The New Yorker Radio Hour - Episode 28: Annie Dillard, Anohni’s New Sound, and Torture in a Florida Prison

Episode Date: April 29, 2016

A former prison counsellor discusses the abuse and torture of mentally ill inmates she suspected inside a Florida correctional institution—and the emotional price she paid for staying silent. Plus, Anohni, the former lead singer of Antony and the Johnsons, discusses her recent turn to pop music; Annie Dillard talks with David Remnick about a new collection of essays; and William Finnegan takes us surfing. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

You're listening to The New Yorker Radio Hour. Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. A few months ago, I had the mad idea to let William Finnegan, a friend of mine and a long-time surfer, take me for a surfing lesson, out on the Rockaways. All right, here we go. Go ahead and lay down.

I'll push you out. Get on it? Yep. Finnegan's book about his life as a surfer has just won the Pulitzer Prize. My attempt at surfing, however, Yeah! Oh, Jesus Christ!

Did not win any prizes. But we're going to start off the hour with a very different kind of experience with nature that's no more in my comfort zone than surfing. You know, I love your stuff. I love your work. Oh, thank you. And I am the least... How do I put this?

A country... Rural. I think that's a good way to put it. Annie Dillard has been writing about nature and spirituality since the 1970s when she won the Pulitzer Prize for Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. She hadn't yet turned 30. The book was a bestseller, but Dillard, over time, became a real writer's writer, revered for her dedication to the craft of writing, sentence by sentence by sentence.

She's 70 now, and she's no longer writing. A collection of Dillard's work has just come out called The Abundance, Narrative Essays Old and New. In the last decade or so, your day is quite different from the decades before. You've retired from writing, and your creative energies have been poured into painting. That's right. I wonder what caused that decision? Did you feel that you were, in some way, diminishing as a writer?

Yes, sure. I came into a room and saw a leave. with my handwriting on it, and I read it because I always write by hand. And it was the beginning of a sentence. And I thought, what a promising beginning of a sentence. I wonder what in the world that was to have been about. I couldn't figure out the end of it from the beginning. And I thought, time to quit. You need a short-term memory. So in other words, you were starting to feel that the prose that had been put on that yellow had the day before was written by somebody mysterious, not you, that you're not able to carry the

book around in your head in quite the same way as when you were 40? Of course, you never carry the sentences around, but at least where you're going next. Was that a devastating discovery? Was that very difficult? No. Really? Well, we're here under conditions, and you either accept them or fight them, but the conditions aren't going to change at all. So you can either accept the conditions as they are or fight them and bitch about them all the time, but you're not going to change the conditions.

So you might as well accept them. I'm in the fighting and bitching about it stage of life. I miss the sports. It is true. I really miss the sports. I'm down to ping pong. apparently you're a terrific ping pong player Yes, sir

When you go back and you read Pilgrimate Tinker Creek which is acknowledged as a classic by almost universally When you go back and look at that early work Do you recognize the person that wrote it? Do you remember it clearly? Does it feel I wrote that

Or does it feel like somebody else? Oh, I have to admit that I wrote that It's as if you look at old pictures of yourself photographs. Somebody called it recently my most conventional book and that settled me down about it

because I've never thought it was any great shakes especially compared to some of the others but if it was the most conventional of course it would have the most readers and I will not resent the poor thing for that. The ones that

I prize most and my fellow writers prize most. In nonfiction, there's a book called for the time being, and writers adore that book. All along, I've been trying to work toward a vision of where we are on this earth. What's here? How can we describe where we are? And that bites off a much bigger chunk than any other book of where we are. What does it mean to keep your eyes open or, as you say, to see truly? In the world's religions, there is always room for people who have experiences,

and one of them is that the veils of illusion are whipped away, and you see a different world. I have seen, actually, the chloroplast streaming in leaves that are on a tree. I've seen it under the microscope, but actually to look at a tree and see something strange about the leaves. And that's a vision of a kind, a spiritual vision of a kind? Yes. And how do you get access to that? Does that come with a little piece of paper or a pill? It's a license, actually. You get a license from the divine. No, I have no idea. You've said that you're spiritually promiscuous, which is a fantastic phrase.

In religious terms, how did you grow up in terms of practice and organized religion? I was raised in a very high church Presbyterian atmosphere. I went to our minister when I was about 16 and quit the church. I came home from school, and the phone rang, and it was from the assistant minister. And my mother said, why would he be calling you? And I said, well, probably because I quit the church. She said, why did you do that? And she slid down the wall like Lucille Ball. It was hilarious. And the minister, when I went to see him, he said, this is rather early of you to be quitting the church. I imagine you'll be back soon. Which I thought was quite smart. Annie, let's go to page 19 of the book The Abundance, narrative essays old and new. And we'd love to have you read this passage from Teaching a Stone to Talk. Sure, I'll be happy to.

