Author Thad Ziolkowski has written a beautiful and important book for helping to restore America. It’s also a great read as we head into summer beach weather.
The Drop: How the Most Addictive Sport Can Help Us Understand Addiction and Recovery explores surfing and its relationship to drugs. It presents the sport as a natural way to heal addiction and trauma, two things that millions of people are struggling with.
Too often, the treatment for depression or anxiety is medication. Ziolkowsky is offering something different. His vision includes surfing as a form of therapy for veterans and surf camps to teach children the benefits of going offline and into the water.
Ziolkowski argues that surfing, like drugs and alcohol, offers passage into a “liminal state.” It’s a place in between heaven and earth. Drugs and intoxicants also offer an escape to an in-between place but in a far more dangerous and deadly way.
Ziolkowski grew up in Florida, where he won surfing competitions. He also started smoking marijuana and eventually graduated to alcohol and cocaine. He observes that an addict’s first hit and a surfer’s first wave are linked in the brain through the “thrill of being gathered up and borne along as if by magic.” This is why many famous surfers have had addiction problems. Ziolkowski wants to change that, keeping the drop-ins and waves and tossing aside the artificial enhancers.
Ziolkowski is a writer with a Guggenheim Fellowship and a doctorate in English literature from Yale University, and the writing is both sharp and lyrical. He is also a very good reporter, providing short and compelling biographies of great surfers such as Kelly Slater and Andy Irons and explaining the neuroscience of addiction.
The famous psychiatrist Carl Jung once said that spiritus contra spiritum. Translated as “spirit against spirit,” it means that the religious spirit of God can be used to combat the “spirits” of drugs and alcohol. Viewing a spectacular photograph by surf photographer Ron Stoner, Ziolkowski wrote of something similar: “The stirring perfection of it, the sense of amplitude, of space and light as alive — the fact that such glory exists on earth.” Drugs can’t compete with that.
In the second half of The Drop, Ziolkowski examines how surfing has become more mainstream in America since the 1960s. While some have argued that surfing is a libertarian activity — “you paddle out alone, you fend for yourself” — Ziolkowski more accurately observes that “surfing is a highly tribal activity, with bylaws and mores passed down as a kind of shared history among peers.” This tribe has expanded in recent decades and become more altruistic, with surf organizations serving veterans with PTSD and children with special needs. Ziolkowski’s description of veterans and autistic children coming to life through surf therapy is inspiring.
At one moment of clarity after years of surfing, Ziolkowski decided to separate himself from the drug culture that was a part of surfing, as well as the stupid and dangerous idea that great writers like him all had to have addiction problems as part of their stories. Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Hunter Thompson — Ziolkowski had bought the story that to be creative was to be addicted.
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His account of how he freed himself from that dangerous myth is beautiful. He envisions pulling his old self out of the water — of saving himself from the fallacy that art requires intoxicants:
“I metabolized this moral [of drugs and art] so completely that, many years later, when I finally and decisively quit, it was like psychic surgery: I had to plunge into and seize myself, drag me out of the underground steam of this story about the drunken, visionary poet into which I had waded blind, becoming a votary of it, someone in whose veins flowed intoxicants. I rested on the bank beside myself, watched as I opened my eyes and sat up.”
Mark Judge is an award-winning journalist and the author of The Devil’s Triangle: Mark Judge vs. the New American Stasi. He is also the author of God and Man at Georgetown Prep, Damn Senators, and A Tremor of Bliss.
