Imagine this situation: the long, tiring semester is over, all exams have been corrected and one or the other term paper has been read as well. It is well-deserved vacation time, off to the sea, maybe you have even planned a trip to the U.S.A., to the East Coast. What you are looking for is something both stimulating and relaxing to read, something that clears the mind but also points to contexts and backgrounds that are worth thinking about. This could be the book for you.

In his Surfing the South, California-based historian Steve Estes takes his readers on an extended journey along the southern Atlantic coast of the United States, to the (supposedly) best surf spots in this region and at the same time to places of his youth and early adult years. On his way from the Texas Gulf Coast up north to Ocean City, Maryland, Estes visited numerous different people and talked to them not only about surfing, beaches, waves, surfboards and all the cultural-commercial trappings of surfing history after World War II, but also about their lives and experiences in that special region that is the U.S. South. The result is a rather impressive travelogue, at the same time the book of a surf enthusiast as well as a close observation of a scholar who is interested in understanding this region and the people who live there. The stories Estes heard from his about forty interviewees and which are retold here are “more wonderful than fiction” (p. 3), and so the publisher also prices the book under the heading “creative nonfiction”. Surfing the South is therefore not an academic study, the book has no thesis and does not come up with some coherent argumentation. It is supposed to be an exploration of “the history of southern surfing and my own southern heritage” (p. 4), and while accomplishing that the author also discusses plenty of aspects highly relevant for understanding the modern South and the United States in general – Cold War militarization, civil rights, the counterculture, the women’s movement, environmentalism, and coastal development. “Surf sagas,” Estes explains, “mix history, memory, and myth. This book blends all three in a quest to find and ride the southern swell.” (p. 4) For most of the time Estes did not travel alone from surf spot to surf spot, usually he was accompanied by his 12-year-old daughter Zinnia, which points to another important dimension of his narrative: Surfing the South is, among many other things, also a small, often funny, self-ironic treatise on father-daughter relationships. Since this reviewer has no expertise whatsoever to show here, and because thoughts on this topic usually emerge somewhat apart from the rest of the observations, I will not go into further detail here, though not without pointing out to readers how important the presence of his daughter has been for Steve Estes’ travel experience.

Surfin’ U.S.A. – the sport of surfing, the actual practices as well as the pop cultural framing, play an immense role in the cultural history of the United States after World War II. However, this dense production of meaning has always been dominated by the West Coast, especially by California, and also, of course, by Hawaii; the Atlantic coast is still only sparsely represented in it. Therefore, with the exception perhaps of the beaches of Florida, surfing is not closely associated with the South. Steve Estes shows that this assumption is unfounded, that the cities, resorts, and beaches of the South do indeed have a prominent place in a cultural history of surfing that, on the one hand, is in constant correlation with the omnipresent imagination of a West Coast ideal and, on the other hand, is very closely interwoven with the political and social history of the United States as a whole and the South in particular.

One central connection becomes already clear in the first chapters, in which the author embarks on his journey along the Gulf Coast from Texas to Alabama. The post-war economic growth of the U.S. South, the boom of the Cold War years when oil and defense industries brought jobs and thus people into the region, greatly influenced the emergence and the flourishing of southern surfing. During his interviews, Estes introduces his readers to early pioneers of that sport, men and women that combined an enthusiasm for riding the waves with the often harsh realities of making a living in a society undergoing rapid change; men and women who started the first and often short-lived surf shops, bringing in boards and expertise from the West Coast. Hand in glove with economic growth came environmental problems, and Estes elaborates upon how the surfing community only very slowly started to engage in environmental causes: “Surfers rely on the oil industry far more than any of us want to admit. Whether you live in Houston or Mobile, Pasadena or Berkeley, if you surf, you drive. Car culture has long been integral to surf culture.” (p. 35) The real wake-up call, as he sees it, did not happen before 2010 with the Deepwater Horizon rig explosion off the coast of Louisiana that caused the biggest oil spill in U.S. history.

In the following chapters, when Steve and Zinnia Estes travel through Florida and Georgia, more difficult interconnections become evident. The very visible presence of the Armed Services in the region means that many of the interviewees have some sort of military past, and considering the time frame that is covered here, the Vietnam War and its consequences figure very prominently in the book. Surfing the South often reads as a history of generational change within the surfer community, and Estes does a good job in emphasizing how the experiences in Vietnam (and not so much the anti-war movement or the counterculture) structured the development of the sport into an early Cold War surf era and one that was characterized by the more critical decades from the 1970s onward. The chapter on Pensacola, Florida, is titled Charlie Don’t Surf, but in some ways, this reference to one of the most iconic scenes of Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979) is somewhat misleading; surfing while being on duty in Vietnam was mostly much less dramatic, and it proved to be more of a (usually male) form of bonding that former soldiers wanted to maintain once they returned back to the United States. Music added significantly to this mélange of real-life experiences turning into memory, and I very much liked how Steve Estes chronicles the overlap between the soundtracks of surfing and that of the Vietnam War.

Two highly important aspects turn up more closely rather late in the book, between the Carolinas and Maryland. For a very long time, surfing – the actual sport as well as the cultural imagination – has been dominated by young, white men – despite (or maybe because of) Duke Kahanamoku and the entire Hawaii folklore. In many chapters Estes refers to the classic surf movies from the 1950s to the 1980s, and these films proved to be most important for transmitting, normalizing, and stabilizing that notion of white, youthful masculinity into a wider society. In interviews with prominent surfer women and African Americans, the author successfully challenges that image. As did almost all sports and leisure activities during that time, surfing also struggled heavily with the color line, and the male camaraderie only sometimes admitted a woman into its ranks. Still, Black people and women were present, even in the American South, against the backdrop of a Civil Rights Movement and Women’s Lib that triggered a “massive resistance” among the white population in that region that extended to the beaches, too. Next to surfer films, Steve Estes also discusses other media outlets to show how Blacks and women were made invisible in the pop culture of surfing or at least pushed to its margins, yet he also demonstrates how many discriminated against people found ways to ride the waves and had fun doing it.

The text is revolving around the journey, the interviews, and many personal observations, it creates a strongly subjective narrative. Nevertheless, Estes enriches his story with many quotations from scholarly sources, a clear indication of his professional routine and also a well-working hint at the rich cultural studies literature that is available to the reader who got interested to learn more about the political, economic, social, and cultural frame in which this travelogue and this chunk of cultural history is placed. To help, Estes included a brief bibliographical essay at the end of the book, a good starting point for further research. Surfing the South is a fine book that demonstrates how a very personal perspective on a region and a sport can nevertheless introduce readers to serious reflections about history, society, and politics that should matter to everybody living in or visiting the U.S. South.