John Milius didn't only write about surfing or war, but when he did one storyline was never far from the other. Think of 'Apocalypse Now' - which Milius wrote and Francis Ford Coppola produced - with Colonel Kilgore capturing Charlie's Point so his men could go surfing, or 'Big Wednesday's' backstory of the Vietnam War being the dividing line between freedom and responsibility.

Recently, Peter Maguire wrote 'Child Of The Bomb', an article on Milius that appeared in The Surfers Journal. In exchange, Milius gifted Maguire this 1967 essay that introduces Jack Barlow to the world. Barlow, of course, is one of the trio of surfers that would appear in 'Big Wednesday' when it hit the screen in 1978.

It's not just Barlow who spent over a decade gestating in Milius' grey matter; readers will recognise many themes: fringe existence, looming adulthood, the crush of California, and not-so-subtle allusions to war.

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"I'm Barlow. Sometimes I need a wave. I feel out of touch with something as though I'm sick and not functioning properly. Sometimes I can go for a week, month, once for a year, but one day I'll know that I'm not in rhythm. Parts are broken. I need an overhaul. I need a wave.

"You see, you might look at the blonde surfer in the Volkswagen bus and say does he need it on a cold winter day? He doesn't. He's not like me. He doesn't need a wave, he just wants one. He looks like it. He rides waves but he does this at the beach. It's not the same for those of us who go “down to the sea on boards.” We're insane. And so, whenever I'm in the middle of a department store and I see myself in the mirror--a grubby stump in a forest of sophistication, or whenever I can no longer give audible responses to cocktail conversation, when it requires a strong moral principle to stop me from crashing headlong into the rush hour freeway, when I find myself jealously reading the evening paper about another mass killing, when I can't stand rock'n'roll--then it's high time I got away.

"Some noisily puff the Indian weed or devour the sugar cube I go quietly to the reef."

Click to read 'The Ride'.

Ventura Overhead (Joe Quigg)

Need more motivation..?

"Why right here was the fountain of youth, the rest of the world lived inland anyway, let’ em have their Cold War, we're going to raise hell and ride a lot of great waves. Thus the Golden Age: When the boards were made of wood and men were made of iron and the world didn't know. When man could dedicate his life to the sea and the perfection of his art. He could live governed only by wind and current, water temperature and storm front. It didn't matter what he did, he was on the lunatic fringe anyway.

"But time was mounting, houses were built, schools, neighborhoods, industries. California, the Golden West. They came by the thousands every day and just beyond the Santa Monica mountains they piled up into the greatest mass of bourgeois humanity in the history of the world. They poised waiting for something, looking for some wilderness to smother because it was wilderness. And the Malibu surfer of which I was one said, “What do inland people do?” and the masses went to the movie houses to watch “Gidget” and said, “Is that what beach people do? I dig it.”