Summary of William Finnegan's Barbarian Days

Everest Media

Description

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.
Sample Book Insights:
#1 I was a haole, or white, kid in a primarily Hawaiian school in Honolulu. The other kids made fun of me, and I didn’t have any friends. I was too scared to say anything.
#2 I was sent to Kaimuki Intermediate School, a racially segregated school, where I was bullied and had no friends. I was bored in class, and spent most of my time watching the trees outside for wind direction and strength.
#3 I was excited to be in Hawaii, and I was surprised by how little surf there was. The waves were small and dark-faced, and the wind offshore. I was worried about the coral reef off the beach.
#4 I paddled west along a shallow lagoon, staying close to the shore, for half a mile. The beach houses ended, and the steep, brushy base of Diamond Head itself took their place across the sand. The reef on my left fell away, revealing a wide channel deep water where no waves broke.

Sujets

• List of water sports
• Surfing

Informations

• Publié par: Everest Media LLC
• Date de parution: 20 mars 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781669355939
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Insights on William Finnegan's Barbarian Days
Contents Insights from Chapter 1 Insights from Chapter 2 Insights from Chapter 3 Insights from Chapter 4 Insights from Chapter 5 Insights from Chapter 6 Insights from Chapter 7 Insights from Chapter 8 Insights from Chapter 9 Insights from Chapter 10
Insights from Chapter 1

#1

I was a haole, or white, kid in a primarily Hawaiian school in Honolulu. The other kids made fun of me, and I didn’t have any friends. I was too scared to say anything.

#2

I was sent to Kaimuki Intermediate School, a racially segregated school, where I was bullied and had no friends. I was bored in class, and spent most of my time watching the trees outside for wind direction and strength.

#3

I was excited to be in Hawaii, and I was surprised by how little surf there was. The waves were small and dark-faced, and the wind offshore. I was worried about the coral reef off the beach.

#4

I paddled west along a shallow lagoon, staying close to the shore, for half a mile. The beach houses ended, and the steep, brushy base of Diamond Head itself took their place across the sand. The reef on my left fell away, revealing a wide channel deep water where no waves broke.

#5

To learn any new spot, you first must know other breaks and how to read them. But at that stage, my surfing experience consisted of only a few California spots and one in Ventura that I knew well.

#6

I began to surf Cliffs Cove in the early morning, before any other people were out there. The wind was usually light, the sea less seasick, and there were other people surfing. I felt free to explore the margins.

#7

I had a series of fistfights at school, some of which were formally scheduled. I was scared, but I didn’t tell my parents anything. Cuts and bruises could be explained.

#8

I eventually joined the In Crowd, a racist gang that was led by a kid named Mike. They let me know I was welcome to join them under the monkeypod tree. I began to realize that people seemed to know I was now part of the haole gang, and they began to pick on other kids.

#9

I began to notice the smoothness of the regulars at Cliffs. I had never seen such smoothness. The Island style was different from the mainland style, and it was channeled. I began to surf like Roddy Kaulukukui, who was 13 years old.

#10

Roddy began to fill me in on the other surfers at Cliffs. The fat guy who took off far outside and ripped was Ben Aipa. The Chinese guy who showed up on the biggest day I had seen yet was Leslie Wong.

#11

The In Crowd’s racism was situationist, not doctrinaire. They had no historical pretensions. They were mostly military kids who looked disoriented and scared. They seemed to be mainly talking about gang fighting, but most of their energy went into gossip, parties, petty theft, and vandalism.

#12

I learned that Roddy and Glenn had gone to the same school as me, Kaimuki Intermediate. They had lived on the island of Hawaii, which everybody called the Big Island. They had family there. Now they had a stepmother, and she and Roddy didn’t get along.

#13

Roddy believed in Pele, the Hawaiian goddess of fire. She lived on the Big Island, and people said she caused the volcanoes to erupt when she was displeased. She was famously jealous and violent, and Hawaiians tried to propitiate her with offerings of pork, fish, and liquor.

#14

I learned to love the rights at Kaikoos. It was a deepwater break off Black Point, visible from the bottom of our lane. It was hard to line up, and always bigger than it looked. I found it scary.

#15

I had always had a fear of the ocean, but when I finally went out there and saw how big the waves were, it changed me. I was scared, but I wanted to learn how to surf.

#16

I had a father who worked at least six days a week, and who made sure we got to see the sights of Hawaii. He was building the foundation for a career as a Hawaii specialist, and spent the next decade making feature films and TV shows in the islands.

#17

My father was always worried about bullies, and he would always advise me to pick up a stick if I was ever confronted by bigger boys. He never told me why he was so worried about it, but it probably stemmed from the fact that he was a haole child in Hawaii.

