From the onset, Kotler—whose Lyme disease, loss of a perfect job and lady has mired him in a stuck-in-a-rut mentality—does not hide his borderline apathy towards life. “I was little amazed that life was nothing more than an accumulation of days,” he opines, in what shouldn't be misconstrued as whiny or trivial. Others might relinquish the same shame if they had to carry a notebook filled with reminders and instructions about how to turn on a computer and not jump out of windows. Yet, after quickly disclosing the premise of the author's heavy mileage surfing trip, you might expect the rest of the book to be a self-indulgent reflection of spirituality and mortality that will leave you asking what makes this guy’s problems so damn important. Until the unexpected arrives.
Sure, it can easily be argued that Kotler’s reasons for writing about a venture taken for himself are innately selfish. But his dives into surfing's mysticism involve the types of experiences that surfers have been having for years. Kotler simply has the chance (and the budget) to explore the questionable spirituality that thousands of wave riders before him never articulated clearly. His story is our story, really, as surfers looking for answers to the unanswerable. Is it a religion? If so, beneath what deity? Do surfers have a keener understanding of, a more developed relationship with, Mother Nature in all her otherworldly splendor? Who knows? Kotler doesn’t and neither do we, which makes his pursuit easy to follow. His attempt at answers is made for all of our questions.
West of Jesus begins with Kotler’s acceptance that his life sucks, at least recently. Defining himself as “the kind of person who went to places hard to get to and far away,” Kotler boards a plane and a bumpy car ride to Costa Azul, Mexico, in a proactive step to start living the life he had been “choosing not to live.” In between almost drowning and answering calls from editors, Kotler wrote, surfed, and had three articles denied. In what had ideally been an escape for the better, he’s sent to the back of life's line, again, “wondering where [his] life had gone.” After his return from Mexico, however, calls are made, waves are ridden, the Conductor’s story is heard twice in as many locations, and the search for the source of this surfer’s myth begins.
The Conductor’s is a story of two bros “on an epic surf quest who get lost near the ass-end of nowhere and meet some guy who could control the weather and conduct the waves with some kind of baton made from human bone.” That is merely Kotler’s abridged version, expanded upon for pages and pages later in the text. He treks across the globe in hopes of rooting out the origins of the myth. It seems perplexing until readers remember that the guy’s life was a wipeout. At that point, any motivation was good reason. And traveling around the globe to world-class surf spots and getting pitted in waves that most surfers can’t even fathom, all under the guise of research for an article about potential hearsay, doesn’t seem like a bad reason to say "fuck Lyme disease."
Kotler tells a good story, colorfully adorning what may sound like scientific droning. The man clearly did his homework for the other two-thirds of the book’s content: science and religion, seasoned with flavorful history. His explanations of the alluvial sandbars that form from out-flowing rivers that create the perfect barrels at pointbreaks like Rincon in Santa Barbara, California, are accompanied by surfer jargon (“Reefbreak is a fancy way of saying lots of rock underwater”), random historical references (“[In 1988] a man named A.J. Hackett opened the world’s first commercial bungee jump operation”), and religious inferences (Siddhartha, Moses and Jesus were all unhappy, apparently). Surfers or not, readers are going to close Kotler’s book knowing more odd shit than they did before they opened it.
For all the marvelous knowledge and detail that spews like the whitewash of a closeout wave, West of Jesus’ main flaw is that it can be tiresome. Whether it’s the somewhat excessive use of quotes—be it Joan Didion, Ernest Hemingway, Tom Waits, or the efficacious Hunter Thompson—or the lengthy commentary on out-of-body experiences and Dr. Melvin Morse’s research on the topic from 1982, Kotler loads the book with so much to retain that it can harbor fleeting focus. It’s not that it shouldn’t necessarily be included—indeed, the opposite helps Kotler avoid the apocryphal—it’s that more of Kotler himself would make all the sporadic intervals of facts easier to regurgitate at a dinner party. Including more forgettable rambling (just a little) may help us remember the unforgettable. Nonetheless, Kotler diminishes the tediousness by smoothly returning to the exposition that launched him on his tangent.
Ultimately, West of Jesus's lasting quality will be its satiability: calming landlocked surfers frustrated from what Kotler defines as acute “surf-withdrawal.” The book strikes all the subtitles with attention to detail and sufficient relevance. Surfers will find its value in the life and death accounts of Kotler surfing some of the world’s premium breaks. Others will find it in the plethora of random facts and mythical interpretations that involve peoples, places, and cultures from unfamiliar parts of the world. Some may even emerge questioning their spirituality. (A subtle goal of Kotler’s?) Regardless, West is 260 pages of reading that, although targeted to a specific sect of enthusiasts, easily satisfies the intellectual palate of those without access to junky waves on random coasts but have ready links to Amazon.com.
Find Kotler’s book here, also access the book's own Myspace site.
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