I have said that I heard screams. I have since read that screaming with hysteria is a common reaction, even to expected total eclipses. people on all the hillsides, including I think myself, screamed when the black body of the moon detached from the sky and rolled over the sun. But something else was happening at that same instance, and it was this, I believe, that made us scream. The second before the sun went out, we saw a wall of dark shadow come speeding at us. We no sooner saw it than it was upon us like thunder. It roared up the valley.

It slammed our hill and knocked us out. It was the monstrous swift shadow cone of the moon. I have since read that this wave of shadow moves 1,800 miles an hour. Language can give no sense of this sort of speed. seeing it and knowing it was coming straight for you was like feeling a slug of anesthetic shoot up your arm. If you think very fast, you may have time to think, soon it will hit my brain.

Less than two minutes later, when the sun emerged, the trailing edge of the shadow cone sped away. It was as though an enormous, loping, gauld. in the sky had reached down and slapped the earth's face. My God, that's an astonishing passage, not just of naturalist writing, but also it's as horrifying as anything in Mary Shelley or Bram Stoker. Tell me a little bit about how a passage of writing like this gets accomplished. I settled down to describe the clips, just trying to mess with it, narratively, and, And boy, it was a mess.

The whole thing took less than two minutes. And everything happened at once. And you can't keep a reader. Reading occupies time. It's a temporal art in the way that the visual arts are not. It takes time to happen. So I was writing, this happened, and then at the next second, this happened, and then simultaneously, this was happening. It was a mess.

because the poor reader was reading on but stuck at that same instant. And in narrative, you want to keep the reader moving along, and God knows the reader wants to move along. So I decided to tell it over and over again, the exact same eclipse, beginning, middle and end, from various levels of consciousness to go a little deeper, time. The idea is to try to reproduce, to invoke in the reader, one's own sensations. Not to describe them, but to reproduce them. Not that I gave anyone the impression of having seen a total eclipse,

but I did my level best. Did you have a sense of mission when you began writing to wake people up? What was... No, my mission was to write a book. Yeah. I was a poet, but could I write prose? I liked the complexity of prose rhythms. I liked that you could be logical or analytical in prose, that you could quote a great deal and explain a great deal of what was going on.

poetry doesn't lend itself to that, but prose does. Did it matter to you about the breadth of audience that you could achieve as a prose writer? Good heavens, no. No, no, of course not. You have to understand, I was just a housewife in Virginia who wrote poetry. And then I was a housewife who wrote a book of prose. I thought I was addressing the book to maybe nine, monks. And in fact, a great many monks did read it. But that's because the great many other people read it. And that was in turn because on the Pulitzer Prize Committee that year, there was a South

African named John Barkham with an H. And he, as a boy in South Africa, had read Lauren's Vanderpost. who is it just a beautiful writer. I've read him too. And he liked the book Pilgrimit Tinker Creek because it reminded him of Lawrence Vanderpost. That's because all nature writers are pretty much alike. So he lobbied to give it the Pulitzer Prize.

It was just a fluke. It could have been anybody, anybody at all. But it happened to have been John Barkham. And the Pulitzer Prize did something for you in that way. Sometimes prizes have no effect whatsoever. The Pulitzer Prize affected your writing life, how? It made it easier to publish what I wrote subsequently, as well as, of course, making me self-conscious about what I wrote subsequently.

Updike wrote about, oh, who was the head of the New York Book Review for so many years? John Leonard or the New York Times Book Review or the New York? Leonard. Leonard. And he, John Updike said that the bane of his life was that he couldn't write a sentence without imagining John Leonard's waxing sarcastic about it. That kind of thing got on your head as a young writer? Of course it did, but I got over it. I know you move around the country during the course of the year. You're in Key West, you're in Virginia, in Cape Cod.

And in all three places, you're in extremely beautiful natural settings, all of which are resonant each in their own way. And I wonder how getting older changes your relation, if at all, to the natural world. You're more familiar with the stuff around you, the vegetation, that is, and the light and the color. But mostly the vegetation fills your pictures. what life on earth is like. Here in Virginia, we live in a national forest.

My husband lives in a cabin, and about 10 yards away. I have a shack, and I can see the stars at night as I go to bed. It's a national forest. There are no lights, and in whichever of four directions I look out, there's the beautiful world. Annie, thank you. Well, thank you, David. But it's been a pleasure.

