Excerpt: Obama Speechwriter Harshly Taunted by French Surfer

The moment our boards touched the water, he took off without looking back. I scraped toward the horizon into a patchwork quilt of impact zones, where I was pummeled from all directions until I ran out of steam.

Ten minutes later, I was in the kiddie pool surrounded by Germans. One had donned what appeared to be an old-timey leather football helmet. Another, as he hugged his board for dear life, wore a full canvas rucksack. As a wave no more powerful than a cocker spaniel neared him and he began to capsize, he flashed me a look that said, What do I do now?

Mine said, Where do I even start?

Matt and I had never had much in common. He was an electrician who worked with his hands; I was an author who stared at a screen. Matt was covered in tattoos; my definition of “edgy” involved colorful socks. I was a former Obama speechwriter; he was Joe Rogan’s biggest fan.

But in 2022, after moving to the Jersey Shore during the pandemic, I started surfing at the advanced age of thirty-five. I set, for me, an audacious goal: get good enough to ride an overhead wave on the North Shore within eighteen months. I needed a partner who could help me improve, and the only expert surfer I knew was Matt. Over the last year, we’d spent hundreds of hours together, in and out of the water. Now, we were on our final tune-up trip before Oahu.

Matt probably could have surfed Zurriola forever, but the next morning, we decided to go to France. Not long after crossing the border, we parked our car on a stone bluff above Lafitenia, grabbed our boards, and wound down a footpath to the rocky beach.

The green hills formed a perfectly symmetrical V framing the ocean, which had the grayish tinge of a blue jay’s crest. What really made me swoon, though, was a flat deepwater channel extending from the beach. With no whitewash or current, paddling out was a breeze, and I reached the center of a small cove feeling positively springy. A wall of water approached in a spirit of bonhomie, as though it might kiss me on both cheeks. I pivoted my board and took off.

“Nice turn and burn!” Matt yelled as I paddled back. For some reason, the French riders only went right, so the two of us had the left to ourselves.

As the tide dropped, a different sort of surfer joined the crowd. Bony, chiseled, with faces made for taking drags of unfiltered cigarettes and staring into the abyss, these newcomers fixated on a headland far outside, where no peaks were crashing. Then, as though they’d heard a whistle audible only to grim-looking French people, they all began paddling in that direction. As the first riders reached their destination, the tide whooshed out, revealing skewers of red-brown rock underneath. The water churned in a drumroll. Waves began breaking off the reef.

The new takeoff section was narrow. Wary of being shishkabobed on the rocks, I sat just to its right. For a minute, Matt joined me and observed. Then a set rolled through and he lunged like a dog flushing a pheasant. The moment his ride was finished he paddled back out for another.

“I think I have to go even deeper,” he announced.

He maneuvered one foot to his left, then another. I could see he was being unusually precise with his movements—paddling in spurts, pulling up at the last second, measuring distances and timings in his mind. Matt was so focused, in fact, that he failed to notice the guy coming up behind him.

I could tell at once that this was one of those people who would rather impress others with their attitude than their skills. He drew within a foot of Matt’s board, so close I worried his neckbeard might scratch my brother-in-law’s face.

“Why are you going so deep?” The guy’s accent was almost cartoonishly French.

“I dunno,” Matt replied, holding up both hands in a pacifying gesture. “I just thought it’d be a good spot.”

“Are you . . . le snake? Do you feel at home here?”

He added something I couldn’t understand, but which included the word maison.

“It’s cool, man,” Matt said, always respectful of locals. “Take any wave you want.”

“Humph,” snorted the Frenchman, who had clearly been itching for a fight.

By the time we were halfway to the Spanish border, I was trying to turn the incident into an inside joke. “What are you, le snake?” I asked, as Matt passed a Peugeot on the highway. He played along at first—“You feel at home here?”—and I was surprised to discover his French accent was much better than mine. But the bit quickly wore thin. He’d been rattled.

The next day, we went to a different spot on the French coast, and when a small pack of locals showed up, Matt was so careful to keep his distance that I worried he might paddle back to Spain.