#18

My father, Big Bill Finnegan, was a strong man who was not afraid of anyone. He had a cantankerous streak that could be mortifying, and he was not afraid to raise his voice in public.

#19

My mother, Pat, was a Pat, née Quinn. She was a blithely upwardly mobile tennis-playing Irish Catholic woman who knew how to make ends meet. She had grown up in Los Angeles, and had never really cared much about friends or family.

#20

She hid all of that from us and threw herself into making the most of life in an insular, reactionary town. She loved the water, which was lucky for her. She would spread beach towels and lead the little ones into the lagoon with masks and nets.

#21

I had to babysit my sister Colleen, who was about to receive her First Communion, on a Saturday. I tried to lose my job one blazing Saturday with Colleen, but I was too afraid to leave her alone.

#22

I was starting to get used to life in Honolulu. The city was between the Ko'olau Mountains and the sea, and it was surrounded by mountains that sent rain clouds out to water the city. I missed my friends in Los Angeles, but Hawaii was starting to feel more like home.

#23

Before the arrival of Europeans in Hawaii, surfing had religious significance. The islanders were skilled fishermen, terrace farmers, and hunters, and they built and managed elaborate systems of fishponds. Their winter harvest festival lasted three months, during which the surf frequently pumped.

#24

Modern surfing is descended from the few Hawaiians who kept the ancient practice of he’e nalu alive. It wasn’t subcultural or imported, and it felt deeply woven into the fabric of the place.

#25

I was invited to a meeting of the Southern Unit surf club, which was located in Paki Park in Waikiki. The club's members wore aloha-print trunks, and every Southern Unit guy I'd seen in the water surfed notably well.

#26

The In Crowd and the Kaulukukui boys were integrated, with no visible fuss. The Pacific Club, the leading local private club, was still whites-only. The In Crowd, however, was not impressed by the Pacific Club’s membership rules.

#27

I developed a crush on Glenn’s girlfriend, Lisa. She was an older woman, fourteenth in ninth grade, and poised, amused, and kind. She and Glenn made sense as a couple only because he was a natural-born hero and she was a natural-born heroine.

#28

I entered a surfing contest at Diamond Head Cliffs, and won second place. I was shocked to learn that the winner was one of the low-profile haoles at Kaimuki Intermediate, Tomi Winkler.

#29

I had often heard Glenn tease Roddy about the way he surfed, saying that he was too Island-style. But I had never heard of the Aikaus, a local surfing family known for their traditional styles.

#30

I had been leading a clandestine life, particularly since we moved to Hawaii. I had been surfing since I was ten, and my family had helped me start. But as I entered my teens, I suddenly moved on from them.

#31

My father, who was forty when I was born, seemed to want to put youth behind him. He had hated the Navy, the claustrophobia of shipboard life, and the helplessness of the ordinary seaman. He had a thousand jobs.

#32

I was a devout Catholic, but when I was confirmationally confirmed, I was shocked to hear that I no longer had to go to Mass. I stopped going immediately. My parents continued to drag the little ones to church, but I knew they didn’t actually believe in God.

#33

I had become a sunburnt pagan. I was attached to two worlds. The ocean, which was infinite and falling away to the horizon, and land, which was everything else. I was unable to explain why I did it, but I knew that it filled a psychic cavity of some sort.

#34

Swells are groups of waves that are larger and longer-interval than their locally generated cousins. They travel together and become more organized as they approach a shoreline. The waves below the surface begin to feel the sea bottom as they approach a shore, and their lower ends begin to break.

#35

The surf at Cliffs changed as spring progressed. There were more swells from the south, which meant more good days at Cliffs. Patterson’s, the gentle wave between wide panels of exposed reef out in front of our house, started breaking consistently and a new group of surfers appeared.

#36

At Kaimuki Intermediate, the most intimidating guy was known as the Bear. He was huge and looked about thirty-five. He was Samoan, and he was always surrounded by a deferential retinue. But something happened that caused him to be deposed.

#37

The aftermath of the mauling of Lurch was asymmetrical. Ford was not punished, while Lurch became scarce around school. Glenn became a wanted man. The rest of us were not punished, although Mr. Chock seemed to come around more and give us long looks known locally as da stink eye.

#38

I was in a phase of desperate shame about my balky puberty, and I could not take the compliment. Steve’s suave sensuality was from some borderless, unknown world. I still didn’t have even the reproductive basics straight, and my parents were too shy on the subject to be any help.

#39

One night, I heard the sound of surfboards colliding above the noise of the rain. I went outside and saw five or six boards floating down the street, toward a river that had formerly been our lane to the beach.

#40

I began surfing in Hawaii, and I especially liked surfing at the diamondhead end of the long swoop of city shoreline that includes Waikiki. This was where Tomi Winkler, winner of the Diamond Head Surf Contest, lived with his mother.