Annie Dillard, the new collection of her work, is called The Abundance. Coming up, a visit with the artist who was once known as Antony. That's in a minute on the New Yorker Radio Hour. I think it's safe to say that there's no voice in music quite like the artist who used to go by Antony, of Anthony and the Johnsons. For 15 years, she's been challenging the definition of what pop music could be, with a sound that was orchestral and a voice that was operatic, in its ability to turn pain into beauty.

Her new album is called hopelessness, and it's a departure in many ways. For one thing, Anthony now goes by the name Anoni, and it's a dance album, or at least it borrows a lot from contemporary dance music to tell her stories about drone bombing, political despair, and environmental devastation. She came in to speak with the New Yorker's Nightlife editor, Matt Tramel.

You know, in my past work, I spent a lot of time grieving around eco-collapse and positioning myself as a pastoral victim of eco-collapse, but there's this giant chasm of disparity between who I imagine myself to be in all my best intentions,

and that's the person I humor is me, and then there's this inkling I have of the person I actually am in the reality of my footprint on this planet and the way I actually affect the rest of creation. So I get the sense that in this moment, you're being more honest with yourself than you ever have before. This is the first album that you've released under the name Anoni.

Do you see that as a political act? Do you see that as an act of identity? No. It's not more personal, but it's more, it's a little more interior. That was just a happy accident because it wasn't that I was being more honest. I simply wasn't there yet in terms of wanting to create like a formal name or like a spirit name that would hold a space around, a formal space around me that recognize my trans identity. You know, I've always talked about myself as transgendered. I've never been shy about that.

My whole life has been lived in that way. I've never not been transgendered. It's not like I'm with a wife and five kids and I'm just trying on a girdle and bra now in my late 60s. Yeah. But in fact, I never wear a girl. girdle and bra. It's much for me, transgender is more... It's a spiritual condition for me.

That's how I understand it. And for me, it was identified for me long before I really knew what I was dealing with. You know, it was just the community identified me. Identified my difference. Identified my variance. As in you looked around and saw that... No, they were telling me, you are not... You are not, you are not as the others.

You're with the women. You're not... Trans is an interesting minority experience because with a trans experience, you might have more in common with another trans person in Bangladesh than you would with your own sister. Yeah. Do you know what I mean? Because the hate could be so intense.

Yeah. Did you personally experience anything close to that? Yes. Vigorously. Yeah. Which is normal for my generation. You know, and it's not holding anyone to blame. I love my family and I have a pretty good relationship with them.

but I had to learn to navigate unsafe environments, as many people do, to survive. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I think it's a common experience when you feel that level of vulnerability to go from feeling victimized to feeling empowered in a way. I'm grateful. I'm so grateful for what I got. Yeah. I mean, I got so lucky. You know, I'm a transgender person that got a platform that's on the radio.

Well, I think you're also incredibly talented, and that is a bit of denial. We're all talented. I don't have your voice. Whatever, but I don't have your whatever. You know, it's like, and anyway, it's like this whole joke that only three people can sing. That's just another scam. If there's one thing that I have that I would actually count as an actual skill set, it was my inability to endure the humiliation and shame necessary to push through my self-censorship and continue form. with my truth.

That's it. The only thing it really took was courage to continue acting in the face of incredible discomfort. Anoni, thank you so much. Thank you for taking the time to come and talk. This was awesome. How I didn't scare you away from the record?

I'm absolutely horrified, but it's great. You are? No, I'll get it. Anoni, formerly known as Anthony Hickertie talking with Matt Trimel of The New Yorker. Her new album, is called hopelessness. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour.

I'm David Remnick. We love stories about whistleblowers. Nobody seems more heroic than a courageous loner who stands up to a corrupt government or a corporation that puts people at risk. But whistleblowers often pay with their careers, and sometimes they risk their own safety for the greater good. But pick up the newspaper any day of the week,

and you see the obvious. Terrible things happen in institutions of all kinds. and they're open secrets, and people don't blow any whistles. A few months ago, news from the Miami Herald caught the eye of contributor A.L. Press. The stories were about the death of an inmate at the Miami-Dade Correctional Institution and accusations of brutality by the prison's guards. A.L. talked with a number of people who told him all about rampant abuse at Miami-Dade. All of it perpetuated by the guards and enabled by silence from the staff.

