Peter Heller: Surfer goes from kook to shredder

Clueless novice surfer sets a midlife goal - to turn himself into a real shredder in 6 months

"I just got up from the beach and hung up my wetsuit," Peter Heller says, with an earnest, easy laugh. It's a few minutes past 9:30 a.m. on a weekday, and the 51-year-old adventure writer has already put in a few hours at one of his favorite surf spots: Seal Beach. 

It's not far from where Heller first attempted surfing six years ago in Orange County, at Huntington Beach, a.k.a. Surf City, U.S.A. "Huntington Beach is like ground zero for surfers. I was an idiot." 

Surfing is a surface water sport. Two major subdivisions within stand-up surfing are longboarding and shortboarding, reflecting differences in surfboard design including surfboard length, and riding style. In tow-in surfing (most often, but not exclusively, associated with big wave surfing), a motorized water vehicle, such as a personal watercraft tows the surfer into the wave front, helping the surfer match a large wave's higher speed, a speed that is generally, but not exclusively a speed that a self-propelled surfer can not match.

His first day on the waves was like being the new dorky kid at school - on a beginner's hand-me-down board called an Egg in an orange wetsuit with his pal Andy, trying to teach themselves how to surf and be cool. They were anything but. 

And for Heller, not only was he a novice, he was the worst kind, a "kook," a condescending surf term for a beginner so clueless, he is a danger to everyone out on the waves. "It's really humbling," Heller says, looking back. "Surfing is a life path. You have to really commit. ... You have to let go and have faith that it's gonna work out when you take off," be it a wave or anything else. 

After a few days of failing at surfing, the author says, he was experiencing the kind of awakening that many encounter, the midlife crisis. Even though he had just wrapped up a book about his two-month expedition kayaking Tibet's sacred Tsangpo Gorge, "Hell or High Water," Heller says he realized that he most definitely was a kook, and in every way - with relationships and with living a meaningful life. 

Determined to shed his kook status, the author took lessons from the surf master, the Saint of Seal Beach, and learned to hold his own. He returned home to Denver and didn't get to surf much, but work assignments over the next couple of years would take him back out to sea. He missed surfing and knew what he had to do. 

He decided that he would go from kook to "shredder," a surfer's surfer, and ride the perfect wave, a "big hollow," in six months. 

It would seem like an absurd goal for the then-48-year-old, but, "I like the drinking-out-of-the-fire-hose approach - you're getting way more than you can handle," he says. 

But just two months into his surfing journey in Mexico, he got a call from the filmmakers working on the Oscar-winning fishing industry documentary, "The Cove." The director Louie Psihoyos had read Heller's book on the whaling industry, "The Whale Warriors," and asked him to join them in Japan. They hid cameras and Heller had to dress in all black and paddle into "the cove," an inlet where "the rocks were painted red with blood," from the killing of pilot whales, he says. 

When he got back, Heller says he cried for weeks before he could go back to Mexico and his surfing journey. He was a changed man. The result is his latest book, "Kook: What Surfing Taught Me about Love, Life, and Catching the Perfect Wave." 

His next book is a collection of a new form of poetry that he has yet to name. After that, he plans to take a break from reality, writing fiction for a change. "I'm very excited at the idea of making everything up."

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