"Seeing Cleary," by Jeff Duclos, ran in two issues of H20 magazine, back to back, in 2000 and 2001. Bill Cleary, the former editor of Surf Guide, was 63 when Duclos interviewed him, and would soon die Parkinson's disease. The interview below has been shortened and slightly edited from the original.

Great works of fiction have been written around fishing, mountain climbing, bull fighting—you name it. You'd think surfing would be the perfect environment in which to tell a story. It’s man against nature. It involves self-discovery.

It’s there and it’s not there. It’s transcendental more than anything else. The metaphor I love the most is when there is a set of waves, every now and then, the front one disappears and a new one appears instantaneously at the rear of the set. It’s like rebirth. Willard Bascomb's 

 is the best book I’ve ever read on that.

But that book’s not fiction. Some might say Tom Wolfe’s 

 is a great book on surfing but is it fiction or essay?

Well, really, it was just one essay in a book of essays. I remember reading it and really liking it. People talk about what 

 did and I would always get pumped up about that, but when I finally went back and actually 'em, I felt like an idiot. I didn’t think that there was anything there that was really very good. We were doing stuff that no one else was doing, that’s true. What Severson was doing [SURFER Magazine] was mostly a comic book; it was just full of pictures.

Everybody went for it. You could point to a picture and, without even seeing the caption, say “there's Dewey Weber at 22nd Street.” That unified us. You knew everybody by their surfing style, not by their name. I loved the anonymity in surfing back then. Once it started to become a business, once 

 hit, once magazine sales took off, it wasn’t as fun. It got serious and we couldn’t be kids anymore. You couldn’t just go down to the beach and play in the sand and make mud balls.

When it came out, Gidget (Kathy Kohner) called me with her dad on the phone. I was living up in Topanga Canyon. I was so excited to have Gidget call me. She was a big deal to me—just her existence. Yes, it’s a really important book, because it made people aware of this new teenage culture that was going on. Everybody always wanted to come to California anyway, but now they had a big fat reason to do it. It was like overnight, it happened. The word was out—really out.

This may be a stupid question, but is there a distinction to be made between writers who surf and surfers who write?

I started writing way before I even knew what surfing was. I didn’t have any friends who were surfers. None. I was a loner, out there by myself. [NOTE: Cleary grew up in Pasadena, California.] Then later, when surfing came to be a team sport, with surf clubs and stuff, I unconsciously invoked that old line—I wouldn't join any club that would have me as a member. But we did have one club, sort of, and that was Topanga Beach. We all gathered there. Everybody was so different. Everybody had a huge IQ. Everybody had so much promise and so much faith that we could make a better world. I’m going to get back to your question about surfers who write and writers who surf eventually. It’s a real good question.

It just seems strange that although many excellent fine artists came out of that period of surfing history, where are the sport's literary artists?

All I can say is that surfing to me is a transcendental thing. It fuses the old existence-essence controversy. It's like when the Impressionists got together and said, “Hey, we got something really new going on here.” They had their own secret. Surfing was our secret. They [non-surfing writers and filmmakers] could put out 20 movies and 50 books and they’d never get it. To me, surfing was my private piece of heaven. You don’t get it unless you do it. Then, what are you going to say?

Changing the topic just a bit, in your book 

, you encapsulate what was happening with the whole changing of the guard from the 1950s to the 1960s in one sentence: “Essence had turned to image.”

If you like that sort of thing, you’re my man.

What was going on during that transition period?

There’s a lot to say about that one. Let’s see if I can remember any of it. Okay, we used to sit out in the water at Church (near San Onofre) and see these old guys paddling out, sitting on their boards with a quart of beer between their legs. They’d be laughing and scratching and saying hello. They wanted to talk to everybody. They were a soulful group. Meanwhile, we thought we were so hot, us kids, that it was beneath us to talk to anybody.

I mean, those old guys were ahead of us. We may have had some hot technical stuff down, but surfing was fun for them. It wasn’t fun for us. It was very serious. True, it felt good, but your ego was always nailed to your board. I remember when I stayed in the Canary Islands they would call me “el artiste” and I thought that was great. Not because of my ego or that they recognized me as an artist, but just that they saw anything in the sport of surfing that had to do with art. They got it. They saw all of it right away from the very beginning. They saw, in surfing, the essence of the bullfighter. They chose that analogy. A lot of people in places like that, they seem to pick right up on surfing’s connection to the heart and to the soul. It’s not something that can be measured.

In 1965, when Tom Morey put together that noseriding event where he timed how long each surfer rode the nose, although I was right there and I was his official photographer and we conceptualized it a lot together—I hated it. There’s a great Marshall McLuhan quote in the Malibu issue of 

: Everything we do is music. And when you really get into surfing, it is music.

The rise of surfing in the 1950s parallels the rise of the Beat Generation. There are similarities in the way those two subcultures developed. You allude to the “surfboard rebellion” in some of your early writings. Do you see these movements as being similar?

Do you feel there was true rebellion in surfing at that time?