Ayl, you talked with a prison worker named Harriet Kasky. Why were you interested in her story? Yeah, I was interested in this fundamental conflict that people who work in the mental health wards of prisons feel every day I learned. On the one hand, they're there to treat the inmates who are their patients. At a larger level, they're beholden to the guards. What happens when you see that the guards are mistreating the patients? You know, I wanted to tell her story to see what a person with a conscience who can't act on it

goes through. Is that better? Can you hear me? Can everybody hear me? Okay. Hi, Harriet. Hi. Good to talk to you. Before we get to Harriet's story, I should warn you those of you who are listening, that this story is really disturbing, and there are some graphic details that are probably best not for kids. That's right. Tell me about Kriskowski's job at the Miami-Dade Correctional Facility. What exactly she do? She is a mental health counselor. She's training to be a forensic psychologist. I had just finished my My master's in criminal justice over the summer. She ran counseling sessions. She organized recreational activities.

Making sure that they got outside. I have some outdoor recreation. Also providing them books, magazines, crossword puzzles, that kind of thing. What first raised questions for you about how the inmates themselves were actually being treated? On my first day, I saw what I would consider to be verbal abuse. I was shocked. As time went on, I heard rumors of more concerning things going on. I was new.

I was, you know, an incomer. She doesn't want to antagonize the guards. Keep in mind, she is a woman working among men she thinks could be dangerous. I really tried to go with the flow with things for a while. And then I realized that they were really impeding me being able to do my job. One of Harriet's responsibilities is to do my job. take the inmates out on the weekends to the rec yard. And this is, you know, the only sunlight, the only fresh air they get. She goes in one weekend and the guards say, sorry, there's no

wreckyard. She comes in the next weekend and they tell her again, no rec yard. On the day that I realized that it was not due to an actual, justifiable reason, well, I had been writing emails, the weekend reports. I wrote that I went to the wing and I was told by the sergeant that we would not be having wreck that day. And that's all that I wrote. I was told later on that what I should have written was that due to security reasons, I was not able to conduct wreck that weekend. That's when things started to get difficult for Harriet. After she wrote the email questioning why the guards weren't letting her do her job. Right. I started noticing that when I was out on wreck with the inmates, I would turn around and the officer would be gone. So I would be outside on the

rec yards with the inmates just out there by myself with them. You're standing there and with how many inmates? It could range anywhere from, say, six to 40. And it would happen in the day room. It would happen when we were doing our cycle educational groups. The office were supposed to be sitting outside the window so that they could see watching and they would leave. Are you with inmates who could be violent towards you and you have reason to fear that?

Absolutely. I knew that I was in there with, among other things, rapists and murderers. And I had also heard rumors of when you are a target, that officers can even orchestrate an opportunity for an inmate to hear you. And I even confronted some of the officers. I said, listen, you know, things are obviously different. What is it? What did I do? How can I fix it? And pretty much what I heard was, well, if you're not, with this year against us. Was this the kind of thing that happened with other staff at the prison? It was. There was a psychotherapist named George Malincrot, who reported at a staff meeting that there

was physical abuse of inmates, filed some complaints about it. What happened as a result? He got fired. He was officially accused of taking too many long lunch breaks. Too many long lunch breaks? Yes. Did Harriet talk about what she'd seen? Did she back him up at all?

No. At that point, she thought of him. as a hug a thug a thug. What does that mean? He just identified too much with the inmates that he had drunk the Kool-Aid and lost all objectivity, which, you know, as a psychotherapist, you're supposed to monitor yourself after he was let go. We were all told informally to remember what happened to Malancroat and don't let that happen to you. So Malencrot is now fired and that is taken on board by Harriet Howe. Is she learned a lesson from this? She's learned a lesson which is, you know, whatever you see, don't speak out.

If you want to keep your job, stay silent. Not just job retention, but safety. Yeah. There was one time that I absolutely felt even more in danger than I had it in the other point. I was on the rec yard on the west side and the officer left. I wasn't sure what I should do at that point. These men also couldn't stay out there by themselves. So you're stranded at that point.

I am. And this particular time, an inmate touched me in a way that violated what I thought was appropriate. In an aggressive way, in a way that... Yes. I froze. And I remember my mind was screaming at me. Get up. Get up.

No one else is going to come save you, so get up and save yourself. Do you mean you actually sprawled out on the ground? No, no, no, I was leaning against the fence. I was kind of like sitting against the fence. You didn't scream. Screaming wouldn't have done any good. The only one who would have heard me were the inmates that were out with me. Nobody was stopping this inmate.

I froze for just a few seconds. It seemed like forever. He kept doing what he was doing. And I got up and I left. I went to. to the door to go back inside the building. And at that point is when the officer came back and I said, we're done with wreck today.

