John Pavlus

Eight o'clock Friday morning: a stiff north-northwest has been scudding up shoulder-high waves for the past two hours at a break near Hammond, Indiana. Five surfers from Lake Michigan's "South End Crew" bob in the brownish swells a hundred yards off shore, their black wetsuits glistening like sealskin.

The sun is weak and cloud-cut. From a small scrubby heath, a boaters' clubhouse overlooks the break--a natural or manmade obstruction in the water that creates good surfing conditions. A nondescript jetty flanks the north side; a backdrop of belching industrial ziggurats looms from the south. In between lies the "beach": a bottle-littered swath of rebar-and-concrete slabs, sunk like cracked teeth in a gumline of gray sand.

We're not supposed to be here. Even if the break wasn't on private property--which it is--the vibe is damn near post-apocalyptic.

Jack Flynn--who's been in the water since 5am--likes it that way. "When it's snowing, and the factories are back there blowing fucking fire out of their smokestacks--it's the ultimate, man." The 28-year-old graphic designer looks hard and lean in his camo wetsuit, running one hand through his blond-tipped hair and gripping a cold-waxed, ten-foot longboard with the other. "Most people going surfing want to listen to the Beach Boys," he scoffs. "We listen to Ministry."

Yes, it's true. You can surf the Great Lakes. Actually, people have been hitting the waves here for decades.

To be fair, freshwater surfing doesn't get much publicity. According to P.L. Strazz, Chicago surfer and author of the guidebook "Surfing the Great Lakes," the whole five-lake scene comprises "no more than 750 people"--so the odds favor ignorance. Even Dana Brown--director of the new surf documentary "Step Into Liquid," and a true dauphin of West Coast surf royalty (his legendary father, Bruce, directed "The Endless Summer" and its sequel)--had no clue about Great Lakes waves until an editor at Surfing Magazine tipped him off.

"Of course he thought I was dumber than snot," Brown admits. "I'd heard that people surfed Lake Michigan, but I had no idea that it was this whole subculture." The surf ethnographer carted his cameras off to Sheboygan, Wisconsin--home of the Great Lakes' most popular breaks--to give freshwater surfing its big close-up. But while affectionate and entertaining, "Step Into Liquid"'s brief freshwater segment offers little real insight into the motives and movements of "the tribe," as Great Lakes surfers collectively call themselves. (Lake Michigan surfing is thus a sub-tribe, and those who tackle the South End a sub-sub-tribe.)

Not that they particularly care that their entrance into the public imagination was brief. If anything, the opposite seems true. One prominent South End surfer literally calls himself "Keeper of the Secret." For another, "naming the break"--that is, leaking a prime spot's exact location to the uninitiated--is a no-no on par with violating the first rule of Fight Club. Flynn proudly considers Great Lakes surfing "a cult"; and Strazz, whose "insider's guide to monster waves along North America's fresh coast" sold huge to Lakers and non-Lakers alike, nonetheless cautions that "once you start to broadcast it, you're just asking for headaches."

While it's true that the Great Lakes are often regarded as a stepchild to the "real" surf scenes on the coasts, the tribe's wariness of outsiders isn't about repressed wave envy. In the South Enders' case, many of the best breaks in and around Chicago are technically off-limits to surfers; usually a crew can establish a wink-and-nod workaround with the local powers that be, but such arrangements are necessarily delicate.

The Hammond break is a case in point. Mike Turnipseed, a local millwright who's been surfing here since 1971, describes how, after nearly getting arrested for trespassing by the beach-owning factories, he decided to register his surfboard as a watercraft with the adjacent boat club. "The next time they called the Coast Guard," he says with a grin, "they found out that we're million-dollar yachts."

Twenty years later, the other 15-odd South Enders don't have to join the club to surf here--though many of them do, if only to take advantage of the clubhouse and parking perks. But even so, all it takes is one break-naming "kook"--a surfing newbie--to bring in a dozen friends-of-friends-of-friends, and this hard-earned, quasi-legal equilibrium could evaporate instantly.

Christy "Chicago Wahine" Will, a svelte thirtysomething from Hyde Park who works as a freelance communications consultant, breaks the situation down. "People aren't trying to be elitist--we just want to surf, and we want to protect our access to the water that we have," she says. "If you're interested in surfing, then sure, I want to share the stoke. But it can get pretty gnarly out there, and if you don't know the rules of the road, people are going to get pissed off. I saw it happen in Winthrop Harbor: People made a stink, and the cops came and said, `You're not supposed to even be here, so get out.' We had to put in a lot of effort and be very polite and respectful to get them to give us back this break we all loved."

