Ah, Hawai'i

Rico says the article in The New York Times by Lawrence Downes makes him long for a return visit (no, no, Rico can't afford it, alas) to Hawai'i:

Forget, for a moment, what you know about surfing: the professional sport, the multipurpose verb, and the online metaphor. Put aside the Beach Boys, the baggies, the huarache sandals, too. Surfing’s all that. But those bushy bushy blond hairdos have dark brown roots.
Two new books and a documentary film, all out this year, are reclaiming the story of surfing as Hawai'ians once knew it. They are telling the neglected tale of one little world, on eight little islands; surfing before outsiders took it to California and far beyond.
Hawaiian Surfing: Traditions From the Past is the most startling of the three. John Clark, a surfer who was once deputy chief of the Honolulu Fire Department, draws deeply from Hawai'ian-language newspapers from the 1800s, after Europeans arrived, but before the stark eclipse of Hawai'i’s population, tradition, and culture, a loss that native descendants have been striving for generations to reverse.
Tracing every reference he can find to surfing, beaches, and waves in the Hawai'ian language, Mr. Clark shows surfing as a social sport played on a scale unimaginable anywhere today. In old Hawai'i, everyone surfed, from children to grandparents. They surfed with long boards and short boards and no boards. They surfed big winter waves and lazy shore breaks. They surfed the mouths of rivers. They surfed the beach, skimming on sheets of water left by receding foam. They surfed with banana stalks. After hotels came to Waikiki, they surfed with wet pillowcases: they’d fill them with air, run, flop and fly.
“When the surf was good, the whole village got up, moved to the beach, and everybody jumped in the water,” Mr. Clark said in a phone interview from Honolulu.
This amazed the Europeans, who watched children play in the zone that to them meant shipwrecks and broken necks. “None but natives ever master the art of surf-bathing,” Mark Twain wrote in 1866, after wiping out.
Surfing required not just grace but strength, since the old boards were heavy, finless slabs of wood. You couldn’t paddle out while lying on one; you’d have to swim behind, pushing like a tugboat. Rides were tricky. But then, as now, they were exhilarating. In the old stories and news accounts, Mr. Clark finds frequent comparisons of surfers to ocean birds, and references to surfing as a sexual dance. Soon enough, though, the missionaries made everyone put on pants and muumuus. They discouraged idling and sensuous pastimes like surfing and hula. The young Princess Kaiulani kept surfing in Waikiki, a pointed act of rebellion. But surfing declined steeply in the early twentieth century. Hawaiians kept at it, though, as surfing evolved into an individual sport, with athletes like Duke Kahanamoku, the Waikiki beach boy and Olympic star. Kahanamoku and other legends, like Buffalo Keaulana and Wally Froiseth, appear in A Deeper Shade of Blue, a documentary by Jack McCoy, which uses stunning footage to show that Hawai'ians remain great innovators and keepers of the soul of surfing.
And in Waves of Resistance: Surfing and History in Twentieth-Century Hawai'i, Isaiah Helekunihi Walker, a history professor at Brigham Young University in Hawai'i, takes the story to the present day. He argues that the surf zone is one place where native Hawai'ians have successfully resisted the encroachments of outsiders. Hawai'ians lost their kingdom in 1893, but surfers, he said, have been leaders in a struggle for environmental and cultural renewal. They may have been pushed off the land, but have not yet lost the waves.