What could have happened, given that you were alone, essentially? Anything up to including death could have happened. Why doesn't she leave? She says she thought about it, but she needs the money. She's got young children. They were putting together a family budget

with the help of food stamps, and there was very high unemployment in Florida. She's so afraid, actually, that she doesn't even tell her husband about the incident we just listened to. It's a horrible way to live. And secretive. Her life is a secret in some terrible way.

Yeah, and she, you know, in some sense, she is completely alone. She doesn't have allies on the staff. So somehow this story gets even worse? Right. One day in June of 2012, Harriet was getting ready to leave work, and she realizes that the guards are struggling with an inmate named Darren Rainey. Was he one of the patients? He wasn't one of her patients, but she knew he was schizophrenic.

He didn't come out of his cell a lot. What Harriet told me about that day and the days that followed is really graphic. Right. What we're about to hear is extremely disturbing, to be on your guard. That's probably a good idea. Here's what Harriet saw and heard about what happened to Darren Rainey. I saw Rainey was being escorted by some officers. I didn't know where he seemed pretty upset about.

and didn't seem to want to be going with them. And I asked the lieutenant, I said, well, what's going on with Rainey? He told me, oh, don't worry about it. We're going to put him in the shower later, and he's going to be just fine. You come back, I guess it's the next day. And what happens when you come in? I learned that Rainey died the night before in what was a horrific, abhorrent, torturous way. I was sitting at the table with some medical staff, some nurses,

and they were all talking about what happened. He had died in the shower, and he had been left in the shower for a very long time. From what I understood, it was like between an hour and a half, two hours, something like that. And I thought, whoa, well, could this possibly be able to be. have been suicide? How did this happen? And I was told that these showers were only controlled from the outside by the officers. I even thought at the time, well, how could the water have gotten that hot? Hot enough to kill someone, hot enough to have their skin be falling off, like a boiled chicken.

That's what I was told by the nurses who were there. And I knew after that, of course, is true because there was a staff bathroom that the cold water is broken, and I knew how hot that water was. And I had used water in my ramen noodle soup bowls, and it was hot enough to get the noodles soft. Like, I knew after. Like, I put all the pieces together after, but I didn't see it before. Horrifying, horrifying story, and it leaves her the recourse to do what? It leaves her with the question, should I, at this point, report this? This is a crime, she feels. So what did she decide to do? She doesn't report it. And no one on the staff reports it. With all due respect to her fear for herself, is there any justification on not reporting this? Medical ethicists who write about prisons and people who work in prisons basically say, look, you have a duty to report.

The reality that everyone who looks at this world knows is that nobody does. The thought crossed my mind, but I had already been told and learned that no one cares about inmates except for inmates and their friends. families. Once someone is sentenced to serve their time, society kind of washes their hands of them. That's the message that I got. It turns out one of the prisoners ended up launching a kind of crusade and became the kind of whistleblower in the story. Was there an investigation? Not really. In the months that followed, there was no official cause of death, no autopsy was released. Still hasn't been. And still, Harriet didn't say anything. She felt like she couldn't. She found it increasingly difficult to go to work and get through a day. Her hair started falling out.

She was depressed. And she still didn't quit. She stayed at Miami-Dade for a while. She eventually leaves the prison. She tries to blot out the entire experience to erase it from her memory. Until the Miami Herald story appears, one of the inmates got the attention of a reporter there, and at that point, it all came back. And by the time you found Harry Herald. She was finally ready to talk. Right. She even wrote to one of the inmates who said he had witnessed Darren Rainey's death. I wrote a little note to say that, you know, more or less that I was back in the fight. He and I had talked about how hard it was to maintain, to not give up.

And at times, he encouraged me not to give up. So I just shot at him a quick note. So after all this reporting that you've done, what do you derive from this really disturbing story about a would-be whistleblower who kept silent? What I've come away with feeling is that the mass incarceration story has another dimension to it about what happens to people who work in these facilities.

It was not just saying it on the surface being afraid for your life, but I was afraid for my life, and so were others. I wish there was more that I could have done. I wish I tried to do more, instead of giving up saying I can't change it. I can't do anything about it. The FBI, the Florida Department of Corrections,

and other state and federal agencies have all opened up investigations into Darren Rainey's death. Despite that, nearly four years on now, there's still no official cause of death. You can read AIL Presses, piece at New Yorkerradio.org. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. More to come. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.

A few months ago, before the winter set in, I got up very, very early, one Sunday morning, to go surf it. The occasion for this piece of idiocy is that William Finnegan, a staff writer at the New Yorker, whom I've known for a million years, had just published a memoir about his life as a surfer. And I was very curious how this deeply serious reporter, the world's troubles, spent so much of his life doing something absolutely nuts. Little did I know or suspect at the time that Finnegan's book Barbarian Days would go on to win a Pulitzer Prize. Look at this.