Not all members of the tribe are so circumspect. In fact, Sheboygan doyen Larry "Longboard" Williams--revered founder and principal organizer of the Dairyland Classic, an internationally known freshwater surf summit held every Labor Day for the past 18 years--has some of the loosest lips on the Lakes. "I don't like secrets," he confirms. "I like finding out about secret breaks and busting `em loose. Come on: there's 8,300 miles of coastline on the Great Lakes. There's a new break around every corner."

In a way, he's right to be casual. Even if the Lake crews all broke their breaks on CNN, the dreaded poseur hordes would surely blanch at one inescapable fact: chasing waves is damn hard work.

Flash back to Friday morning, waking up to a voicemail: "Just to let you know-- It's 7:30am, and there are waves." If only it were really that easy. The tip from Christy Will is a breach of protocol, a courtesy granted to a kook. Real Lake surfers do their own wave dowsing, and they've each got their method down pat. Will's is eyeline-direct: her Hyde Park high-rise offers a clean view of the Indiana lakefront. Craig Kemnitz--a North Side computer consultant who administers the lively forums at www.lakesurf.com --works off of wind direction, which he judges from a small flag atop an apartment building near his home. Others rely on the online forums themselves as an interactive beehive of up-to-date wave intelligence.

For the scientifically inclined, even more options abound. "You must check the buoy," intones Steve Timble, a frequenter of early morning South End swells. "Everyone who surfs here is on intimate terms with the buoy." This vaunted device--#45007 of the National Data Buoy Service, bobbing reliably away at 42°40'12"N, 87°01'12"W on the surface of Lake Michigan--is the ultimate arbiter of wave-worthy weather, zapping new data on wind speed and wave height every hour to the NDBS website.

Of course, fancy metrics mean squat unless you know how to interpret them over your geography. Every break requires different weather conditions to produce optimal waves; South End swells, for example, need northerly winds--which usually ride on the lead edge of nasty squalls. Dana Brown recalls a telling moment between him and some of his documentary subjects, who couldn't understand Brown's reluctance to join them for a few sets: "I asked them, `Hey, um...when lightning strikes the water, how long does it electrify it for?' And one of them said, `Ah, we just get out of the water when our hair starts to stand on end.' To be honest, it was kind of spooky."

Then there's the fact that surf season doesn't really get going until mid-October--and even then, the very best waves will often wait until late December to appear. That's when vets like Mike Turnipseed hit their stride. "People come out of that water," he says, "and you can hear the ice crack on their wetsuits when they move."

This is why Strazz does not worry too much about naming breaks or keeping secrets. "Some people will get a little paranoid because they just love the sport so much and they don't want it to get diminished in any way," he says, "but objectively speaking, no amount of cheerleading in the world could cause `the masses' to come swarming down here to surf. You have to be an armchair meteorologist, you have to be a geographer, you have to be a hell of an athlete--but one thing you don't have to be is a salesman. I don't think it's something you can convince someone to try unless they've already got a bit of it inside them."

Besides the substantial intellectual and physical commitments, Lake surfers still have to find time to chase down these waves--most of which do not respect a proper business-week schedule. Not surprisingly, several of these younger Chicago surfers--like Will, Strazz and Flynn--are single, self-employed, or both. According to Flynn, "Everything else has to be secondary, man. Job, girlfriend, family, whatever. I've ditched out on funerals to go surfing." He claims that he and his buddy Mike Caputo, a bartender, get on the road "at least twice a week" during the autumn/winter season.

"If you really want to surf Great Lakes in the fall--if you're willing to sacrifice work, and your family, and piss a lot of your friends off--you have to be a road warrior," agrees Will. She's squatting on the lawn behind the clubhouse, picking at her longboard with a set of small tools neatly organized in plastic baggies. "Whether you're in Hawaii or New Zealand or New York, it's the exact same passion for waves that drives us to blow off work, blow off family commitments."