I definitely do. Surfers were very attuned to the fact that it was a rat race out there and society really wasn’t taking people where they wanted to go. My generation was expected to go into the military then come home and have babies. It was all set and scripted, from womb to tomb. Surfers didn’t want any part of that. They wanted to be free to ride waves and not be hassled by the Man, and that’s what they did.

Another strong influence at the time, which you articulated so well in 

, was Hollywood’s discovery of surfing. Let me read you one passage, which says it well:

The pendulum swung. Surfing, once the vehicle of rebellion, had suddenly become a source of social acceptance, of admiration. The mystique was in the hands of the masses. And as surfing grew civilized, it once more fell ill to white man’s disease, just as [Hawaiian surfing] had [during the 19th century]. But it did not die. On the contrary. Alongside Gidget marched the golden bodies. The myth of mystique was spread: Of golden skin and sun-bleached hair and good muscle; of the freedom of the beach and the guys and girls who didn't care; of the thrill found in breaking waves. Right around the point from the film colony, Malibu was in Hollywood’s backyard. And soon the long black limousines did stop at Malibu, and the big men stepped out onto the sand to find that what once had been the great unwashed—the surfers—were suddenly young and healthy and exciting! In their golden bodies, Hollywood found new life. Where the magic of [Hawaiian surfing] was dead, cinema culture saw a new, even more powerful magic—life in the California sun.

That makes me think of Malibu, because [so many of the guys who surfed there] worked in the film industry. Some were carpenters, if that was the best they could do. If one of them got into the Screen Extras Guild, then a bunch of them did. It did change things.

I never thought [Hollywood] would keep making those beach movies, but they kept coming out. Bam. Bam. Bam. And people loved them. You know what the meaning of all that was? "The mystique was in the hands of the masses"—I remember that line—but they couldn’t crack it. It was in their hands but they didn’t know what it really meant. The secret meanings all remained intact. They still are. Dave Rochlen Sr. once said it really well. He was primarily a bodysurfer, and I remember he said, "It’s like orange juice. I take a little drink and I become the whole tree." That’s the way he put it. You get a shoulder in the wave and you can feel all of it and you’re reborn. But you have to really do it to understand.

Rochlen is someone many people may not know of, but a very influential figure in surfing’s past. Do you think surfers today have an adequate sense of their own history?

I have no idea what surfers today think about. I’d guess it’s like every younger generation. They’re so full of themselves; their eyes are so big with the possible that they don’t look behind them.

Who are the figures from the so-called Modern Era that people should know about that they probably don’t? What about Tom Morey?

I was there that day at the beach on the Big Island in Kona when he invented the Boogie. We were sitting under the same palm tree watching his wife, Marchia, bodysurf waves over this jagged reef. She was maybe eight months pregnant. All of a sudden Tom ran up to the car and got this weird piece of foam that they used for packing and, with a machete, whittled out a rectangular board. He threw it out to Marchia and she started using that thing. That was the first Boogie Board. Morey democratized surfing by bringing it within the reach of everybody; by making it so cheap and simple. That’s the greatest thing that’s ever been done for surfing.

Who were some of the other guys we should remember?

Ricky Grigg. He’s definitely an egoist, but he’s a bright, thinking guy. He’s a creative guy. He’d always come up with something unusual. Mike Doyle, for me, captures the essence of surfing. He has a certain style.

I don’t know. I really didn’t know that many people. I just knew them all from the water. The only reason I came into that whole side of things was because I wrote

Let’s talk about that book. It was a manual for surfers during the early 1960s. It really expanded the world of surfing for that generation.

I never dreamed it would have such influence. Whenever people find out I’m the guy who wrote that book, they tell me all their stories. One couple told me that, for their honeymoon, they started from the southernmost spot and surfed their way to the northernmost spot. I hear this stuff all the time. It’s a mindblower.

You must get the other side as well. People telling you “How dare you reveal my surf spot!”

As somebody who has traveled the world and surfed so many different places, what do you think of that attitude?

I’m a Libertarian. I believe anybody should be able to say anything. Not to be able to tell somebody about a surf spot? Egads! Information to the people. You can’t ever have too much information.

Your surf magazine stories helped define two legends of the period—Mickey Dora and George Greenough. Has the image of those two changed much in your eyes over the years?

Dora is the same as he always was, only worse. It was fun to talk to him on a tape because his dialogue is just brilliant. All the things I wrote on him, I took off tapes and I hardly ever had to change a word. Mickey is a true misanthrope. He does not like his fellow man and he makes that very clear.

George, I think, in some ways, is the same. He’s an elitist. I don’t personally like him, but I’ll acknowledge that he’s done a lot of creative stuff. He’s got a genius in his fingers.

I mentioned earlier my favorite line of yours, “Essence had turned to image.” I think it really speaks to what happened in the early 1960s, when Hollywood and the media discovered surfing. We know a lot about the image part of that equation. What do we need to know about the essence part?

We’re all still looking for the same things. A first-time experience. A wave you can call your own. But every wave is the first wave, and if you’re in tune with that, then you’ve got it.

[Photos: Ron Church, Bill Cleary, Brad Barrett]

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