I mean, nobody can surf, but look at the waves. Wow. I'm sitting out on the beach with the great Bill Finnegan. Oh, oh, oh! Let's try that again. That was quite a wipeout. I'm sitting out at the Atlantic... Look at that stance!

Wow. I'm David Remnick, and I'm here with my friend and colleague, Bill Finnegan, who's written an astonishing book called Barbarian Days. And we're sitting out here in the Rockaways at the Atlantic, watching a lot of people fall in the water as they try to serve. There are probably more than 100 people in the water, and the waves are kind of nice. They're small and quick.

And one of the odd things about this crowd is that there are no clumps of people, where the waves are concentrating, because nobody out can read the water at all. Nobody's reading the waves, and you actually read the waves first before you ride them. I read these as pretty good with a couple of good spots to take off.

Water looks so nice. I want to go dive in. So what we're going to do is we're going to get in the water, and we're going to attempt to stand on a board. You're going to catch some waves. You might be well advised to stay on your belly the first couple. That's what I tend to do when I surf.

It's low tide, so it's going to be a little crunchy, a little quick. Let's go west, yeah. Let's go where it's... Maximally dangerous. And you began this adventure in life as a really young kid in Hawaii, as a way to do what? As a way to get out of the house? I grew up playing around in the ocean in Southern California. At a certain point, at age of 10, I really admired surfers and how beautiful.

for what they did seemed and how cool this is in the early mid-60s. How long did it take you? How many times did it take you before you could get up on a board and surf a wave? I think the first wave I caught I stood up and rode for a long time. But I was the small kid. The first time you went surfing. Yeah, but I was a small kid on a big board. I spent a lot of time in the water body surfing. You're just trying to make me feel better.

I spent a lot of time with the water body surfing. I could read waves. I've been reading them for years and that's the crucial thing. And why did it become an obsession? It wasn't just, you know, every, Everybody, when they're kids, they play playground basketball, or they collect model airplanes, or they do what they do. Surfing for you has never been that.

How did that start and why? Well, serving is quite different from other sports, and it's not just me. It's for lots and lots of people this happens. It takes a tremendous amount of time to get even halfway decent. I mean, you need to put in basically years during which you have nothing else to do. In other words, you need to be a kid. And once you learn the pleasure of it is so intense. What is it?

What's the pleasure of it? Well, riding a wave well, it feels like such an achievement because you know how far you've had to come to do it. There's that. Some waves I caught in Fiji in the 70s, off an uninhabited island. A friend and I camped there. We'd kind of heard about a wave and then we'd seen this wave with binoculars and it was an absolutely incredible wave, long, long, long, the 300 yard long left over a very shallow coral reef,

just going on and on and on, and you're not getting obliterated, not falling off. And in real time, how long does the experience last? It's probably 10 or 15 seconds. But it feels like forever. I mean, you're in that moment where you are braced for impact. You're about to dive off and you don't dive off and you don't dive off. And what are you seeing? What's in front of your eyes? Well, you're looking down the line, what's the wave going to do? What's the wave going to do? And at a certain point when you realize that the wave is just going to hold you that deep in the barrel and just fire you Like cannon down this reef, you are free to actually look back deeper into the tube

You're free to look up at the wave that's breaking over your head. You're inside and you're looking at at daylight and sky ahead and that's where you're headed. Is it roaring or quiet? It's noisy I mean at a certain point in the barrel people say it gets quiet and I think I've I've felt that, but I don't know why it should be true because the waves breaking full force all around you. All right. First, let's put your leash on. Put it back down. I have to put a leash on?

Yeah. This is the third most terrifying thing I've ever done in my life. So the two things I told you, it's actually important to remember now. Board straight. Straight. Board straight. And second thing, I didn't get the finish on you. Never get your bored between you and the wave.

Oh, good. It's to the side or behind you. To the side or behind you. Never between you in the way. Excellent tip. Third thing. So to the board should always be to your side. Side or behind you anywhere, but except they're in front of you.

That it will hit you quickly. Okay, great. And the third thing, and this is for after you fall off. Yeah. This could happen. Which could possibly happen. You get a good breath if you can before you fall off. Uh-huh.

Fill your lungs. And when you fall in, It's not real deep, it's not a lot of water, but nonetheless go as deep as you can, go to the bottom, whatever. And then hold your breath and stay down in a little while. Why? Because the board is bumping around and you don't want to get hit. And then when you come up, and this is the most important single thing, come up with the arms over your head. So it's not the edge of your face.