She stops, reconsidering. "Well, it's not blowing off, it's `prioritizing.' Hey, some people golf. Some people garden." She wrenches a black plug about half the size of a hockey puck out of a seam in the wax-dappled surface and then, with a tug, splits the ten-foot board neatly in half. This is her Pope Bisect, a surfboard designed to break down for easy stowing in planes, trains, and automobiles. Kemnitz has one, too.

"Last October, there were, like, two whole weeks where we just drove back and forth between here and Sheboygan," she says, sharing a grin with Kemnitz. "We'd go up there to catch the souths, and then when it clocked around we'd head back down here. It was a blast."

All this talk of "commitments"--made, traded, and broken, all for love of the waves--might lead one to believe that these Chicagoans have more in common with the coasts than they let on. But as Larry Williams notes, the operative C-word for ocean surfers is actually "competition." What sets Lake Michigan surfers apart, he says, is their rejection of supposed synonymity between the two terms.

"There have been times at Dairyland when we've called off our competitions because the waves are too good," he continues. "If nobody wants to come out of the water to make room for this competition, and nobody wants to judge it, we'll just call it off and have a day of it. That don't happen in California."

This uniquely Midwestern disconnect between passion and performance is exactly what members of what Kemnitz terms "the surfing establishment" often fail to grasp. Subsequently, says Kemnitz, "there's very little recognition from the two coasts, even a little bit of hostility." Even Dana Brown, who's quick to assure that any supposed condescension in "Step Into Liquid" is completely unintentional, still evinces a somewhat diminutive attitude toward the Lake Michigan scene:

"Great Lakes surfing just strikes me as funny, but so do a lot of things," he demurs. "I'm not going to lie and say they're the greatest surfers in the world. But they're not the greatest waves, either."

Which begs the question: is the near-fanatic passion of Lake Michigan surfers, which can often send them plunging into waves so frigid they leave icicles on their cheeks, just an exceptional case of Midwestern making-do? If Larry Williams could magically transport himself, his job, and his family from Sheboygan to Santa Cruz, would he?

Short answer: no. "I've been offered jobs in California before--surf shops, surf promotion, clothiers--but I wouldn't go," Williams asserts. "Would I enjoy surfing as much if I could do it every day, if I was involved in the industry? If you lived at the bottom of a ski hill, would you hit the slopes as much?"

Many Lake Michigan surfers have been there, done that. "What you'll find is that a lot of us are pretty well-traveled," says Kemnitz. "Most of us get out to both coasts. In a couple weeks I'm going to Cape Hatteras. But I learned how to surf on Lake Michigan. It's my favorite. It's my home."

Even Mike Turnipseed, a bona fide transplant from Carlsbad, California, has dug himself in. There are no Great Lakes pros, but he might be the next best thing. His wife, Maryanne--blonde, tanned, a self-described "diehard surfer wife"--has been watching her husband catch Lake Michigan waves for three decades, rain or shine, snow or storm. Technically, he's supposed to be at his job right now, but Maryanne says he's taking some "personal hours." And besides, she says, "surfing is a job." Mike clambers out of the water and proudly states the work ethic that's brought him this far. "When there are waves, you just gotta go," he asserts, slicking water off the arms of his wetsuit. "It's like hunting. It has to be done."

Noon at the Hammond break: The wind's settling down, paychecks and time cards beckon, and the crew is starting to disperse. The swells that battered the sunken slabs all morning have flattened out, but Flynn and Caputo are still out paddling, popping up on lazy waist-highs and coasting them out to nothing. Caputo nabs almost every set; nothing's too small--he clearly doesn't want to call it a day. He cuts and sweeps his board, trying hard not to outrun the feeble break. Just as it coughs its last, another swell rises in its place, carrying the board another thirty yards before fading out like a gentle lap dissolve.

"That's the `re-form'," says Kemnitz. "The waves form further out by that sandbar, but as they approach the shore and start to break, the wave will `re-form' and you can ride it all the way into shore." Even the post-apocalyptic breaks, it seems, have their quiet charms.

We're not supposed to be here. The breeze is cool, the sun's got its strength back, and no one's wearing a wetsuit anymore. If this weren't Lake Michigan, you might almost say it's a perfect day to surf.

(2003-08-27)

Also by John Pavlus

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Perhaps the Debates' storied history--thirties-style carny barkers, heckling hordes, and orators with names like "One-Armed Charlie"--set expectations too high
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(2003-05-28)

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