Friday Afternoon Long Read: Susan Orlean on Maui and Its Surfer Girls

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Longform.org is a website with a simple premise—aggregate the best long-form journalism from around the Web—and yet it's hard to know how I ever did without it. In any case, the site recently highlighted a classic of travel-ish writing by Susan Orlean, "Life's Swell," an article about the sun-speckled lives of Hawaiian surfer girls published in Outside in 1998, and later made into the movie Blue Crush. In the spirit of our recent piece about seven unusual island destinations, here's a story from a kind of beach you're probably more familiar with—and a good one to distract you on a Friday afternoon:

The Maui surfer girls love each other's hair. It is awesome hair, long and bleached by the sun, and it falls over their shoulders straight, like water, or in squiggles, like seaweed, or in waves. They are forever playing with it — yanking it up into ponytails, or twisting handfuls and securing them with chopsticks or pencils, or dividing it as carefully as you would divide a pile of coins and then weaving it into tight yellow plaits. Not long ago I was on the beach in Maui watching the surfer girls surf, and when they came out of the water they sat in a row facing the ocean, and each girl took the hair of the girl in front of her and combed it with her fingers and crisscrossed it into braids. The Maui surfer girls even love the kind of hair that I dreaded when I was their age, 14 or so — they love that wild, knotty, bright hair, as big and stiff as carpet, the most un-straight, un-sleek, un-ordinary hair you could imagine, and they can love it, I suppose, because when you are young and on top of the world you can love anything you want, and just the fact that you love it makes it cool and fabulous. A Maui surfer girl named Gloria Madden has that kind of hair — thick red corkscrews striped orange and silver from the sun, hair that if you weren't beautiful and fearless you'd consider an affliction that you would try to iron flat or stuff under a hat. One afternoon I was driving two of the girls to Blockbuster Video in Kahului. It was the day before a surfing competition, and the girls were going to spend the night at their coach's house up the coast so they'd be ready for the contest at dawn.

Read the full story at Outside.