ON A RISING SWELL

An anecdotal history of surfing along Florida’s Atlantic coast.

Reiter opens his nonfiction debut with a sensual, almost elemental summary of the basic allure of surfing: “The coconut smell of surf wax, a wetsuit drip-drying in the sun, coffee vapor mingling with salt mist, the gleam and crackle of an outside set on a windless morning.” The author’s decades of enthusiastic surfing have left their mark on him: “Twenty years of brine, of salt marinade, of inhaling the sea’s musk, have permanently transformed me.” Reiter’s book, a collection of essays and vignettes on various aspects of this transformation and the activity that caused it, takes readers from the deep history of surfing to his own personal history with the sport to the deep connection between surfing and the Cocoa Beach area of Florida’s Brevard County. The loose structure of his narrative allows for frequent digressions about the eccentric people who populate the surfing world and the natural landscape of Cocoa Beach, with glances at remarkable weather events like Hurricane Frances (“a mere Category 2 at impact, but it was massive, and punishingly slow”). He intersperses comical asides about zany surfers or inept day-trippers (“easily the most abundant of all nonlocal species”) with broader social observations about Cocoa Beach, which bills itself as “a tropical, quaintly parochial town” that has nevertheless been home to some of the greatest surfers in the sport’s history. The author writes with warm, knowing affection for his cast of characters, including Kelly Slater, “the man who revolutionized a millennia-old sport” who’s dubbed by Reiter “the greatest surfer of all time.” The author does a thrilling job narrating the action of surfing big waves, but the main strength of the book is Reiter’s heartfelt appreciation of the natural world of the sport, the “brief Orphic hours” when Cocoa Beach surfers commune with the sea. He’s written a surfing classic fit to sit beside John Long’s The Big Drop (1999) and William Finnegan’s Barbarian Days (2015).

A wonderfully colorful and inviting paean to Cocoa Beach surfing.