So you don't get hit by your board. And you think that I'm going to remember all this in a moment of crisis. No, I mean, people never do until they can hit a couple times. I don't want to get hit any times. So that's why I think you will remember it. All right, let's go. Okay, let's walk this way a little bit. Because the current's going that way.

We don't want to end up on those rocks. Okay. Pretty little waves. You know, Bill, I read your book. I've read your book a couple of times, and I cannot help but thinking this guy has had more fun in about three weeks of life than I've had in a lifetime. There are different ways of living lives.

You know, that Milan Kundera book, Lightness and Heaviness, the Heaviness of Responsibility, and there's the lightness of living outside, trying to live away from that. And you've done both, you know, a reporter, you've been in the middle of the worst circumstances all around the world, and then you do this. How does one treat the other? It's a good description. I mean, I have this sort of bipolar life, and the North Pole of irresponsibility is surfing, you know, dropping everything.

It's nature worship, and you have to be ready if you're going to serve to, like, ditch all engagements and flee your desk and make all kinds of bogus excuses. to editors while you chase the waves when they're there. But you did it for years at a time. Yeah, I don't know. If you've got the time and money, you just go. And I just went. You know, like dog whistle orders from on high.

And I went to the South Seas, Australia, Southeast Asia, Africa, looking for waves. And nothing was tugging you back. Parents, friends, money, whatever it is. Nothing was drag. dragging it back to... Well, ambition was. I mean, I felt like, you know, everybody was getting on with life except me.

I'm laying here with malaria in Sumatra. You know, what's, you know, why am I doing this? My parents got fed up with it after about two or maybe two and a half years. They just showed up in Cape Town where I was teaching high school. Just they were, enough was enough, you know, I mean, they had like a few phone calls for me in two and a half years. It's not that I didn't remember them, but I... A significant board of it?

Bored with waves? Yeah. Not when the waves are good. And so there's always the lure of the possible. Right, and the ways are usually not good, and you spend a huge amount of time chasing good, un-crowded ways. All right, here we go.

It's fairly cold. I would wear a parker if I could. I didn't exactly grow up in a beach family. Go ahead and lay down. I'll push it out. Good. That's good. Go ahead and lay down. Get on it?

Yep. My usual experience of the ocean in New York City is when I would go with my grandmother after visiting my great-grandmother to Coney Island. And she would just yell at me and say, watch out for the syringes. You're okay, don't paddle, don't paddle. What is it in your personality

that makes surfing part of you? I have been serving so long that it's probably, it is your person. Formed my personality to some extent. And anyway, all kinds of personalities serve. Right, I was gonna say, you're not Mr. Leyden. back. I mean, it's not like some cartoon of a surfer. And as a writer and as a reporter,

you couldn't be more ferocious and aggressive in your own way. I think I'm the same person surfing and reporting. I'm fairly intense in the water. I really want to surf. I take some chances. I've had lots and lots of arguments with the guys I serve with, no, we shouldn't paddle out here. I'm paddling out. That kind of stuff. So it's sort of all of a piece. So you're the guy, go out reporting in some place. You're the guy who says, no, we're going to the next checkpoint. Yeah. I fear so. Okay. Fair enough. Tell me about danger. What's the catalog of your injuries? Wow. I'm talking about danger. I'm watching people crash into each other out here who just don't know what they're doing. Yes, and people not hanging onto their boards. So the main danger is starting to look like the belt

parkway on the ocean. Yes, it is. So the main danger is other people's surfboards, I'd say. With me, I mean, yeah, I have lots of little injuries of concussions, broken nose, you know, broken this and that. But what do you mean? Broken this and that? I don't know. My ankles are a mess. It seems like everything that's wrong with me is from surfing. But most of it's long term.

My eyes are messed up from the glare. I've got these terrigia in both eyes. My ears are really messed up from cold water. I've had three operations. My skin is a mess. I'm always having this basal cell carcinoma dug out. and I hope it remains only like that. Are you oblivious to the danger, or it just comes with a territory,

and if you don't want to get hurt, don't serve? If you know what you're doing in the water, it's usually not at all dangerous. You know, the first time you go out and you don't really know what to do, you get hit by your board. Usually first time. That's sort of how you learn where not to put your surfboard. But if you've been doing it for a million years, all those dangers go away. In a crowd, there's other people's boards fly.

