The March
issue of Vanity Fair has a great
article on the iconic movie poster for Bruce Brown’s Endless Summer, titled “One
Summer, Forever” By Lili Anolik. I often blog about surfing and my Westerns,
but I always thought the only connection was my interest in both. Anolik set me
straight. In the article, she wrote,
“And the image’s hero, the surfer, was a new kind of hero. Well, he was old and new. If he’d been born a hundred years earlier, he’d have been a cowboy. He had the cowboy’s instinctive loathing of fences, love of the great wide-open. And what was standing at the farthest edge of America, surveying the Pacific, but the next logical phase of Manifest Destiny and lighting out for the territory and Westward ho.”
Why I never
saw that before is beyond me. At least Anolik has given me an excuse to intersperse
an occasional reference to surfing on this blog. By the way, this is a fun article if you have
any interest in surfing, film, design, nostalgia, sports, world travel, or tan
lines.