William Finnegan's "Black Sea Blues" ran in the August 15, 1999, issue of the New Yorker

I could have been the first man to surf the Black Sea. I got off a bus in a coastal village somewhere in northern Turkey, and there it was: brown and misty and full of mediocre, blown-out waves, dribbling in from the general direction of Odessa. This was 1970. I was a hippie surf punk from California dialed into the world surf underground (if not much else), and was therefore fairly certain that the Black Sea hadn’t been surfed. I didn’t have a board, but I figured I’d find something to ride. The beach was deserted, but I saw in the distance a couple of decrepit cafés at the edge of the sand. One of them probably had an old German paddleboard lying around. The water would feel good. I’d have something cool to claim. Instead, I turned and trudged inland through hot, scrubby dunes, got to the middle of nowhere, and had a little nervous breakdown.

My problem, Doctor, was freedom. I was 17, and I had taken advantage of a certain lapse in cultural authority to declare myself a sovereign state. That summer, my girlfriend and I were bumming around Western Europe, living on crackers and fresh air, sleeping under the stars. C., also 17, also from California, but less callow than I, had grown tired of the merciless pace I set—the gruelling pilgrimages to rock festivals (Bath) and surf towns (Biarritz) and the old haunts (and graves) of my favorite writers—and she’d finally dug in her heels on the western Greek island of Corfu after I announced that I had a burning desire to see more “Turkish influence.” I could go hunt for Ottoman minarets on my own, she said. And so I up and left her on the remote, mountain-backed beach where we’d been camping 

 Neither of us, I suppose, believed I would really do it, but I was adept at, if nothing else, moving quickly through strange territory at low cost, and within a week I was in Turkey itself, newly intent on traveling overland to India. Motion, new companions, new lands were my drugs in those days—I found they did wonders for addled adolescent nerves. Turkish influence had fascinated me for about half an hour. Now only Tamil influence would do.

But something about that Black Sea beach brought it all to a grinding halt. The emptiness, the silence, the familiar but unexpected sight of surf, the beckoning goofy feat. Had I really left my girl alone in the boondocks in Greece? Nubile, smart-mouthed, tenderhearted C., whose mother, once she saw that we were actually catching that rattletrap charter to London, had ordered me desperately to watch out for her baby? I looked back now and felt like Orpheus seeing Eurydice get sucked down into Hades, except that I hadn’t tried to rescue her; I’d just abandoned her on the trail. My lust for new scenes, new adventures, had seemed all-important. It wasn’t. At least, it vanished in a bitter puff as I lay there in the Turkish scrub and dogs barked and darkness fell and I saw myself not as the dauntless leading lad of my own shining road movie but as a hapless fuckup: deadbeat boyfriend, overgrown runaway, scared kid in need of a shower. Also far, very far, from home.

The next morning, I started back toward Europe. I got picked up by a kind journalist and his family from Ankara, who took me to a resort on the Sea of Marmara. They fed me, washed my clothes, studied me wonderingly. I was, for them, an outrider from a wild new Western tribe—children who had suddenly won, somehow, unprecedented amounts of permission. For me, the question was becoming: Permission to do what? I wrote the family a midnight thank-you note and split without saying goodbye.

Europe turned out to be harder to reenter than it had been to leave. There was a cholera scare, and the borders with Greece and Bulgaria were closed. I bounced around Istanbul, walking along the Bosporus, sleeping on roofs. I tried to go to Romania, but Ceauşescu’s sentinels reckoned I was a decadent parasite and refused me a visa. Then the police raided a flophouse where I was staying. They arrested three Brits, who were convicted the next day of hashish possession and sentenced to several years each. I moved to another roof. I wrote brave, boastful postcards: hey, no photograph could do justice to the beauty of the Blue Mosque.

But I was frantic about C. Although she had said that she would find her way to Germany, where we had friends, I kept imagining the worst. I bought her a cheap purse in the Grand Bazaar. I befriended other stranded Westerners. Finally, I broke down and phoned home. It took all day to get through. Hanging around the vast old post office: an idle, scruffy foreigner, heretically long-haired, squatting like a beggar in the shadows, offending the eyes of busy clerks and shop owners running their workday errands. Then the connection was awful. My mother’s voice sounded terribly frail, as though she had aged 50 years. I kept asking what was wrong. I told her I was in Istanbul, but I still hadn’t asked for news of C.—nor mentioned that I hadn’t seen her in weeks—when the line went dead.

In the end, I bribed some Bulgarian border guards, made my way through the Balkans and over the Alps, and found C. in a campground near Munich. She was fine. A little wary. Yes, I said, I’d got my fill of Turkish influence. She accepted the purse. We resumed our rambles: Switzerland, the Black Forest, Paris. In Amsterdam, we heard that Jimi Hendrix would be playing in Rotterdam. We planned to go. Then, suddenly, Hendrix was dead. This was a couple of weeks before Janis Joplin. (Jim Morrison was the following July.) It was slowly becoming obvious that not all of us would get out of this funhouse alive.

C. and I flew home. I started college. The structure suited me—for a year. Then I dropped out and moved to Hawaii to live in a car and surf. C., though doubtful, came along. I worked in a bookstore. She worked in an ice-cream parlor. She hung in there for quite a while, really. And then she didn’t.

I later became a foreign correspondent. Sometimes, though, I feel like I’m still in Istanbul, 1970. My addiction, never conquered, to the remote leads me over some distant horizon, deep into the peculiar intellectual ecstasies of the unfamiliar, and then into nineteenth-nervous-breakdown territory, and then I’m scrambling to find my way home. Meanwhile, I’ve left those whom I should be looking after to fend for themselves. My freedom problem persists, Doc. But—have you noticed?—everybody surfs now. Decadent young parasites are probably carving artful S-turns in windblown dribble off Odessa as we speak.

[“Black Sea Blues” first ran in a 1999 issue of the New Yorker.]

“BLACK SEA BLUES,” BY WILLIAM FINNEGAN (1999)

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