lying around. And in serious waves, there's the bottom and the power of the waves themselves. And when it's dangerous, though, you know that, if you have a lot of experience. Have you ever been terrified? Yes. Where? In Hawaii, in Madeira. What's the terrifying bit? For me, the worst moments have been in really big waves. I did something stupid. I was on too

small aboard in big waves that have placed. called Makaha in Hawaii. And I got frustrated because I was on a small board, hard to catch waves. So I moved in, I moved in, I sat too far in. I sat in a really dangerous spot, and I paid the price. I got held down for a very long time

by a couple of big waves. And I've actually taken a solemn vow not to do anything that stupid again. Do you want your daughter to surf? No. She's how old now? 13. And you've never kind of done with her

what you just did with me? I've pushed her into little waves. Is she suitably terrified? Not bad. I mean I took her out to her mother's distress before she could swim. I took out in Costa Rica and rode some waves. Whoa, whoa, whoa. You took her out surfing before she could swim. It was totally safe.

She had one of those little things around her, little floaty things. And she was, I had a death grip on her leg. She was not going to fall off. The waves were small, around a big board. But it was taken ill by my wife and others. Can't imagine why. Yeah. But then she and I in Hawaii one time were out on a giant tandem board,

riding together. We've done that a few times, you know, ridden together just on our bellies, me and back. And I made a mistake, and we had a really big board, like an 11-foot board. She got smacked. And had her dad land on her from a height, and then hold her under for a little while, while his legs were tied up by a leash, and it was generally pretty rough and traumatic, and she hasn't served sense, I don't think. Okay, ready to slide back a little bit. You did a great job of staying under after you ate it. I'm really good at failure. I mean, you were in no danger because you board was that side of the same thing.

But in principle, you gotta just... You're gonna let me know when there's a wave coming, right? Yeah, excellent. I'm trying to be more careful. Always make sure I get back to shore. That's the main thing. What? Jesus Christ.

Now you have to stand up on the thing. I think I'm hooked. I'm ready to go to Tehidi or wherever. This book is a memoir, and it uses surfing not... not, it's as a vehicle, as a way of living, and when you look back on all the time you've spent in the water and thinking about surfing, it seems to me like it's like physical chess in a way. It's meaningful and meaningless at the same time, right?

Yes, yeah, I mean, it's the most useless thing you could possibly do. It's just a monomaniacal pastime, and really doesn't resemble sport. There's nobody keeping score. You'd rather do it alone, usually, although there's a performance aspect. You want to be seen? Yes, you want to be seen, you want to do it well, you want to do it stylishly, that's important. And it has to do with masculinity? Not necessarily, some women serve beautifully, but it's...

I meant your own masculinity. Well, it's certainly, especially in bigger ways, more challenging waves, it's a it's a continual proving ground, yes. What can you do less well now that you're not only a man of parts, but you're not only a man of parts, but but a man of 60. 62, yeah. Who's counting? This is a really tough thing to do.

Get up on a board and ride a wave and stay out there for a long period of time. What becomes trickier, harder, more painful? Well, one just, the general process of what surfers call becoming a kook again, a kook as a beginner, is psychologically quite painful. And that's what goes on when you get old. You feel like you're a beginner again in some way? that bad but it's you're headed in that direction yeah you peaked a while ago as a surfer you can read waves just as well ah I see where I need to be I see what I

need to do and what do you know you're not as quick or as strong as you used to be where you really notice it or I really notice is it is in the pop-up which you and I haven't got to yet yeah well that'll be tomorrow yeah springing to your feet on a small board a short board which is what I still ride the timing's got to be perfect and you've got to be strong when do you I have no plans to stop. I do know guys who surf into their 80s. Obviously on bigger boards and gentler waves and they try to find some way to grow old some way to grow old gracefully. To watch Bill do it even on a small wave out in

Far Rockway and nobody else is getting up on their boards for more than a half a second and Bill at age 60 something just rides the thing in with ease all the way in. That's pretty amazing. There he goes. Oh my God. On the Rockaways with William Finnegan, author of the Pulitzer Prize winning memoir, Barbarian Days. It almost makes me want to give surfing another try, but there's no way I'm going to. Folks, that's it for today. If you do any water sports or other pointless, absurd, risky activities, please wear a helmet, get some insurance, and obey the speed limit.

Next week on the New Yorker Radio Hour, we'll hear from another newly minted winner of of the Pulitzer Prize, television critic, Emily Newsbaum. I'm David Remnick. Have a great week. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Yards with additional music this week from Paul Schneider. This episode was produced by Emily Boutin, Ave Carrillo, Riannon, and Corby, Jill Duboff, Karen Frillman, David Krasnow, Sharon Michihe, Sarah Nicks, Paul Schneider, and Stephen Valentino, with help from Owen Agnew, Becky Cooper, and Matt Fiddler. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.