was a “dictator,” though he considered him a “popular” one, and “the country has made remarkable progress” under his rule, he told his parents in August 1964. The evidence cited by Troy illustrates the extent to which tourists hailing from the industrialized West often conflate material trappings that remind them of home with “progress” in the nations they are visiting. There were, Troy wrote of Paraguay under Stroessner, “machined fence posts, town indicators, mile signs[,] and direction indicators.”²⁵

      As the jaunt in landlocked Paraguay suggests, Troy spent more and more time away from the ocean. What was originally conceived as a surfing-centered voyage became a hitchhiking odyssey across vast swaths of the Latin American, European, and African interiors. There were occasional opportunities to surf, but Troy’s interests broadened with each passing mile. Still, there was no doubting the significance of his globe-trotting to the international surfing community. Peter Troy was, one of the Australians who discovered Lagundri Bay with him opined, “the grand-daddy of surf exploration,” spending years on the road with a backpack, some instruments with which to write, and a dwindling reserve of funds.²⁶ However, he was nowhere near as successful in popularizing surf exploration as were a couple of Southern California teenagers in the mid-1960s. Robert August and Mike Hynson are, to surfing enthusiasts today, house hold names. This is not because the two photogenic teens—one a blond-haired regularfoot, the other a dark-haired goofyfooter—racked up any championship trophies; neither of them, in fact, was a professional competitive surfer. Rather, August and Hynson just happened to be asked by a budding twenty-something film-maker whether they wanted to appear in his new movie.

      Bruce Brown had already made a series of popular films for surfing audiences in the late 1950s and early 1960s, among them the cleverly titled Slippery When Wet and Barefoot Adventure. All August and Hynson would have to do for Brown’s newest project, The Endless Summer, was to travel, smile, and surf. They would not even have to talk; Brown would provide the picture’s narration. August and Hynson readily agreed, and the result was Brown’s artful chronicle of the two surfers chasing the summer, with its warm water and consistent waves, from California to Africa and points between. Shot in 1963, The Endless Summer traveled the traditional surf-film circuit of civic center and high school auditoriums in California, Hawai‘i, Australia, and South Africa over the two years that followed. But Brown was convinced his documentary could appeal to a broader audience. With Gidget and the Annette Funicello/Frankie Avalon beach-party movies having achieved wide commercial success, surfing’s popular appeal at that time was unmistakable. No major distributor would touch the untested documentary, however. Brown thus decided to rent a venue “about as far as one can get from the ocean and surfing,” a press release for the film noted, so as to screen it to an audience of surf-culture neophytes.²⁷ By any mea sure, Wichita, Kansas, fit the bill. “[O]pening a surfing film in Wichita is like distributing Playboy Magazine in a monastery,” Brown opined. “In Wichita, most of the natives think surf is a new brand of detergent . . . or something.”²⁸ In spite of what would seem, by all reasonable predictions, to have been a uniformly disinterested audience of landlocked Midwesterners, The Endless Summer proved a runaway success.

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